If You Think This Has a Happy Ending, You Haven't Been Paying Attention

I know just a few weeks ago I already went on at some length about art in the current mass distribution media landscape. Normally I would worry about repeating myself so soon after covering a topic, but I read a thing a few days ago that made me think about it again. Also I really seriously considered the other current-event topics available to me and it was this or let you the readership watch me struggle and fail to understand/give a shit about the nuances of a trade war with China. I can't really see myself wasting blog space on that because a) probably end up with math, so automatically boring and b) why would I get bogged down in details of a trade war when, if I hold out just a couple of weeks, I could be struggling to understand an actual war instead? Yeah, it's a million times scarier, but the visuals on CNN are going to be way easier to follow.

No, what I'm thinking about is rabbit gnocchi. Seems pretty self-explanatory, but just out of an overabundance of caution, I'll explain what I mean by that. See, when I go out to eat (one of my favoritest things to do. There's no price too high to pay when someone else does the dishes for you at the end), I'll almost always scan the menu for something I really don't recognize, either because I know I have never tasted it before (a thing in itself or a combination of things) or because I have no idea what it is. A few weeks ago at a Japanese hibachi place, it was calamari steak. Had no idea calamari came in steak form. It was fine. I watched an adult throw knives for my entertainment.

After an event many years ago, a reception related to the one time in my life I got paid for writing, I found myself at this fancy (for my scrubland exurb) eatery with my then-wife and her then-and-still-parents. I was way past the point of being self-conscious with them as they were (and still are!) genuinely decent Kansas refugees who never failed to make me feel part of the family AND who made so much more money than we did that there was never any question about who was getting the bill. So I scanned the menu past the primavera and the scallopini, shit I knew too well, and I found rabbit gnocchi. You know, gnocchi but with bits of rabbit. Didn't know what that would be like. Was excited to find out. Turns out the rabbit and the gnocchi were tied together with a cream sauce bolstered with what could only be some kind of industrial-grade tile grout. That shit was heavy. And it came in a dish large enough to collect RF signals from low-earth orbit. I'm saying it was big.

When I ate about a third of it (tasted fine, but I'm convinced the low-fat diet I'm on now, maybe 15 years later, is the direct result of this fateful evening) the in-laws, looking concerned, asked if I wanted to send it back. I told them no, because 1) I'm a coward who knows any staff I piss off are at some point going to be back in a room I can't see into, alone with my dessert and 2) there was nothing wrong with it. It was made exactly as described in the menu, to a reasonable standard of execution and cleanliness, consistent with the rest what I saw in the restaurant. I just didn't like it that much. And that was OK. Now, when the place burned down four years later (no injuries!), did I laugh a little bit? Sure. But less because of my bitterness over a disappointing meal and more because of my unresolved issues around pyromania.

How a thing is supposed to come out has to be a consideration, not just whether or not I like it. It's one thing if I've ordered a custom-built dresser and I can't get any of the drawers to open. Sure, I'm passive, but there are only so many days I'm going to be able to tolerate lack of access to my carefully folded underwear. Especially when I've specifically paid for an underwear holding and redistribution device, such as a dresser. If I'm at a movie or watching a TV show, though, how important is my expectation about what it is I'm about to see?

Sure, I'll have expectations. Hype is part of the deal for movie-going anymore anyway. I'd argue the movie itself is only 2-3 hours, whereas the hype can be months, sometimes YEARS in its active cycle. Marketing has become as much the entertainment as the finished product, arguably moreso.

And the religiously fanatical vigilance against the blasphemy of spoilers means fans are actually going as far as possible out of their way not to know anything about the movie they so desperately want to see.

And yet, time and again, we are running into these paroxysms of outrage surrounding the most popular, the most deeply ensconced franchise comestibles the entertainment industry has to offer. The backlash against The Last Jedi (a film I genuinely love) was (less so now, but still is to some degree) a farcical mess of misogynist and racial dog-whistles and you-will-not-replace-us preemptive counter-attacks that it became a parody of itself immediately, a truth still lost on the people self-parodying (as all the best self-parody is). This week it's been violent anti-Game of Thrones apoplexy vs. the soon-to-be-concluded Season 8, touching on some of the same but still other social issues.

The problem seems to be that ownership of entertainment has been shifted, with the Distribution Revolution of the last 25 years making it harder and harder to draw eyeballs to any one thing in significantly measurable and monetizable numbers, from the creators to the audience, which is... well, it's fucking weird.

The old model, the auteur model, put the maker(s) in charge. The audience's duty was to take in the thing and then decided if they liked it or not. Now everyone involved has to confront and fight the head canon of every individual member of the viewing public and hope they draw enough for a return on the production and advertising budgets AND hopefully avoid sparking off some dumb fucking petition to change it, a thing that will never happen. An audience could be challenged. Hell, if the director was European, the audience could be derided, mocked or ignored completely. The artist could express and the audience could fuck all the way off.

But movies used to have to live in movie houses. There were three TV stations who were content, thanks very much, to broadcast content they owned and could fully monetize. So the full range of films by type and genre had to live together, fighting it out for projector time. As that paradigm scattered and ignited like so much powdered creamer shot out of an air cannon, the more intimate content retreated to a more intimate space, the home theater, and we find ourselves challenged in smaller bits here in the Golden Age of Television.*

Films on the other hand have become more and more akin to sporting events. The commentariat will moan and hand-wring from time to time because the only things making any money at the movie theater anymore are comic book films and woe, isn't this just a sign of how base and crass our culture has become, all we want to see are pretty people in colorful tights punching planets into smithereens. I'd argue no, it's just that level of spectacle is what it takes to make people want a communal experience with strangers anymore. I've seen Avengers: Endgame in theaters four times now. In every screening people cheered, all of whom knew Chris Evans couldn't hear us. Have we become "stupid" because the "lowest common denominator" films make all the money? Or is it that we actually are watching Jules et Jim (or whatever the current equivalent would be), we're just waiting for that shit to show up on Netflix, to take in between Friends reruns?

We didn't invent dumb mass entertainment in 2008 or whatever. We used to just call them John Wayne films. And is audience "backlash" based on their own stupid expectations really a problem--or even a new problem?--or is it just that twitter is a sewer, open to everyone, immediately, all the time? Sure, there's angst and anger, fine, but so far it means exactly nothing. Unless you want to make a Sonic the Hedgehog movie apparently I guesss. We've found the cultural limit, everyone.

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*seriously, watch Fleabag on Amazon Prime. That could only exist now.