Another nice bit of clarity from Rushfield at the Ankler. Main point: Everyone is watching a screen all the time. Hollywood’s business is screens. Yet none of Hollywood’s products are appearing on everyone’s screens.
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Today, I want to turn to — as Hollywood hopefully, sooner or later, steps up to that mission — how dire the place high production-value, filmed entertainment is in in the world’s cultural diet. Hollywood doesn’t have a decade to think about this; it’s a battle that, in many ways, we’ve already lost.
Not to sound too defeatist about it. After all, Hollywood has some major assets in its arsenal if it chooses to deploy them. The appetite for entertainment, despite the above, hasn’t disappeared. There still remains a — I won’t call it a hunger anymore, but an appetite — for filmed entertainment, as evidenced by the continued flourishing of Netflix (even if the hunger is for a decade-old Suits).
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All of our major institutions are equally irrelevant. Journalists and politicians and academia and churches are universally despised, yet they don’t seem to care. They just keep doing more of what the audience hates. A poll showed that journalists know they’re hated and ignored, and they think it’s not their problem.
If all of those jobs were guaranteed sinecures, apathy would make sense. Politics is lifetime sinecures, so the apathy there is understandable. Congress can waste years on fake “votes” to choose a meaningless “speaker”. No ordinary business could spend years pretending to choose its new CEO while all the factories were shut down. (Corporations often have internal power struggles, but they keep the business running during the struggle.)
Journalism and entertainment and academia are not guaranteed, and all are losing jobs fast. Normally losing a job causes a change of attitude, but it’s not happening in those areas. There’s no Dad to shout GET OFF YOUR ASS AND FIND WORK. The people who formerly would have been Dads are inside those same institutions that smashed their own respectability and authority.
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Later thought: According to some analysts the Supremes have been trying to shift the job of legislating from courts and agencies back to Congress. This change is truly historic, since Congress abandoned its legislative power in 1803 and the courts were happy to hold onto the power until a few years ago. So the Supremes are the Dad figure but they’re not shouting loud enough yet.
Polistra's Mill 