My last piece on how the decline of Hollywood blockbusters may lead to a new golden age of creativity for Hollywood included an explanation of why Furiosa ate ass on Memorial Day:
This is much less complicated than you are making it. We are tired of the 'Warrior Princess' theme for many reasons. The first, and most important, is due to how often such characters are ridiculous. They often have strangely expert talents that just appear without effort, or do physical acts or combat that is utterly unbelievable. Then, they are ridiculously aggressive and nasty to everyone around them, which is supposed to be a signal of how tough they are. It comes off like a caricature of maleness, and many of us are sick to death of it. Cuz it's done for political reasons.
Here's an idea for wokies. Create new stories that people love authentically. Characters that are relatable. Show how they struggle, show their flaws and how they fail and fall short too. You know, the 'hero's journey' stuff? Instead, almost all Warrior Princess characters seem to arrive fully formed, and ready to rock and roll - even if they are like 11. I remember watching Ren in the Star Wars reboot, wanting to love it cuz while not a Star Wars groupie, I always found the stories good fun. I didn't mind a female lead but when she ran faster then the men and fought better, as a young woman, I was put off. Then she jumps into the Millennial Falcon and just 'knows' how to fly it?
We've been shown that when Hollywood focuses on identity and 'representation', the story often sucks. We are also very tired of having treasured movie characters and stories hijacked by activists and then turned into caricatures of themselves. We are not blank slates, evaluating each movie with a standard checklist.
We are fans (a term for customers) and we are always right. If you cannot get that, you should not be a media creator or artist. I'm an artist, and my biggest breakthrough came when I realized it was all for my audience, not my ego. The less it's about me showing how good or talented I am, and the more I'm trying to add value or inspire or enlighten my audience, the better my art is. Creativity is all about hot it occurs for others. If you are self-absorbed as a creator, you make bad art.
Be obsessed with pleasing fans, or fail. Those are you choices.
So much of what you've said I said in the section on blockbusters. What started out as military propaganda evolved to a hybrid of military propaganda plus woke advocacy. LIke a woke CIA ad. I even said that fans are angry that their favorite movie characters are hijacked by activists. Read this and the previous post again, although the previous post says it more explicitly so it might make more sense to start there.
As for the fan service portion of your comment, there we have a fundamental difference of opinion. I do agree that you shouldn't serve your ego, but when you truly dig deep and put yourself on the page, your ego will hate it the most.
Sorry, written two books, had a literary agent and was edited by FSG, ya? Have a publishing credit on another book, but the 2008 crash killed my book deal. Also a life long gigging musician/songwriter. I’ve deeply plumbed the depths of creative energy personally and found that any self-focus is death to creativity. I’ve also found that whatever falls out of my head isn’t great, I figure out what art is great by the audience - that’s the only way to do so. What you think doesn’t actually matter cuz art for self-consumption is masturbation, not art.
As for your claim to have said what I said in your article, incorrect. You were much more generalized and complex. My claim is that in the case of Furiosa is specifically the “Warrior Princess” meme that is so trashed at this point that when we see it, we go running. Politicization is low in my account, rather it’s the crappy character, dialog and action that results. The primary issue is that the stories suck and often are quite hostile to men. The politics are merely the ‘why’ of it and while it’s an issue, the biggest problem is the crappy art itself. Which is being done for the egos of activists, not for the cause itself. They are damaging the cause of ‘equality’ with their Fascism. Born in part of doing art to satisfy themselves.
To reduce the centrality of focusing on the audience as an artist to ‘fan service’ is a memetic, BS response to a serious point.
I’ve never seen a notable author or any other creative be this aggressively dogmatic about their creative process being the one correct creative process. Good job on landing that one book deal in 2008 though. I’m sure the 2008 financial crisis is also why you haven’t been published since.
Ya, the loss of my deal in 2008 was awful. My agent was actually negotiating with 3 top publishing houses who wanted me as a new author of ‘smart fiction’, think Caleb Carr, that’s who I was being compared with as a writer. I was repped by Bob Lesher, fyi. You can read a lovely obituary another author wrote about him in 2012 when he died, https://the-year-of-living-english-ly.com/2012/12/09/bob-lescher-my-literary-agen-r-i-p/ He repped small names like Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keefe and Andrew Wyeth in his early years, headed 3 major publishers and was still going strong when he worked with me from 2005 till 2008…The guy had gotten thousands of books published in his career. I was literally in awe of him and felt so lucky that he chose to represent me.
You may not be aware how 2008 changed the book business. That year they only published 10% of the number of new fiction authors they’d published in 2007. Going forward after the biz recovered, it was only 50% of that level and less. They focused much more on already published authors just as the movie biz focuses on sequels and reboots versus doing anything creative.
Tbh, it also broke my heart after 10 years of writing and perfecting two fully realized works of fiction. I had never dared believe I could be published and hadn’t believed it possible until the summer of 2008 when Bob called me and said, “I’ve eliminated 2 of the 5 houses interested, we are negotiating with 3 and I’ll get you the best deal I can. I have made many of these calls over the last 40 years, and I’ve never been wrong - you are going to be published.”
He’d worked hard developing me for 3 years. He was such an amazing agent, he hired an editor from FSG to moonlight editing me (out of his pocket).We rarely talked about business. He would take me to Craft Bar, in Flat Iron area of Manhattan for lunches where he was a regular. We talk writing endlessly. It was perhaps the most enjoyable professional experience I had in my entire life. He was also demanding in his own way. I remember him reading my draft for the first time and getting a lecture about a real author having to produce error free prose. He told me to go away and and come back with a perfect book style-wise. I listened and did so with earnest.
And then poof, by early October all deals were gone. Tbh, it broke my heart into a 1000 little pieces. I was unable to find new representation and was also going broke so had to focus on making money and digging out. It was a very tough time, as my career disappeared, there were no jobs in my industry. I decided I didn’t have the heart to chase it again and I’m not sure that was the best choice.
Hence me being here and writing my heart out. I do feel strongly about art occurring for the viewer/reader/audience, that’s how I know if my art is ‘good’ or not. I do apologize for getting so intense about it, I re-read my comment and it was unnecessarily aggressive. Apologies and happy trails.
What you miss is that many conservatives have long consumed 'art' we knew was produced by wokies, even with a bit of an agenda. This isn't new, like claiming it started in 2017 is absurd. I was find with separating the politics and even the agenda from the art, if it was good. You speak about fans like we are lower life forms.
The thing about the Furiosa contretemps everyone seems to be missing: Fury Road wasn't *that* big of a box office hit. It wasn't in the top 20 of the domestic or global box office for 2015.
The idea that a Marvel-sized audience is actively rejecting this new movie isn't true, the fanbase was never at that scale to begin with.
But Fury Road made 10x what any of the earlier Mad Max movies made. It's the big hit of the franchise.
I dunno, I just really don't feel like the whole thing fits into the "franchise movies turning to wokeness" frame. The data on that concept is sound, but this is just the wrong news peg for it.
(I also quite liked Furiosa, so this is not a Last Jedi vs Rise of Skywalker situation where both are flaming garbage and ought to just be ignored)
Again, I saw its win that night as a victory for art, white or black. Should have known it was the start the win signaled the start of gaudy but empty gestures.
I'm sympathetic here but every time this article tries to list examples of "wokeness" I make the Tim Allen "hunh?!" noise. This particular bit is just totally flabbergasting:
> There was of course dreadful drek from the movement even at this time. Blackish, Hamilton and Sausage Party come to mind.
I mean, right off the back calling "Sausage Party" a WOKE movie is insane - it's 90 minutes of variations on a theme, where the theme is "making a circle with the fingers on one hand and sticking the index finger of your other hand through it." (OK, the plot of the movie is vaguely New Atheist-y, but mostly the film is 90 minutes of grossout comedy and broad ethnic humor, starring Seth Rogen playing a sentient phallus.) It's exactly the kind of "problematic" comedy that ""wokeness"" defines itself in opposition to.
Now, Black-ish and Hamilton are both definitely products of the Obama era, but I think they both represent a "post-racial" ethos that ""wokeness"" rejects: Hamilton views the cultural syncretism of an America represented by a middlebrow biracial president as good, whereas Black-ish is animated by anxiety that Obama-era middle-class lifestyle is eroding Black American identity (Anthony Anderson's character explicitly spells this out in the title-drop of the pilot). And they each have obvious lineages from before the turn of the millennium, in classic musical theater and the Norman Lear message sitcom, respectively.
And also, Hamilton isn't dreck at all! It's good. Really, really good! Like, I know musical theater is a niche taste, but within that niche there are no serious criticism to be made of Hamilton. Which is why every takedown of Hamilton is not about Hamilton the concept album or Hamilton the Broadway production, it is about Hamilton as a totem for WOKE!!!1 or neoliberalism or whatever.
Read The Cut's Great Awokening for a greater look at how Sausage Party is woke. I think the confusion for you lies in the word "woke," which is fair. "Political correctness" comes closer to the mark. Also I am not so much looking at tumblr-rooted wokeness as much as at Hollywood attempts. You say Hamilton and Black ish are not woke. I bet you if Kenya Barris and Lin Manuel Miranda heard that, it would be back to the drawing board for them.
If you are still "flabbergasted," sit with the feeling. I don't do back and forths unless I am 100% certain they are in good faith. Also, I am way more concerned with the immunity ruling right now. If defending Hamilton is where you're at, go with God.
This is much less complicated than you are making it. We are tired of the 'Warrior Princess' theme for many reasons. The first, and most important, is due to how often such characters are ridiculous. They often have strangely expert talents that just appear without effort, or do physical acts or combat that is utterly unbelievable. Then, they are ridiculously aggressive and nasty to everyone around them, which is supposed to be a signal of how tough they are. It comes off like a caricature of maleness, and many of us are sick to death of it. Cuz it's done for political reasons.
Here's an idea for wokies. Create new stories that people love authentically. Characters that are relatable. Show how they struggle, show their flaws and how they fail and fall short too. You know, the 'hero's journey' stuff? Instead, almost all Warrior Princess characters seem to arrive fully formed, and ready to rock and roll - even if they are like 11. I remember watching Ren in the Star Wars reboot, wanting to love it cuz while not a Star Wars groupie, I always found the stories good fun. I didn't mind a female lead but when she ran faster then the men and fought better, as a young woman, I was put off. Then she jumps into the Millennial Falcon and just 'knows' how to fly it?
We've been shown that when Hollywood focuses on identity and 'representation', the story often sucks. We are also very tired of having treasured movie characters and stories hijacked by activists and then turned into caricatures of themselves. We are not blank slates, evaluating each movie with a standard checklist.
We are fans (a term for customers) and we are always right. If you cannot get that, you should not be a media creator or artist. I'm an artist, and my biggest breakthrough came when I realized it was all for my audience, not my ego. The less it's about me showing how good or talented I am, and the more I'm trying to add value or inspire or enlighten my audience, the better my art is. Creativity is all about hot it occurs for others. If you are self-absorbed as a creator, you make bad art.
Be obsessed with pleasing fans, or fail. Those are you choices.
So much of what you've said I said in the section on blockbusters. What started out as military propaganda evolved to a hybrid of military propaganda plus woke advocacy. LIke a woke CIA ad. I even said that fans are angry that their favorite movie characters are hijacked by activists. Read this and the previous post again, although the previous post says it more explicitly so it might make more sense to start there.
As for the fan service portion of your comment, there we have a fundamental difference of opinion. I do agree that you shouldn't serve your ego, but when you truly dig deep and put yourself on the page, your ego will hate it the most.
Sorry, written two books, had a literary agent and was edited by FSG, ya? Have a publishing credit on another book, but the 2008 crash killed my book deal. Also a life long gigging musician/songwriter. I’ve deeply plumbed the depths of creative energy personally and found that any self-focus is death to creativity. I’ve also found that whatever falls out of my head isn’t great, I figure out what art is great by the audience - that’s the only way to do so. What you think doesn’t actually matter cuz art for self-consumption is masturbation, not art.
As for your claim to have said what I said in your article, incorrect. You were much more generalized and complex. My claim is that in the case of Furiosa is specifically the “Warrior Princess” meme that is so trashed at this point that when we see it, we go running. Politicization is low in my account, rather it’s the crappy character, dialog and action that results. The primary issue is that the stories suck and often are quite hostile to men. The politics are merely the ‘why’ of it and while it’s an issue, the biggest problem is the crappy art itself. Which is being done for the egos of activists, not for the cause itself. They are damaging the cause of ‘equality’ with their Fascism. Born in part of doing art to satisfy themselves.
To reduce the centrality of focusing on the audience as an artist to ‘fan service’ is a memetic, BS response to a serious point.
I’ve never seen a notable author or any other creative be this aggressively dogmatic about their creative process being the one correct creative process. Good job on landing that one book deal in 2008 though. I’m sure the 2008 financial crisis is also why you haven’t been published since.
Ya, the loss of my deal in 2008 was awful. My agent was actually negotiating with 3 top publishing houses who wanted me as a new author of ‘smart fiction’, think Caleb Carr, that’s who I was being compared with as a writer. I was repped by Bob Lesher, fyi. You can read a lovely obituary another author wrote about him in 2012 when he died, https://the-year-of-living-english-ly.com/2012/12/09/bob-lescher-my-literary-agen-r-i-p/ He repped small names like Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keefe and Andrew Wyeth in his early years, headed 3 major publishers and was still going strong when he worked with me from 2005 till 2008…The guy had gotten thousands of books published in his career. I was literally in awe of him and felt so lucky that he chose to represent me.
You may not be aware how 2008 changed the book business. That year they only published 10% of the number of new fiction authors they’d published in 2007. Going forward after the biz recovered, it was only 50% of that level and less. They focused much more on already published authors just as the movie biz focuses on sequels and reboots versus doing anything creative.
Tbh, it also broke my heart after 10 years of writing and perfecting two fully realized works of fiction. I had never dared believe I could be published and hadn’t believed it possible until the summer of 2008 when Bob called me and said, “I’ve eliminated 2 of the 5 houses interested, we are negotiating with 3 and I’ll get you the best deal I can. I have made many of these calls over the last 40 years, and I’ve never been wrong - you are going to be published.”
He’d worked hard developing me for 3 years. He was such an amazing agent, he hired an editor from FSG to moonlight editing me (out of his pocket).We rarely talked about business. He would take me to Craft Bar, in Flat Iron area of Manhattan for lunches where he was a regular. We talk writing endlessly. It was perhaps the most enjoyable professional experience I had in my entire life. He was also demanding in his own way. I remember him reading my draft for the first time and getting a lecture about a real author having to produce error free prose. He told me to go away and and come back with a perfect book style-wise. I listened and did so with earnest.
And then poof, by early October all deals were gone. Tbh, it broke my heart into a 1000 little pieces. I was unable to find new representation and was also going broke so had to focus on making money and digging out. It was a very tough time, as my career disappeared, there were no jobs in my industry. I decided I didn’t have the heart to chase it again and I’m not sure that was the best choice.
Hence me being here and writing my heart out. I do feel strongly about art occurring for the viewer/reader/audience, that’s how I know if my art is ‘good’ or not. I do apologize for getting so intense about it, I re-read my comment and it was unnecessarily aggressive. Apologies and happy trails.
What you miss is that many conservatives have long consumed 'art' we knew was produced by wokies, even with a bit of an agenda. This isn't new, like claiming it started in 2017 is absurd. I was find with separating the politics and even the agenda from the art, if it was good. You speak about fans like we are lower life forms.
The thing about the Furiosa contretemps everyone seems to be missing: Fury Road wasn't *that* big of a box office hit. It wasn't in the top 20 of the domestic or global box office for 2015.
The idea that a Marvel-sized audience is actively rejecting this new movie isn't true, the fanbase was never at that scale to begin with.
Someone had to say it.
But Fury Road made 10x what any of the earlier Mad Max movies made. It's the big hit of the franchise.
I dunno, I just really don't feel like the whole thing fits into the "franchise movies turning to wokeness" frame. The data on that concept is sound, but this is just the wrong news peg for it.
(I also quite liked Furiosa, so this is not a Last Jedi vs Rise of Skywalker situation where both are flaming garbage and ought to just be ignored)
Again it's not about what the people who saw it thought.
I thought I was the only person who liked "Us"!
Nope.
Man that pic is such a beautiful scene that’s impossible to be cynical about. For all its faults you can’t say the film wasn’t sincere.
Again, I saw its win that night as a victory for art, white or black. Should have known it was the start the win signaled the start of gaudy but empty gestures.
I'm sympathetic here but every time this article tries to list examples of "wokeness" I make the Tim Allen "hunh?!" noise. This particular bit is just totally flabbergasting:
> There was of course dreadful drek from the movement even at this time. Blackish, Hamilton and Sausage Party come to mind.
I mean, right off the back calling "Sausage Party" a WOKE movie is insane - it's 90 minutes of variations on a theme, where the theme is "making a circle with the fingers on one hand and sticking the index finger of your other hand through it." (OK, the plot of the movie is vaguely New Atheist-y, but mostly the film is 90 minutes of grossout comedy and broad ethnic humor, starring Seth Rogen playing a sentient phallus.) It's exactly the kind of "problematic" comedy that ""wokeness"" defines itself in opposition to.
Now, Black-ish and Hamilton are both definitely products of the Obama era, but I think they both represent a "post-racial" ethos that ""wokeness"" rejects: Hamilton views the cultural syncretism of an America represented by a middlebrow biracial president as good, whereas Black-ish is animated by anxiety that Obama-era middle-class lifestyle is eroding Black American identity (Anthony Anderson's character explicitly spells this out in the title-drop of the pilot). And they each have obvious lineages from before the turn of the millennium, in classic musical theater and the Norman Lear message sitcom, respectively.
And also, Hamilton isn't dreck at all! It's good. Really, really good! Like, I know musical theater is a niche taste, but within that niche there are no serious criticism to be made of Hamilton. Which is why every takedown of Hamilton is not about Hamilton the concept album or Hamilton the Broadway production, it is about Hamilton as a totem for WOKE!!!1 or neoliberalism or whatever.
I don't know, am I missing something here?...
Read The Cut's Great Awokening for a greater look at how Sausage Party is woke. I think the confusion for you lies in the word "woke," which is fair. "Political correctness" comes closer to the mark. Also I am not so much looking at tumblr-rooted wokeness as much as at Hollywood attempts. You say Hamilton and Black ish are not woke. I bet you if Kenya Barris and Lin Manuel Miranda heard that, it would be back to the drawing board for them.
If you are still "flabbergasted," sit with the feeling. I don't do back and forths unless I am 100% certain they are in good faith. Also, I am way more concerned with the immunity ruling right now. If defending Hamilton is where you're at, go with God.