Weekly Reel, May Day
International Workers' Day, Make Yuppies Evil Again, The Northman, Marriage Story, CEO compensation, and Eisner's Malibu compound
Happy May Day, or better yet, Happy International Workers’ Day.
Though confused with government-approved Labor Day and the symbolic first day of summer, May Day as International Workers’ Day was first celebrated in 1890 to commemorate the struggle for the eight hour workday after the Haymarket Affair. The day, in principle, was set up to keep up that struggle.
International Workers’ Day is avoided—but not entirely gone—by most Americans today. President Grover Cleveland chose Labor Day to be the day for working people because his pro-business administration didn’t want workers’ parties emboldened by the Haymarket deaths and because the date conveniently sits on a temperate Monday of September, halfway between July 4th and Thanksgiving. Accordingly, Americans—the ones lucky enough to be given the day off—use the three-day weekend to celebrate with a picnic or camping trip before preparing the kids for the new school year. But in the rest of the world, International Workers’ Day is still a day for struggle, protests, and demonstrations.
Needless to say, American cinema woefully undervalues both May Day and Labor Day compared with the other über-cinematic holidays. The number of available films depicting a passing scene or two of labor demonstrations can be counted on one hand (Lilo & Stitch 2, The Assassination of Trotsky, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Salvatore Giuliano, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy).
Films depicting the struggles of the working class, symbolically or literally, against corporations and capitalist excess once had their place in American cinema but have been becoming more tepid each decade. Between the sixties and eighties, the major film studios were bought, sold, and traded by various multinational conglomerates until their complete corporate subservience by the end of the millennium. In this time, films explicitly condemning corporations and CEOs as evil antagonists began disappearing. One can see this decline parallel to the decline in labor unions. But with the rise of the miniseries, success of stories featuring tech companies like The Social Network, and growth of unions as a byproduct of the antiwork movement, one would expect today to be a ripe time for anti-capitalist films/series. Dazed’s James Greig
recently went through a phase of watching classic blockbusters from the 80s and 90s (Aliens, Total Recall, RoboCop, Gremlins 2 – that kind of thing) and…was struck by how often these films featured smarmy yuppies as antagonists, often acting as the human face of an evil corporation. These characters were truly loathsome, nasty pieces of work; avatars of the worst excesses of the Reagan years who would inevitably get their well-earned comeuppance. In terms of both malign influence on the world and sheer obnoxiousness, the Tech Bro has surpassed the City Boy as the archetypal villain of the age. And yet, with a few less than stellar exceptions, Hollywood hasn’t looked to Silicon Valley as a source of antagonism as it did with Wall Street in the 80s. This year has seen the release of a number of new TV shows which could have reversed this decline: The Dropout (about Theranos), WeCrashed (about WeWork) and Super-Pumped: The Battle for Uber. But through clumsy attempts at exoneration, these shows have failed to deliver the villains we deserve. Tech CEOs like Elon Musk shouldn’t be lambasting Hollywood for depicting them unfairly, they should instead be thanking it on their hands and knees for giving them such an easy ride.
It should be noted that antagonists in the eighties were overwhelmingly Russians and other ethno-nationalist groups hostile towards (or more accurately, victims of) the US that year. Nonetheless, there existed a time when corporations were pushed back upon in cinema. Today’s tech companies were yesteryears multinational conglomerate:
The decline of the evil yuppie comes alongside the attendant decline of another archetype: the Evil Corporation. “I would say that in terms of popcorn entertainment, it has disappeared,” Jesse Hawken, film critic and host of the podcast Junk Filter, tells Dazed. “When it comes to mainstream cinema, today it’s more about bad actors within a corporation, as opposed to the actual mechanics of the corporation itself. You can contrast that with something like Robocop which is explicitly about the dangers of privatisation.” You can see this at play in the spate of Silicon Valley films and TV shows, which rarely act as an indictment of the tech industry itself; while there might be some hand-wringing about the dangers of hype, the problem is usually an individual excess of ambition.
Does anybody remember how quickly The Social Dilemma deflated after its viral week at Netflix? It argued a case we all know about but fail to seriously acknowledge: social media is designed to be addictive in order to manipulate our emotions and behaviors purely to maximize profit at the expense of everyone’s mental health, especially among teen girls. In this way, tech companies should face exponentially higher levels of scrutiny than eighties yuppies.
According to Hawken, the decline of anti-corporate messaging is partly because the economy of Hollywood has changed in the intervening years. While there have always been big corporations involved in major studio filmmaking, today this involvement is far more direct. “I don’t think any executives of 20th Century Fox in 1979 were worried that a movie might have an anti-capitalist or pro-working-class message,” he says. “But today nobody’s going to get a lot of corporate support if they want to make a new blockbuster about an evil corporation. On a huge box office level, the movies that spend a lot of money to make a lot of money play it safe more than anything. They want to make sure that the highest number of people like the film, so the most you could ask for in any kind of anti-corporate messaging in a movie is surface level. If there were a bad guy in a corporation, he would be acting alone. Contrast that with somebody like Carter Burke from Aliens [the yuppie villain]: he’s a company man and the evil stuff that he does is on behalf of his evil company.”
Where else have we heard the rotten apples argument?
While writing my thesis on Disney I always had those South Park episodes in mind where Mickey Mouse was the foul-mouthed, megalomaniac Disney CEO unafraid to get physical with the Jonas brothers. It wouldn’t have been enough for Parker and Stone to lambast the actual CEO of Disney, which would have singled out the evil unique to the individual. By making it Mickey, the heart and soul of Disney, they condemned the company itself.
Greig continues by explaining how the trauma plot is abused in these series to depict CEOs in a fairer light, that whatever they’re doing is justified to a degree because they’re the actual victims. He linked an excellent article by Parul Sehgal, my favorite living literary critic, on how a traumatic backstory flattens a character, makes them transparent and boring. Can you imagine how lame Patrick Bateman would’ve been if we watched flashbacks of him abused by his parents, being an orphan, etc.? On trauma plot utility:
That’s not to say these narratives are wholly untrue: people’s harmful actions often can be explained, in part, by past experiences. But often the more cogent fact is that some people are just selfish and greedy, and enabled by an economy and culture which is every bit as corrupt as they are. What is served by portraying these people, who embody Silicon Valley at its most predatory, as sympathetic? And who is afforded this degree of clemency? Maybe this is glib, but the fact that Holmes is white, and from the right stock, makes her an easier candidate for this kind of narrative rehabilitation. Rather than a bad person (which, by any definition, she surely is), The Dropout presents her as being cursed with the fatal flaw of being too ambitious, too much of a go-getter; everything our culture rewards but taken too far. These attempts at nuance become a cop-out. It might be true that no one is wholly evil, but someone who recklessly endangered people’s health in a craven bid for status and wealth deserves to be portrayed in black-and-white terms.
I recently read Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography and was astonished at the number of pages detailing Jobs’s awfulness as a human being without calling him what he was: a giant asshole. This goes for most biographers that write hagiographies of their idols. Isaacson traffics in the trauma plot by explaining Jobs’s robust character, which included the abandonment of his first-born, was the consequence of being put up for adoption as a baby. Though I don’t have the data, I would think that the level of assholeness is roughly equal between adopted and non-adopted people.
So why does it matter that these shows have failed to successfully villainise the Silicon Valley CEO? In a sense, it doesn’t. Even if The Dropout or WeCrashed were the most rousing agitprop ever committed to film, they wouldn’t inspire people to take up arms and march to the Bay Area, or even to campaign for the mildest tech industry reforms. It would be nice to think that we are doing activism simply by watching a Hulu original, but this isn’t the case: mass media is rarely a good driver of political engagement. Squid Game and Parasite were both deservedly popular, but if they’ve succeeded in fermenting any revolutionary class consciousness, this has yet to materialise. Moreover, it’s an unreasonable metric by which to judge a film or TV show, and one which leads to such absurd situations as people denouncing celebrities for hosting Squid Game-themed parties on the basis that they’ve ‘missed the point (“capitalism is bad” sailing straight over Chrissy Teigen’s head.) Even if you look at the films commonly held up as the most effective examples of political satire, the extent to which they are useful is questionable: Dr. Strangelove (1964) failed to achieve nuclear armament, which has no bearing on its artistic merit. Truly subversive art tends to arise in tandem with political movements, rather than bringing them into being. If a film or television show were to pose any threat to societal order, you probably wouldn’t be able to stream it on Netflix.
Looks like Greig helps solve my conundrum with the response to The Social Dilemma, a Netflix release.
So, in a sense, the decline of anti-capitalist sentiment in Hollywood doesn’t really matter. But the yuppie villain was usually enjoyable to watch, and it’s a pity that we have been denied an equivalent catharsis today. It’s not that these depictions act as a catalyst for political change or a form of consciousness-raising, but they do offer a kind of libidinal release that, apart from anything, is fun. “I guess it’s the vicarious thrill that movies give us in general, where the good guys win and the bad guys lose. I don’t think that people really get their subversive points in that way,” says Hawken. If we do have to live underneath the boot of the Silicon Valley Tech Bros, if we are daily subject to their smug hypocrisy and corny aesthetics, then we should at the very least be afforded the visceral satisfaction of watching their fictional representations meet with retribution. No doubt we’ll soon be treated to a wry, subtly absolving dramedy about Tesla: if it doesn’t involve Elon Musk being eaten by an alien or blown up by a robot, then you can count me out.
The “cinema is just entertainment” argument only goes so far. It has a more ideological aspect for Americans than is obvious—after all, that’s how ideology works. The more prominent case is the amount of CIA-sponsored and affiliated films/series that work together quid pro quo. The less prominent and more impressive case is exemplified by the incident in 2019 when Scorcese said that Marvel films resemble theme parks more than cinema. The outrage from Marvel fans was loud and obnoxious. But “the reason all this should worry you,” wrote Alex Pappademas, “even if you have zero investment in superhero movies or their relative position vis-a-vis film culture as a whole, is that the response to Scorsese is a populist groundswell in service of the status quo, of corporations, and of power.”
It’s similar to that awkward position with Leftists taking Disney’s side, one of the biggest corporations in the world that has a monopoly on audiovisual imagination from the cradle onwards, against the democratically elected officials of Florida. (Disney was in a lose-lose position regardless.)
The important thing is to highlight the fact that the apparatus of corporate control is so effective that Disney films whitewash references to homosexuality and intimacy past a G rating for authoritarian countries and even thank Xinjiang officials—the ones running modern day concentration camps—in the credits for an American film, yet we still watch their films, buy their merchandise, and visit their theme parks.
The Northman (2022) ★★★★
If I see the film again before it leaves theaters, I’ll probably write up a full review since I wrote one for Eggers’s previous film, The Lighthouse, last year.
Robert Eggers is unique in his approach to visual storytelling (to say the least). Whereas most directors/screenwriters take a Shakespeare text (or other multi-century story) and either adapt it to our current sociocultural context or make a literal, word-for-word period piece, Eggers looks to the context in which the original texts first arose for inspiration. For instance, The Northman is a telling of the Old Norse/Icelandic story that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” Also, for The Witch and The Lighthouse, Eggers used primary sources (the 17th century diaries of Samuel Sewall and John Winthrop for the former and the 19th century Smalls Lighthouse tragedy with the coastal Maine dialogue of Sarah Orne Jewett novels for the latter) to create an uncompromising and hard to understand dialogue reminiscent of the high school English texts most of us disliked and didn’t read.
What The Northman brings to the Eggers canon is a further entrenchment in pre-Norman, Proto-Germanic language. He may be the only working film director that finds the splitting of West Germanic languages from North Germanic to be a historical tragedy—with romantic notions of the two co-mingling ever since. His upcoming remake of Nosferatu seems it will confirm this lingual commitment by setting the film in Baltic Germany and complete the Proto-Germanic trifecta by including East Germanic influences in the dialogue.
And not just with the dialogue. Eggers is concerned with the literary mythmaking of the past and attempts to be as true as possible to how these myths work in their historical context by bridging their time with ours. I’d love to write more but for now I’ll let the ideas gestate.
Marriage Story (2019) ★★★½
Pardon the lame final line, I’m playing around with the three-dot ellipses for provocative effect.
I'll like this movie more after re-watching when I have something at all to relate to. Seems like it was an autofiction reboot of Baumbach's previous divorce movie, this time from the side of the suspects rather than victims. Whereas before when the parents were more easily condemnable in certain ways, this film doesn't allow us to get away with judging so easily. The point being to have the audience litigate endlessly on which side was more at fault; until the end, which basically refutes that point in favor of a satisfying yet unrealistic conclusion to how divorce/custody battles in LA actually end. But is that because of his three year divorce battle with Leigh or successful reconciliation (so far) of a married life with Gerwig? As with all things, the answer lies somewhere...
Relevant May Day News:
Entertainment company CEOs payday in 2021 proves that their forgoing of compensation in 2020 was for show. Although theaters largely opened back up in 2021, it didn’t compensate the companies to pre-pandemic levels. Workers weren’t furloughed like in 2020 but they also haven’t returned to their 2019 levels. In general, media moguls are compensated far better than other CEOs. Variety just published this long piece explaining all of this, which deserves its own commentary (maybe next May Day?). It also breaks down compensation by individual and company, so see what your favorite streaming company CEO is up to.
Michael Eisner, Disney CEO prior to Iger who presided over hits like The Lion King and The Little Mermaid, listed his Malibu compound for $225 million, which would make it the most expensive house sold in CA. He doesn’t spend too much time at this seaside estate because he’s usually at his primary Bel Air spread when not visiting his ranch in Colorado or Upper East Side apartment. Buyers be warned: due to the rise in sea level this compound may sooner than not be under the sea.
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