How do they keep their jobs? How do they get promoted?
A rare comment on a contemporary issue. Also philosophical reflections on the role of optionality in the life of wisdom
In a break from tradition for this Substack (don’t worry, we’ll be back next post to essays explaining the difficult by means of the obscure and esoteric) today I am writing about a contemporary issue: the obsession of contemporary visual media with nostalgia and retro-callbacks. I have some experience with this media - not much, as I have a condition common to married men in their 30s called “young children” that limits my time for watching (or doing) anything - but I often hear it remarked upon.
The inspiration for my writing is an excellent essay by Freddie de Boer, “Yes, I Got That Reference. But Who Cares?”:
… contemporary filmmakers seem to believe that simply making a reference your audience understands to be a reference is somehow inherently entertaining. But why? The massively successful Spiderman: No Way Home was essentially two and a half hours of “hey, remember Spiderman? Remember that other Spiderman? Remember Dr. Octopus? Remember when Willem Dafoe said that line? Remember? Huh?” The nadir of this style of mythmaking may be Ready Player One, where beloved nerd references keep wandering onscreen for no discernible purpose. (“Hey, the Iron Giant! He’s here, for some reason!”) That movie and the book it’s based on are a firehose of stuff you remember that you liked before. But while we might feel a twinkling of emotion when we encounter those references, we do so because those movies and shows were actually good, were capable of wringing emotional resonance out of us themselves. Today’s reference media attempts to cut the line by borrowing that resonance from the past. It’s a sad statement about our power to create meaning in fiction and, if nothing else, will inevitably lead to diminishing returns.1
De Boer blames a subset of fan culture that has acquired significant power among contemporary creators. Here he draws on Roger Ebert’s analysis, commenting on ‘fandoms’:
A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies. Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.
While Ebert’s observation may be astute - I went to high school with some kids who seemed to communicate entirely in Army of Darkness and Star Wars quotes - I feel both Ebert and de Boer are not asking the deeper question:
Why has this style come to dominate entertainment?
Why
The easy answer is that creators like the Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things) or J.J. Abrams (large amounts of cinematic garbage) are superfans, and are making movies for superfans. Either that or they are so creatively impoverished that they cannot conceive of creating without references, like the kid whose art skills never grow beyond tracing Jack Kirby covers.
But here I think it’s worthwhile asking second- and third-order questions. Why is this being made? As in so many things, we need to look to the whole system if we are to explain the phenomena in question.
Back when I was a freelance writer, a mentor taught me a simple and useful mental model for understanding how people act in business:
(1) how does the person I am dealing with keep their job / what are the minimum requirements they have to meet?
(2) how does this person get promoted? / how do they excel?
With answers to these two questions, you are well positioned to both predict their behavior and understand how (if possible) you can influence it.
When we ask these questions about the creators behind these reference-heavy properties like Stranger Things and the post-Disney purchase of Lucasfilm Star Wars films, it’s evident that the answer to (1) is not “make a product that people love” and to (2) is not “make a product that directly makes oodles of money.”
Back in the Olden Days - let’s say from the cooling of the prehistoric Earth down to the early 2000s - a film was created to make money directly on ticket sales. There were aftermarkets (second-run theatres, revivals, film festivals, and later videotapes and DVDs) but these were tertiary. What mattered was parking asses in seats for 90-150 minutes at a time.
The process went something like this, with many variations:2
(1) A filmmaker had an idea for a movie, wrote a screenplay, and took it to a producer
(2) The producer, if they thought the film had potential to make money, would come up with an initial budget to deliver the completed film, and would shop the film and the estimate around to distribution companies.
(3) The distribution company would, for the right to distribute the film to domestic and international movie theaters, provide initial financing for the film, and often played a large role in finding investors. If the producer was working for a movie studio like 20th Century Fox, the studio would play a large role in finding investors as well.
(4) investors, often wealthy people with more secure means of earning income than the (insanely) risky gamble of investing in films, give money to the distribution company/production studio to make the film, in exchange for a percentage of the movies gross (pre-expense, taxes, etc.) revenue.
Each of these four steps had many, many players. If a producer had no luck with one distribution company, they could try another. If a studio’s regular block of investors passed on a film concept, they could find others, or partner with other studios. Drawing on the principle that “No One Knows Anything,” a wildly diverse set of films could be produced in a given year, from blockbuster action films with film stars attached, to sensitive, Oscar-bait historical dramas (winning awards was a good means of raising a film’s revenue in second-run theaters and later through video rentals and sales) to wild so-called “B-movies” that made due with chutzpah and controversy what they could not provide in production values, star power, or sense. The hopes for outcome of this process, for all the players, is money, and the means to that money, historically, is as was said above: ticket-buying asses sitting in air-conditioned theater seats for 90-150 minutes at a time.
Creatively, this setup made something like a Cambrian Explosion from the 1910s down to the 2000s. If “No One Knows Anything,” that crazy idea that Lucas kid has for a outer space epic with laser swords and psychic wizards and a space death sphere might just work. Someone, somewhere, will be willing to try it. I think the greatest sign of this is the plethora of B-movies made during this time. While the original term referred to just the second, usually shorter and less expensively produced film on a movie theater’s double bill, it came to mark out films made specifically to ‘exploit’ audiences’ love of sensation - blood, breasts, and beasts as I have heard it summarized. With many independent theaters, producers like Roger Corman were able to make a living creating a film, touring it around for a few months, then putting the revenues into making a new one.
Now, the situation has changed.
One sign of how it has changed is in the wretched state of modern B-movies. While truly awful films have been made since the beginning of cinema (Manos: The Hands of Fate comes to mind),3 the sheer volume of wretched films in our present era is without parallel. If you have Netflix or any other streaming service, scroll to the end of a genre list to see contemporary low-budget films that, very possibly, no one has watched aside from the people who made them (and possibly their families, who gritted their teeth during the initial screening to “be supportive.”)
The extremely low quality is due to what these films are being produced for. These films will not be shown in theaters, nor rented on VHS from a video store. No one needs to be motivated to part with both money AND time to watch them, the decision facing a video store customer. Rather, they will fill the back catalogues of streaming services to present the illusion of breath in their offerings - never mind that no one in their right mind would sit through those films. Even connoisseurs of “the cinema of limitations” prefer not to subject themselves to films made without any one of talent, vision, passion, or skill. It’s one thing to watch the hilariously demented Plan 9 From Outer Space, another to watch whatever was made post-2000 at the lower depths of the Netflix catalogue.
The subscription business model is also partly responsible for the nostalgia obsession. While films are, out of tradition now than anything else, released to cinemas, their ultimate destiny is to make up the headline titles of their parent companies’ streaming services.
A subscription streaming service has a different business model than the wham-bam-thank-you-patron of the traditional movie business. Keeping people subscribed is the model. It doesn't matter whether they actually watch anything, or just log in every night to look at their list of potential viewing, but then play another round of Fortnite. What matters is keeping them paying regular money to the service. Content that makes them feel “well, I might want to watch that” is good enough.
An additional factor is the ownership of major motion picture production studios, distributors, and streaming platforms by publicly-held multinational corporations. These firms can draw upon more money than old-model studios did, but they are subjected to more scrutiny. A wildcat, independently wealthy film investor may cut you a check for $250,000 for the chance to have dinner with your lead actor, but Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan need a solid business case. The analysts in their finance departments cannot say “I've got a gut feeling about this” but need some solid, historical evidence that “B is like A, and A has succeeded in the past., so we can cut a loan to make B at 4% rather than 15%.” Callbacks and retro-nostalgia are both proven to make money from contemporary audiences, and they cut down on a huge amount of the expense of marketing new intellectual property: the audience had heard of the IP before, and so the sale to go and see the movie/subscribe to the streaming service and maybe, possibly, someday watch the movie is easier.
This is the environment modern filmmakers are working within. With rare exceptions - Christopher Nolan comes to mind, and even he had to make three Batman films to be able to do whatever he wanted - filmmakers need to supply the content that is not in demand by audiences, but in demand by multinational corporations, their lenders, and the projections of both about what audiences will or will not like enough to part with their dollars/euros/renminbi.
The filmmakers keep their jobs by producing films the studios and streaming services will buy, whether headline films with enormous budgets or shot-on-video dreck that will never be watched by anyone after its completion and uploading. The bankers keep their jobs by loaning money, at rates of interest proportional to the perceived risk, that mostly succeed or blow up close to the risk profile they judged it to have. And the producers keep their jobs by placing bets and raising money for films that will keep people subscribed to their services year in and year out. And the heads of the streaming services keep their jobs because subscriber growth continues as projected.
It cannot last forever, of course. Eventually the subscribers wise up and realize “hey wait, I’m not using this thing at all” and the payments stop coming. Then the bankers loans blow up, the executives lose their jobs or are embarrassed, and the filmmakers go back to asking lumber barons and laundromat franchise owners for investments in their next big idea.
Optionality
Now, the philosophical portion of the essay.
I'm not quite sure how to put this, but here's a try (after all, the word “essay” comes from French verb essayer, “to try”). Part of wise living, I think, is understanding when you are spending your time/money/resources on maintaining optionality rather than directly enjoying or benefiting from things. Optionality is, quite simply, having options. Having a lot of money in the bank, whether in cash, stocks, or bonds, is having optionality - “F*ck you” money, as Nassim Taleb has called it, when you have enough money you can quit whatever job you have when asked to do something you don’t want to do. Contrast this with, as the great Canadian comedian Ron James put it, being “two missed paycheques away from shitting in a shoebox under the overpass.”
Subscribing to a streaming service is an investment in optionality - people buy annual gym memberships as part of a New Year's Resolution because they like the idea of always having the option to go to the gym, rather than paying a fee each time. For subscribers to a streaming service, they judge it value based on all the movies and TV shows they could watch, not the ones they actually do. Compare this to making, each time independently, the choice of whether or not to watch a certain film: it’s showing at eight, the reviews were good, it’s in a genre you like, that’ll be $15.00 please (or whatever theater tickets cost now). Its the option to always be able to go into that theater any time you want.
Optionality makes sense in many domains. It’s better, wiser, happier to have reserves of money for when you get sick, lose your job, need to suddenly move, or flee the country. It’s good to not get a tattoo of your favorite band on your neck when you’re twenty. It’s good to not commit a crime, go to prison, and have a criminal record weigh you down for the rest of your life.4
But in many, many other areas, it is a mistake to maintain optionality past a certain point. Optionality about whom you will marry and have children with is a good idea when you are twenty, a bad idea when you are forty. Optionality about work is a good idea when you are twenty, a bad idea when you are forty.
I think de Boer’s point is borne out by callback films, usually independently produced ones, that milk nostalgia but also deliver genuine thrills and entertainment. Take the wonderful Hobo With A Shotgun, a movie that drips reverence for the Troma-style of exploitation movie, but is itself an incredibly entertaining exploitation film. You don’t need to like or even know what Troma Films are to enjoy Hobo With A Shotgun. Free life advice: go watch Hobo with a Shotgun.
To be clear, this was the process in the United States. In other countries, where the state was more heavily involved in cultural production, films could be made without any prospect of commercial success as propaganda or prestige projects. Some of these could still be quite good - go watch Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky if you need proof propaganda can be both good art and entertaining.
Warning! Do not attempt to watch outside of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode (Season 4, Episode 4)
Save the crime for when it’s really worth it! Remember “if you can’t do the time, don’t commit the crime.” [Disclaimer: “A Flood of Ideas” does not endorse committing crimes.]