All the Frogs
Looking Back at a Century of Simulation
The first truly viral moment of 2024 is Katt Williams’s interview with Shannon Sharpe on Club Shay Shay (correct me if I’m wrong, but this may be the first two hour plus viral video in Internet history).
TLDW: Katt Williams exposes ALL THE FAKERS in Hollywood. Even Pete Davidson caught a stray. One of the most repeated quotes from the interview in the comments (there are many): "Nobody knows why liars lie.” It sounds good and definitely has an ambiguous poetry to it, but I am confident Katt and his audience know why a majority of liars lie: they can’t take the truth straight. It is too harsh and bitter for them. They need to sugar coat it, distort it, whatever. This violent allergy to truth is what Hollywood and much of the simulation1 economy of mass media is based on.
A common trend I noticed for the past few months is the online world’s utter disgust with Hollywood: its out-of-touch millionaires, its center-left hypocrites, and its legions of plastic phonies. But why are we plugging out of The Matrix now? And, more importantly, will we stay unplugged forever?
Our century of simulation starts in the 1920s, with the dawn of commercial radio broadcasting and Hollywood as the movie capital of the world. 2 These two pillars of mass media laid the concrete foundation for the simulation economy. The infancy of the simulation had its growing pains though: films were visual without audio, radio was vice versa. But in 1927, talkies were introduced and the grand illusion moved from gestation to live birth.
Margot Robbie in Babylon
The Jazz Singer’s 1927 release was not only a pivotal moment for film and media. It also afforded people an option they never had before: to get completely lost in an alternate reality. Before 1927, escape from reality was driven by a person’s imagination. Books required readers to imagine the reality described entirely in their minds. Photographs left all the moments before and after the moment captured to the imagination. Even the silent films left the actors’ voices a mystery, an issue explored at great length in Singin’ in the Rain as well as 2022’s much-maligned film Babylon.
In the latter film, Margot Robbie’s character Nellie LaRoy overhears a couple of guys talk about how the sound era is going to make actors with terrible voices like hers obsolete. One of them says “It's the end for all of 'em. All the frogs.” Now when we say “terrible voices” we don’t necessarily mean voices that are grating in any context. Actresses like Nellie LaRoy were not shrill. They simply distracted from the illusion of opulence and royalty that early Hollywood thrived on. From 1927 up until the Instagram influencer era, mass media would be dominated by people with impossibly perfect bodies and voices.
As time went on, the simulation economy only got stronger. Millions in the ‘30s lived in movie theaters and in the living room next to their radios. There was class unrest during the Great Depression, but Hollywood and broadcasting shied away from political messages and delivered escapism by the ton. The ‘40s established the US as the capital of world propaganda with its powerful pro-war effort from Hollywood. As mentioned previously, Hitler may have mastered radio, but Hollywood ultimately won the information war alongside America and Allied forces winning WWII. The ‘50s only lulled the world into deeper REM states with television and car radios (which had dropped in price by this time), taking radio broadcasts from the living room to the road. To understand the effect of car radios on everyday life, watch any film that takes place before the ‘50s and then watch American Graffiti. 3
In the ‘60s, we reached the first major rift in the simulation. News footage increased skepticism of the Vietnam War effort, etc. Hollywood tried to hold the line but after 1967, the lunatics ran the asylum. Now, films that were previously meant to lull us into complacency splashed audiences with bracing truths. The music on the radio was the soundtrack of the unrest on the streets. It’s ironic that the ‘60s was the decade most known for psychedelic hallucinations because it was this very era that was more interested in truth than fantasy.
The suits in the entertainment industry were well aware of this irony and exploited it in the 1970s, with its loud barrage of hard rock and its massive tent-pole summer blockbusters. It must be mentioned that the second wave of New Hollywood (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas primarily) tried — and succeeded — in rehabilitating the image of WWII from its tarnished reputation during the hippie era. Lucas got the ball rolling (indirectly) with the storm trooper-busting thrills of Star Wars. 4 Though Spielberg may have bombed with 19415, Raiders of the Lost Ark was Spielberg and Lucas’s incredibly successful attempt to restore America’s WWII pride as well as a loud and clear rebuttal to the New Hollywood Heaven’s Gate fiasco of 1980.
The ‘80s to the ‘10s could well be considered the Golden Age of the Simulation. In the ‘80s, simulation and stimulation reached dissociative levels with the Walkman, the remote control, the VCR and the GameBoy. From the ‘90s onward, the pull of the simulation was getting stronger than ever before with the Internet. The iPod and the iPhone in the ‘00s brought us to the peak of dissociation. Plugged into the Internet as it was, there was plenty of dissent available on the iPhone. But by then capitalist realism set in. The opposition was every bit as marketable and easy to sell, consume and digest as the pro-establishment stuff was. Oh, you didn’t like the Iraq War? Just smoke weed and listen to NPR. You hate capitalism? If so, The Wire will show you why you’re right to feel that way.
You would think that COVID lockdown, where people are forced to stay home, away from IRL entertainment, and look at their screens, would have made the simulation easier to merge with. Many stir-crazy people globally were furious at lockdown though and questioned the media further. Now we have a media-skeptical alt-left, etc. But it is important to remember that the culture of this counterculture cannot grow solely online, in the matrix. It needs to grow roots outside if it wants to flourish longer than Dimes Square did.
Even then, there is a strong possibility that Hollywood and new media will fuse together with AI to create an entertainment psy-op simulation singularity. Right now, AI is in its awkward growth phase, much like the talkies of the ‘20s were. After The Jazz Singer, most talkies were awkwardly gimmicky affairs. It wasn’t until 1931, with Fritz Lang’s M, that sound films were truly great. And we still needed to wait till 1939, that banner year of Hollywood escapism, with Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. AI is going to take a few years to get to its complete dominance of the Matrix, giving us sexy movies stars in sexy cars on demand, custom built and factory made.
Indulge me one more opportunity to talk about Babylon. Since it is a talkie, let the film speak for itself:
“Anytime anyone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again.” This was — is — the miracle of the simulation as we now understand it. It preserves the past like amber. Death is optional in the simulation. Death and time. With AI making stars that have never existed before, it is possible that those stars whose faces never existed before are eventually born IRL, making these artificial stars harbingers of future people. Or maybe these AI stars will resemble people already among us, giving these people the mystical allure of someone walking out of a dream into our real lives. When AI gets this good in the 2030s, when the great spectacle is that much more powerful and dazzling…well, let’s just say it wont’ be a bright future for the frogs.
I was going to call this piece “A Century of Simulacra” because Baudrillard is tres chic online, but the truth is I do not know enough about the man’s work, certainly not enough to make it the spine of a Substack I am writing. So throughout this piece I will use the word “simulation” although I can confidently say it does mean the same thing that most Baudrillard fakers (I know, ironic) are talking about when they talk about “simulacra”
Before World War I, film had a far more international community. Because most of the European countries were bombed during the Great War, Hollywood was the default capital. Though the ‘10s had Birth of a Nation and Chaplin, the ‘20s was when Hollywood became Hollywood.
American Graffiti takes place in 1962, but much of the soundtrack is from the era before Buddy Holly died.
Star Wars was also an anti-colonialist narrative, but its clear WWII parallels ensured that it would remain a soft power weapon as opposed to The Matrix, which was more an example of capitalism appropriating revolutionary rage than an example of pro-war propaganda
Puns away!
The breaking point has been just how scolding and moralizing Hollywood has become. We can take their debauchery (and even admire them for it), we can take their out-of-touchness (hey, it can be pretty funny), and we can take their elitism (we like looking at the beautiful and the wealthy). But what many of us cannot take is these people who live lifestyles that are the modern-day equivalent of royalty acting like principals and schoolmarms to the rest of the unwashed masses.
Hollywood's long had this inflated sense of self. Growing up, I always thought it was weird how in Asia, you'd see top celebrities happily and gratefully endorsing everything from refrigerators to booze to chain restaurants. But in America, even a B list star would think themselves too good to do any commercials (or they'd go to non-Western parts of the world to slum it up, endorsements-wise). Hey, you're not some noble artist; you're a glorified jester!
And even worse, these glorified jesters think they're the moral vanguard whose astounding works of genius ought to be consumed and celebrated by the idiot audience. And if the audiences hate these works, then it's not the works and their creators that need to change; it's the audience. It's an inversion of the entertainer-audience relationship, and with all the more audience-friendly forms of entertainment out there, why should people pay more for less?
I enjoyed this piece a lot. I would add, on American Graffiti, you got period specific music too. The Beach Boys feature rather heavily, and were just getting big in 1962. Funnily enough, the movie (with its use of "All Summer Long" at the closing credits) helped sparked a revival in interest for the band, and sent a greatest hits album to no. 1