For a generation, the gathering has led to media companies being bought, sold, and traded like so many Pokémon cards — part of Hollywood’s wholesale merger with Wall Street. Disney’s purchase of ABC grew out of a conversation at the conference in 1995, for instance, and Steve Case and Gerald Levin floated the ruinous AOL-Time Warner marriage there in 1999. The difference from Pokémon, of course, is that Wall Street decides what each card is worth, and Allen & Company, the investment bank throwing the party, is among those who take a cut.

“That summer camp,” a veteran Hollywood producer told UnHerd, “led to this.” This arrived on Monday, when a settlement cleared the last major legal hurdle to Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. The transaction would bring Paramount and Warner Bros., CBS and CNN, and HBO Max and Paramount+ under the same corporate roof. That means Superman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Wolf Blitzer would share a common landlord. Fittingly, Paramount boss David Ellison had turned up at Sun Valley in July with Bari Weiss, his handpicked editor-in-chief of CBS News, while the deal was still tied up in court. 

Much of the alarm over the deal has focused on CNN and CBS, and the prospect of a mega-network beaming Bari Weiss Thought into every Boomer’s living room. But this is also a bigger Hollywood story. Beyond deciding who gets to lecture geriatric Americans on television, the merger will help determine which films and shows get made, who gets paid to make them, and how much of the industry survives the next round of cost-cutting.

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President Trump’s Justice Department approved the merger in June, reportedly to the surprise of its own lawyers. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission approved foreign investment in the transaction, including non-voting stakes totaling up to 49.5% for sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. That means — yes — the America First administration has cleared the way for the Persian Gulf monarchies to own up to half of the company that makes Top Gun. 

Almost nobody in California is happy with the deal publicly, even with the concessions: Paramount will spend an extra $300 million a year on American production, promises not to sell its studio lots, and will set up an independent board to protect CNN and CBS News from corporate meddling. But the media-reform group Free Press — no relation to Weiss’s newly Paramount-owned outfit — called the concessions “empty Paramount promises.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said handing a bigger part of the news industry to a “Trump-aligned entity” would be “disastrous.” And former Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Lina Khan said the deal “seems facially illegal.” Meanwhile, studio staffers are bracing for multiple rounds of layoffs in the corporate consolidation.  

The critics are right about almost all of it, but it’s wrong to think of Hollywood as a healthy organism about to be poisoned by a bad merger. 

This is vulture capitalism working as intended. When an industry can no longer grow, the smart money consolidates it, offshores what it can, cuts the rest, and milks the remaining cash flow until the lights go out. American newspapers already went through this: hedge funds like Alden Global Capital bought regional dailies, sold the downtown buildings, gutted the newsrooms, creating what scholars call “ghost papers”: local outlets are still published, but they barely field any reporting staff, and much of the content is syndicated — and, therefore, not really the sort of local news healthy democracies need. 

In a sense, Paramount-Warner is the Alden-ization of TV and movie production by way of Sun Valley. The Financial Times reports that the acquisition would leave Paramount with about $80 billion in net debt, while management promises $6 billion in annual savings.

The movie producer I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous given his proximity, dates Hollywood’s spiritual death to a Sun Valley conference in the 1990s, when the tarmac was crowded with tech and Wall Street jets. Steven Spielberg’s plane, he recalled, “was parked down by the losers.” Even Spielberg had discovered a world in which $400 million counted as small potatoes (as of 2026, he’s worth more than $7 billion). Likewise, Michael Ovitz arrived as Hollywood’s most powerful man, clearing only $30 million a year at Creative Artists Agency, so he left for a stock payday at Disney, was fired barely a year later, and walked away with a severance package worth north of $100 million. “It was the moment,” the producer told me, “Hollywood realized real wealth is stock-market wealth.”

Over the last two decades, what was once seen as a creative industry has become a financialized one. In his 2024 essay headlined “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” the historian Daniel Bessner traced an industry in which cheap money after the Great Recession turned studios into playthings for asset managers. By the end of 2023, Vanguard Group, a massive investment manager with $13 trillion in assets, became the largest shareholder in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. These owners, he wrote, have no real stake in Hollywood itself. Thus, the logic of maximizing shareholder returns explains why every other movie or TV show became a sequel or a spinoff. Creative risk means financial risk, especially at a time when YouTube — and now TikTok — keep tearing viewers’ eyeballs and attention spans elsewhere.

The contrast in priorities is striking. Comcast’s spending on buybacks and dividends spiked to more than $18 billion in 2022, up from $3.2 billion in 2008. The new owners, Bessner wrote, were “stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house.” These days, there’s less and less left to strip. The biggest film and TV companies were more than $20 billion in the black in 2013; by 2022, those profits had roughly halved. Box-office revenue in 2023 was still 22% below what it was in 2019, and cable revenue has fallen an estimated 40% since 2015. Between August 2022 and the end of 2023, industry employment declined by a quarter. 

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It’s no coincidence that the industry keeps racing to the bottom, seeking out jurisdictions willing to hand out the most generous tax incentives. In the last decade, Atlanta became the “Hollywood of the South,” and by 2021, Georgia’s share of tax money to subsidize Hollywood topped $1 billion annually. Now much of that work is being shipped to England, where the tax credits are even bigger. The Hollywood Reporter has anointed London “the new Hollywood,” and one insider called the city “more Hollywood than Hollywood.” Trump’s threatened 100% tariff on foreign-made films has, so far, changed nothing.

Since the 2023 writers’ strike, American production is down roughly 40%. That puts Paramount’s $300 million pledge in context: it’s a reshoring clause for a company town already half abandoned by the companies. But the threat of even more capital flight explains why Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta folded in their initial opposition to the deal: the threat of departure gave the Golden State a painful choice — challenge the consolidation, or risk losing more of the industry itself.

None of this makes the merger harmless. Managed decline is still decline. The pressure will bear down most heavily on the people still struggling — against all odds — to do creative work. If you’re a rising screenwriter, your bargaining power slips if, as a result of consolidation, there are fewer firms competing over your hot spec script. The public also loses, just more slowly and in ways that are harder to see. The Wall Street model is risk-averse to the extreme and thus likely to discourage gambles on mid-budget prestige dramas and original content. Instead, producers will greenlight Batman Versus SpongeBob and umpteen sequels to the same. At home, HBO Max and Paramount+ will be folded into a single service, and anyone who has watched streaming prices over the past five years knows which way the monthly bill goes when competition disappears. Viewers will end up paying more for less, and most of the “more” will be sequels.

Not everyone is complaining. Warner Bros. shares jumped 10.8% to close at $30.80 on Monday. Hollywood may be slowly dying, but at Sun Valley, there’s always room on the tarmac for more winners.

The story recounts the story of the “Fossil sisters”, three girls adopted by an eccentric British collector who then leaves them in the care of his great-niece and a nanny, with dwindling funds. The three girls begin careers on the stage, while still children, in order to pay the bills. Near the end of the book the most beautiful, Pauline, is offered a Hollywood contract. She accepts it, in order to pay for her sister Petrova, a talented dancer, to train in Europe. 

As a child it was a satisfying ending. As an adult, knowing about Harvey Weinstein, it read like Pauline selling herself to fund her sister’s dreams. I wanted to yell at her: the price is too high! Don’t do it! 

In real life, though, most children offered up to the god of showbiz are sent by their own parents — a decision as unfathomable as the willingness of ancient Canaanites, according to the Old Testament, to sacrifice their own children to the god Moloch. When so many child stars come to such miserable ends, why do it? But perhaps, again, we might find a clue in other, equally disturbing religious practices attributed to the Canaanites, and condemned in the Hebrew Bible.

The latest child star to be sacrificed to the gods of showbiz is the actor Hayden Panettiere, who was found dead over the weekend aged 36. I loved her as the Cheerleader in Heroes, and found her sympathetic as troubled country star Juliette Barnes in the musical drama-soap Nashville. But according to the memoir she released earlier this year detailing her addiction and mental illness, experience of domestic violence, and grief at losing custody of her daughter, Panettiere’s celebrity came at tremendous cost. 

Nor is she anywhere near the first former child celebrity to have grown up deeply troubled. Earlier this year, too, former child actor Daveigh Chase was found dead in Los Angeles, killed by sepsis after a years-long struggle with substance abuse. Drew Barrymore, who had — like Panettiere — acted since infancy, was notorious in the Nineties for wild partying, rehab, a suicide attempt, and a lot of being nude in public and on magazine covers.

A still more notorious just-about-survivor is the singer Britney Spears, whose parents pushed her into acting as a tween and who was just 16 when she sang “Hit Me Baby” in 1998. Spears’ later mental health difficulties were the subject of intense tabloid fascination in the early 2000s, along with those of her fellow child star Lindsay Lohan. But where Lohan eventually withdrew from public life, settling in Dubai, the conservatorship imposed on Spears in 2008 would see her deprived of full adult autonomy while continuing to work. Though unable to control her own finances or even remove her birth control, during her conservatorship Spears released four major albums and completed several world tours.

Still darker, less verified rumors swirl around the children of showbiz. There’s a whole P. Diddy rabbit hole, for example: the rapper and producer has been accused (and acquitted) of sex trafficking, and allegedly held multi-day drug-fueled “freak off” parties which were, according to rumors, sometimes attended by underage celebrities. (After the death of Daveigh Chase, a clip resurfaced of Diddy inviting her, then aged just 12, to “an after-party”. I hope she didn’t go.) Among the rich and famous, it appears, the kind of sexual license now notoriously associated with the Epstein circle was perhaps simply normalized. Hayden Panettiere herself claims to have experienced a kind of celebrity grooming: in her memoir she describes one woman who first befriended her, in her teens, before maneuvering her into situations where she was pressured to have sexual contact with much older celebrity men, including while trapped on a yacht some way out to sea. If true, it seems there’s more than one Ghislaine Maxwell out there.

Who knows what comparable assaults other child stars have endured? And given the risks, and the notoriously high rate of attrition, why would any parent willingly propel their child into this seductive, exploitative, amoral world? Perhaps, again, we can glean some hints from the Old Testament. 

In Leviticus 18 and 20, the injunction not to sacrifice your babies to Moloch is, to modern sensibilities, strangely placed. The context is a warning to the Israelites against adopting Canaanite practices described as “detestable customs”. But most of the injunctions specify not religious rituals but practices we’d call “incest”: that is, prohibitions on sexual intimacy with family members or the spouses of family members. 

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This seems, on first glance, an odd juxtaposition. One interpretation is that all these prohibitions relate to religious practices, which for the ancient Canaanites included sexual rituals. But whatever the truth of that ancient world, it’s still relevant today in the subtle but profound connection it draws between different ways that natural family relationships can become corrupted. 

What child sacrifice and incest have in common is a shocking inversion of parental instincts we consider so natural as to be almost universal. Most parents, human or mammal, instinctively seek to protect their young; child sacrifice ghoulishly inverts this, for example in the archaeological remains discovered at ancient Canaanite Carthage. Incest, too, is taboo more or less universally across human cultures, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed. In this context, again, the alleged incestuous Canaanite rites again appear as the detestable practices Leviticus says they are.

I’m obviously not suggesting that children pushed into showbiz are literally sacrificed to Canaanite gods. Nor am I alleging a literally incestuous relationship between these children and their parents. But it’s clear that when a child is placed under pressure to perform as Panettiere was, at auditions, from pre-verbal babyhood onward, the adults making that choice for them are sacrificing important elements of their normal childhood. Meanwhile Freudian psychoanalysis describes as figuratively “incestuous” those parent/child relationships that remain over-identified and enmeshed, such that the child can’t reach full adult independence. And there’s a parallel between those two detestable Canaanite practices, in that their modern analogs — sacrificing a child for economic gain, or perhaps status, while blurring the boundaries between parent and child — are profoundly unnatural relative to normal parental instincts. And, where child celebrity is concerned, at least figuratively speaking these forms of profound parental failure often appear together. 

In Panettiere’s memoir, the way she describes the relationship she had with her mother makes it appear, to put it mildly, strange and lacking in boundaries. Panettiere outlines first how her mother, herself a small-time screen and stage actress, signed her infant daughter up for a modeling contract at eight months old. By the age of five, Panettiere had a well-established acting career. The mother-daughter relationship itself was plainly always deeply entangled: very much the kind an old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalyst would have called at least figuratively “incestuous”.

Panettiere writes of her own childhood that “Disappointing her was one of my biggest fears”. Her mother seems to have transferred all her acting ambitions seamlessly onto her child, and simply expected Panettiere to comply. As Panettiere puts it: “Her dream had become mine, and mine had become hers.”

A similar level of strangeness and enmeshment seems to have characterized Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Back when the conservatorship was imposed, he described her in legal papers as “an adult child in the throes of a mental-health crisis”. In other words: he refused to allow her to grow up, then continued to make a comfortable living off his artificially infantilized child-celebrity daughter. 

Spears later described the conservatorship as “abusive”. Her father continued to control every aspect of her life until she finally won a legal battle to end it.

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Barrymore also seems to have had a strange relationship with her mother, in which ordinary caregiving seemed weirdly missing. She recounts that, while she was still a minor, her mother took her to parties at the notoriously wild Studio 54, instead of to school: a radical abdication of the duty to keep your daughter safe, in favor of enjoying celebrity access through her. Barrymore later emancipated herself from her own mother at the age of 14. 

Similarly, Panettiere describes how, by her late teens, she began to find her mother’s low-cut tops and party behavior uncomfortable, and sought to leave behind the working relationship for a more normal, mother/daughter dynamic: “I just want you to be my mom now.” But her mother didn’t want that. In Panettiere’s account, she just retorted: “You owe me.” Their relationship never recovered. When the memoir was published Panettiere’s mother, Lesley Vogel, dismissed Panettiere’s account, claiming the drama was all “to sell books”. The Independent reported that Vogel declared that it was she, in fact, who had “chosen the no contact route” in relation to her daughter.

Why do some former child stars achieve adult independence, while others struggle? Drew Barrymore still hasn’t fully reconciled with her mother, but she seems comparatively stable, and has hosted a daytime talk show since 2020. Lohan is now married to a Kuwaiti financier, has two young children, and mostly leads a private (presumably extremely comfortable) life in the Emirates. Spears, by contrast, has refused to reconcile with her father since the conservatorship ended, despite reported pressure from other family members. Earlier this year, she checked back into rehab in April following an arrest for driving while intoxicated. Others, such as Panettiere, Daveigh Chase, and many other child stars, are simply no longer with us. 

Perhaps Pauline Fossil would have survived Hollywood just fine, avoided all the Ghislaines, and just ended up with a financier husband and large collection of Hermès scarves. Or perhaps not. Who can say from the outside what makes the difference between the children who survive their offering to showbiz Moloch, and the ones who get consumed? Is it the enthusiasm with which a child is sacrificed? The intensity of showbiz-parent enmeshment? The horrors encountered in Moloch’s fiery belly, or indeed on the yachts laden with pervy old rock stars?

Whatever the precise formula that produces the maximum of psychological damage, perhaps the only safe recourse is to listen to Leviticus. That is, rather than trying to find a low-impact way of sacrificing your child to Moloch, just don’t sacrifice your child to Moloch. Alternatively, if you prefer levity to Leviticus, there’s the 1935 message of another Noel — not Streatfield, but Coward — to every sharp-elbowed Theatre Mummy pestering him for auditions:

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington
Don’t put your daughter on the stage!

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

Until recently, I had never seen Ewan McGregor’s movie adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. I had hardly heard of it. And when I researched it, I found that it had been a serious flop in 2016, earning about a tenth of what it cost. But when my wife and I came across the picture, hiding in the stream, we loved it and were moved by it.

I don’t mean to call it a masterpiece. That can be too much of a burden. But it is so well done (it is the only film McGregor has directed, so far). What did we like? I think it was the unstressed sadness, and how that emotion grew out of its unusual study of a decent family in New Jersey coming apart. It’s about a couple (played by McGregor and Jennifer Connelly) who have a daughter (Dakota Fanning) who has a serious stammer. This is only smoothed away when, grown up, she becomes opposed to so much of Vietnam-era America and takes up a life of underground terrorism in which she bombs a small post office and kills a passer-by. It also destroys her father who had been a shining success in his young life, an athletic hero and a model for many onlookers.

The film sent me to Roth’s novel, published in 1997, to discover how much plot in the 423-page book the film had omitted (it was scripted by John Romano, a good writer on Hill Street Blues and the Coen Brothers’ movie, Intolerable Cruelty). I could see why these cuts had been made, and did not regret them because I felt McGregor had delivered what Roth intended. But the film had an urgency that improved on the Dickensian detail of Roth’s writing; this can be not so much rich and rewarding as claustrophobic. I don’t think it is the great book some commentators (like Harold Bloom) have claimed. Sometimes a movie can get to a point in a compelling way in one shot, instead of three pages. Of course, Roth was so esteemed that may have left editors afraid to touch him.

There has been a truism for decades that great novels make disappointing films while minor or even pulp fiction can be resplendent on the screen. So the films of Anna Karenina or The Great Gatsby are pathetic whereas very effective pictures were made from Double Indemnity (by James M. Cain), Kiss Me Deadly (Mickey Spillane) and The Graduate (Charles Webb). But this orthodoxy has been altered by television’s ability to do a novel, or a series of novels, in proper detail. Part of the impact of the original BBC The Forsyte Saga, in 1967, was that all (or nearly all) the narrative was covered, along with enviable period interiors and a cast of fine performances all done with care and respect. No one then anticipated what we now call long-form television with a literary reach. But it would grow into such epics as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Babylon Berlin and Ozark, which at over 40 hours on screen became novels on film — those old-fashioned novels that favor realistic social context, full descriptions of place, furnishing and atmosphere, and a delight in colorful small-part characters.

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What I’m talking about is not just a texture of physical realism, but the chance of the story leaving characters more affected by doubt than saved by sudden brave adventure and melodramatic resolution. What I like about the film of American Pastoral is the way McGregor’s character breaks down, without collapsing, so that he anticipates his death before it arrives. It’s a movie that ends with a more poignant, though hushed, feeling for its America, its dream and its imagination, than we expected. It has uncertainties that are usually resolved or tidied up in our movies. That trait is a profound giveaway: American optimism is so desperately insecure. As if we all guess quietly that the recommended positive thinking is a scam.

Does that sound depressing? Movies have promised us modest fun all our lives. But are we really grown-up if we always accept that pressure in movies to have us feel good — again, or not for the first time (as if some grandeur has been lost or taken from us)? Isn’t that the inability to face life that cripples President Trump in his insistence on making America great again? What does that “again” refer to? To slavery, the exploitation of wilderness, to a crowd of unknown souls? When one might aspire instead to decent ordinariness, aware that most of us will die in some sense of failure, and in poverty and anonymity. How irrational to hope for anything much better — like wealth, fame, sexual glory, unhindered ego and an arch of our own — those abiding measures of cinematic fantasy.

What I like about the movie of American Pastoral is that lasting dismay, and a movie experience from which you walk back into the light, not humming the theme song, but so lost in thought you hardly want to talk to other people about what you felt. Because feeling life can be too complicated. So many bought the American ads — until recently.

The marriage of novels and films can work in strange ways. For example, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, is one of his best books — hard, clipped, unsentimental, but assured. But it never won much critical approval. There is a film of it, made by Howard Hawks in 1944, with Humphrey Bogart and introducing Lauren Bacall. It is a travesty of the book (no matter that William Faulkner was one of the screenwriters) but it is a glorious film: a screwball fantasy about courage, wit and sexiness (that uniquely American screen quality). It’s a good example of how Hollywood insouciance could massage a tough book into silky magic.

Hemingway fumed at the movie, but pocketed the deal. Movie has hung over authorship with its apparent promise of easy money. Time and again, Hollywood ruined his work — The Old Man and the Sea (with Spencer Tracy absurd as the Hispanic fisherman) has to be seen to be believed. But was it a dumb book in the first place?

We might all be better off if some fairly challenging novels had been filmed by someone as thoughtful as Ewan McGregor. So why is there no movie of Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow (I think Jack Nicholson wanted to do it), or Democracy by Joan Didion (her masterpiece but hardly known), or Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price, or The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (where a character wonders if he has seen William Holden on the street that gets at the heart of film in a way that could never be filmed), or of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, which in its terse, tender way outflanks most films’ wish to cover sex?

It’s possible for the seasoned observer to say: don’t worry, let literature look after itself. Fair point. It could be that novels will be here after we have stopped making movies. (That seems more likely now than 50 years ago.) Leave open the possibility that the novel’s openness to doubt, disenchanted reflection, and an understanding of failure may keep it alive. Film is in many ways a narrative form, and we still like to follow a story. But film can offer piercing feeling in a split second. And so our “American Imagination” might be more mature if it was open to a little more dismay as well as the thrill of immediate impact. Like Bacall asking Bogart if he knows how to whistle.

This is not only the American Imagination, though that is discussed much more often than the English Imagination — is that because Americans are so desperate to observe themselves in a fit of narcissism, and are in a habit of watching themselves as cinema? Does the happy ending lead to its own madness? I can think of no sadness to surpass Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) which starts off by calling itself “the saddest story ever told”. This is an English novel, though most of it takes place on the Continent and one of its characters is American. It’s an uncanny book, one to return to every year or so. There was a television version made in Britain in 1981, and it’s faithful to the book’s lethal irony and poisoned allure. But there ought to be a new movie of the novel, one fit for our nausea now, that leaves us unclean or disturbed at having kept company with the characters.

You see, there is a chance in a book that we will be left in shocked awareness of what it is to be left alive.

***

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson is published by Allen Lane on 7 July 2026.

A few years later, Pratt found himself in front of the cameras again, this time for MTV’s docu-soap, The Hills. He eloped to Cabo San Lucas with his inamorata, the rat-tail and scorpion ingesting Heidi Montag, she of the 10 cosmetic surgeries, who was soon to grace the cover of Playboy magazine. In 2009, Pratt shifted gears to music, cutting an album and proclaiming he was the “White Jay-Z”. The following year he was arrested in Costa Rica for boarding an airplane with weapons. In Los Angeles, this is the resume — sordid sex-tape scandals and all — that qualifies Spencer Pratt to run for mayor.

The comedians aren’t amused. Late-night Trumpo-phobe Jimmy Kimmel derided him as a crystal-hawking huckster. Drew Carey, the man-of-the-people game-show host, condemned him as a “serial scammer”. Chelsea Handler took a moment off from smutty anecdotes to ask on Instagram: “Have we learned anything yet?” They were among the Hollywood liberals who have ridiculed and demonized Pratt as a showboat, a loudmouth, a clown, and a troll. And yet — to reduce the overriding frustrations of our piteous political moment to three words — no one cares.

The latest UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll has Pratt at 22%, only four percentage points behind incumbent Karen Bass and three behind activist city council member Nithya Raman. The latest from the California Post placed Pratt at 30.1% and the incumbent at 29.5% — a statistical tie. Of course, it doesn’t really matter who wins today’s non-partisan primary (Pratt is a registered Republican), as it has become clear that Bass will not swing enough votes to gather a majority, thus guaranteeing a run-off in November.

The point here is not to decry the degraded state of American politics. Railing against reality television politics is so twenty-teen. These days, not a single eyebrow raises when plaid-flanneled Luke Gulbranson — known for his clueless romantic pursuits on Bravo’s Summer House — runs for a Congressional seat in Minnesota, or when “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham seeks a spot on Austin’s City Council. Just look at the guy with the nuclear codes. 

It’s hardly a revelation that politics has gone Hollywood. The interesting point here is that the liberal Hollywood elite, the longstanding behemoth of left-coast, Left-wing electioneering, has been powerless to stop it. The rattling last gasp of LA’s political establishment came in 2024, when Oprah and Julia Louis-Dreyfus led the cavalry for Kamala Harris, whooping and waving proverbial swords over their heads so that George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jamie Lee Curtis would know which way to charge — to no avail.

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Pratt delivers a new brand of politics — call it alt-Hollywood, as his coalition includes none of the previous power brokers of Tinseltown’s establishment. Of course he has his billionaire, the hedge-fund tycoon Daniel Loeb, who once purchased a massive stake in Sony Pictures. And he can boast a bona-fide Academy-Award winner in Brian Grazer, a longstanding backer of California Democrats (including Kamala). Then come the West Coast MAGAs one might expect: Dennis Quaid and James Woods. But from there on out, his industry backers look different from anything we have seen in the past. He has energized hordes of Hollywood himbos and bimbos, awakening the political consciousness of actresses/models like Amber Rose and Paris Hilton, fellow reality stars Brody Jenner and Kristin Cavallari, Real Housewife of Miami‘s Joanna Krupa, and Dancing with the Stars’ Audrina Patridge. Pratt’s long tail reaches far into the D-List, from Billy Bush to Bachelorette runner-up Nick Viall to the perpetually online blabberati of comedians, DJs and former UFC fighters.

In a viral video of the fundraiser held at the Brentwood home of Pratt’s erstwhile foil on Princes of Malibu, David Foster’s wife Katharine McPhee belted out a version of “Simply the Best” — with new (and cringe) lyrics featuring Pratt. “La la land is ready for a plot twist,” concluded Access Hollywood. 

In Hollywood, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, a plot twist is generally accompanied by what is technically known as a “recognition” — a perception that what was once is no more, a new awareness that changes everything. The recognition that may well define Pratt’s political future is the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. This became evident on Fox News‘s hard-Right comedy hour Gutfeld!. “He’s on a mission to defeat the coastal elite,” declared the arch-conservative stalwart and eponymous host, Greg Gutfeld. “You’re on a roll. You’re surging in the polls.”

Pratt ignored the statement and repeated his campaign promise to be the “look around” candidate — apparently the only mayoral candidate in Los Angeles who will “look around” and see the “naked drug addict zombies with machetes” who plague his native city, leaving a trail of steaming excrement on sidewalks from Sherman Oaks to Silver Lake.

“You have celebrities that are now coming out in support of you,” Gutfeld pressed on. He named two of them: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx.

“I actually don’t want celebrities to come out and endorse me,” countered Pratt. (This, from the man who won “Snapchatter of the Year” at the 2018 Shorty Awards.) “I love when the celebrities attack me.” All of which makes it clear that Pratt fully comprehends the moment he is so thoroughly exploiting: the twilight of Hollywood’s liberal elite.

Pratt himself provides a perfect example of the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. He grew up in the tony enclave of the Pacific Palisades, part of California’s 32nd congressional district where Hillary Clinton notched 70% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. He attended the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where he imbibed a socially mindful “Human Development” curriculum in which math and science were subordinated to social justice, environmental issues, and “Modern Gender Studies”. At Crossroads, Pratt’s classmates included numerous progeny of the entertainment aristocracy, among them Dave Chernin (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Peter Chernin) and Max Winkler (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Henry Winkler). Pratt thus had the privilege of witnessing first-hand the great tradition of Left-wing Hollywood groupthink, and learned its lessons well. Perhaps too well, as he has co-opted its ethos and language for himself, incessantly emphasizing personal victimhood, namely, his post-Palisades homelessness and subsequent neglect at the hands of the political establishment. Of course, Pratt isn’t suffering too terribly, holed up for the duration in the Bel Air Hotel. That said, he has tapped into vast veins of resentment among LA’s Democratic base — the poor, the non-celebrity, and the Porsche Cayenne moms.

Pratt can get away with a campaign ironically fueled by discourse long-ago perfected by Hollywood liberals: because he knows that the species is going extinct, and thus cannot wield much in the way of meaningful response. He knows that the power and glory that once defined the Hollywood liberal establishment is a thing of the past.

There may be room for some pathos here. I recognize the loss, as my own father was an OG champion of the rights of the poor, suffering, ink-stained proletariat toiling in the writers’ rooms of Paramount and MGM. He plotted one Writers Guild of America West strike after another as he tooled from his Neutra house in the hills to studio commissaries in his white Lincoln convertible — followed, in chronological order, by a silver gull-winged Mercedes, a black Porsche, a bronze Bentley, a biscuit Jaguar, and in a fitting finale for an octogenarian Marxist, a black Cadillac.

Throughout his half-century career as a director and screenwriter, the project closest to my father’s heart was a film Spencer Pratt would surely hold up as an example of the most absurd of all bleeding-heart fantasies. This was the 1962 release of Convicts 4, a biopic loosely based on the story of John Resko, an impoverished and unemployed unfortunate who robbed a convenience store on Christmas Eve and inadvertently shot and killed the shopkeeper. The rest of the show concerns Resko’s life in prison, where among a madcap crew of ne’er-do-wells he learns how to paint, and as a result is at long last reprieved — redeemed by the power of art. At that point in Hollywood’s ancient history, such a scenario could attract a rat pack’s worth of stars, among them Ben Gazzara, Sammy Davis Jr., Vincent Price, and Rod Steiger. Yet today, almost everyone in the industry would rather get the bums off the street than waste taxpayer dollars on paint and canvas to rehabilitate them. 

Almost everyone, that is, except the “Communist and Socialist” — who are, in the world according to Pratt, “the only people that don’t love me”.

From his earliest days in reality TV, Pratt has understood that the fast track to success was to wage war against a fake foe like David Foster. In politics, he has created a similar kind of illusory enemy out of Hollywood’s liberal establishment. No matter that it’s dead and gone. Its ghost will do. As every executive producer knows, there’s nothing quite as terrifying as a ghost. 

Odessa A’zion, star of Marty Supreme and Rachel Sennott’s HBO series I Love LA, is a name of which you may only be vaguely aware. A raven-haired 25-year-old, daughter to the voice actress Pamela Adlon (aka Bobby Hill from cult animation King of the Hill) and the filmmaker Felix Adlon, is undeniably a nepo baby. Unfortunately for the peanut gallery, she is also an excellent actress. But no matter — the bitchfinder-generals of social media are determined to hate her anyway. She is, after all, a “jew mid”, “zionist nepo baby”, “jew psyop”, “IDF plant” according to the not at all spiteful public square. This young actress — despite having no association with Israel or Middle Eastern politics beyond the crime of simply being Jewish — has been so viciously targeted by the terminally online for her assumed beliefs that she had to announce on her public Instagram story that she was, as she put it, “not a zio”. A healthy and normal pop culture indeed.

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A’zion’s list of crimes is growing by the hour. There’s the “not quite blackfishing” accusation cowardly couched by the TikTok creator Georgie James, the logic of which goes that by dyeing and curling her hair, A’zion is attempting to look more, ahem, “Mediterranean” and ethnically “ambiguous” in order to muscle in on the social cachet of biracial Hollywood superstars. Then there was the Wigcident, as I am now calling it. During a red carpet interview last month, A’zion was asked if her hair was real. Evidently taking the red-carpet gratitude olympics too far (“I feel so blessed,” mewled everyone and her dog at the Golden Globes on Sunday), she said: “You think I can afford a wig like that? And wear it all the time? I’ve heard wigs can go up to like 20 or $30,000… are you fucking kidding me?” Cue a slew of armchair critics spitting feathers over her famous family and cinematic success, accusing her of playing mock-humble. Yes, she may have over-egged the pudding — but given how neurotic her fanbase seems to be, can you really blame her for trying to prostrate herself?

What a load of bad-faith nonsense this promising talent has had to field already. She’s been on the scene for all of five minutes but is already having to apologize for her Jewishness, withstand a purity test on Palestine and discuss the state of her finances. We are a million miles from the Hollywood of former decades, when stars like Johnny Depp and Sigourney Weaver would work with dodgy directors like Roman Polanski without facing any real stick — or when monsters like Harvey Weinstein were able to make the most of the casting couch as part of a smug open secret. A startling overcorrection has taken place which nastily guns for those whom fans once most adored: the young stars on the rise, the interesting new talents tasting well-earned fame and doing exciting things on screen. It seems all that has been swept away in favor of a sort of equal-opportunity fandom, where admiration is constantly tempered by jealousy and suspicion that a starlet might be the wrong kind of success story.

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Even A’zion’s Marty Supreme co-star is not immune. Timothée Chalamet, despite being perhaps the world’s most celebrated young actor, is getting similar accusations — notably, rounding on his Jewish heritage. Under a tweet celebrating Chalamet’s success in the Golden Globes — he won best actor in a musical or comedy — the eye-rolling goes turbo: “Why do you think he has been pushed so hard,” writes one anonymous account; another intones: “He’s a huge star in Hollywood getting an unreal push from the media. Lol ya it’s probably a safe bet he’s Jewish.”

Clearly, antisemitism is in the water. In this climate, the successes of someone talented can be conveniently wafted off as the product of in-group plotting and industry-planting, calling on ancient conspiracy theories heard more often in the wake of October 7. But the focus on Jewishness is just one — and perhaps the most noticeable — of a range of modern refrains which make insecure audiences feel better about someone else’s achievements. The fact is that any perceived advantage — beauty, family, even ambition — renders fame undeserved in this pitiful age of envy. Think of the purportedly feminist outcry at Sydney Sweeney’s breasts, or the sudden shocked realization that many famous actors also have famous parents (a state of affairs as old as the film industry itself), or indeed the backlash against Chalamet saying, while accepting an award no less, that he was determined to be “one of the greats” last year. In 2026, the worst thing a celebrity could be is satisfied and successful — which is why another wave of spite broke out when Chalamet declared his love for Kylie Jenner at the Critics’ Choice Awards. And if you’re asking yourself why Chalamet seems always to be at the scene of the crime, here’s your answer: he is the most successful.

None of this tall-poppy scything benefits a soul, least of all the arts themselves. But the frequency and vitriol of online dogpiles seems likely only to increase; they are, after all, built into the algorithms of social media. For a generation of Zillennial underachievers too nervous and inept to conduct a job interview, let alone lift an Oscar, the best justification for your failure to thrive is the same as any toddler’s complaint: It’s just not fair! Couple that with the delicious dopamine loop of liking and retweeting a vindictive post about someone whose life you’d very much rather have, and the well of celebrity culture is hopelessly poisoned.

You might not give a fig about the consequences of this, but the pool of talent in the entertainment industry may well go the way of that in politics: dismal and packed with dopey masochists — after all, who else would put up with the abuse? For a rational adult to succeed in the hypercritical pop culture of 2026, they have to be willing to swallow the most bitter of pills and perform continual meekness, forever on the right side of social media’s obsessions. The result? Zara Larsson, the Swedish pop star, posting a bizarre Instagram story last week reeling off all the groups she “loves” which, you’ll be glad to know, includes… “criminals”. In trying to appease the peanut gallery, celebrities can only ever look like clowns. It’s high time we remembered why we used to elevate people in the first place, with the only test that really matters: are they any good?

When it was announced last week that Netflix made an offer to buy Warner Brothers film studios and associated properties, many people in Hollywood expressed dismay. The deal has since been contested by Paramount, with a “hostile takeover” bid of their own. However the ownership of Warner Brothers shakes out, it is worth thinking about the intuitions that caused people in the film and television business to freak out about the prospect of Netflix taking over a major studio. Last Thursday, a group of top film producers and other industry players sent a joint letter to congressional representatives, urging them to block the deal. It was published anonymously for fear of retaliation by Netflix, and expressed skepticism that films produced under Netflix would continue to be released in theaters, despite Netflix’s assurances. The film industry group pointed out that Netflix’s incentives are such that they do not want people sitting in theaters, as this represents time not spent on the platform. The industry letter suggests the whole ecosystem of Hollywood would be put at risk with this deal, and the survival of an art form put in doubt.

The fear rests on the sense that Netflix is not interested in movies or television — you know, characters, stories and all that. Their business model comes out of Silicon Valley rather than Hollywood. The deal, if it were to go through, could be understood as a case of alien ownership, in which an enterprise is controlled by parties who have no history with, and no particular sympathy for, the product or service that the firm exists to provide — no emotional or intellectual investment in the craft of it.

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By Matthew Crawford

In his excellent article on Netflix from 2023, David Roth quotes the actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman: “I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’ Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off.”

A show that is too interesting will monopolize a person’s attention, and it is assumed that nobody has the luxury of getting invested in a story to that degree. What is needed is a show that is glossy but humanly vacant. Of course, some of the shows on Netflix don’t fit this description; Stranger Things is loved by many. Sometimes the human spirit shines through despite all.

But, like every other institution subject to “managerialism”, Netflix is run by cadres of people whose competence is an omni-competence, expressed in an idiom of metrics that is transportable across industries. The making of widgets is to be optimized by people who may never have held this particular kind of widget in their hand, and gazed upon it lovingly.

The lovelessness of managerialism is like a pillow held firmly over the face of culture. Roth writes, “there is a shrinking and flattening that comes with being owned by people whose interests, on balance, are themselves notably small and flat. Every business these people touch winds up cheapened, worsened, and dispiritingly similar. … [The point is] to find just how diminished and demeaning a version of a once-useful service people are still willing to pay for.”

Under managerialism, the thing-in-itself (here, television drama) recedes; all the real action happens on a meta level. But only primary things, concrete things, are lovable; abstractions and metrics are not. This system ruthlessly selects for people who will not disturb the system’s need for vacancy. Anything real would be like lumps that impede the smooth spreadability of a peanut-flavored sandwich filling.

The reality-deficit that comes with this late form of capitalism tends to back up, like a sewer line, and come gurgling to the surface where it soils even the meta-layer where metrics are supposed to remain clean. The occasion for Roth’s expose of Netflix was the screenwriters’ and actors’ strike of 2023. The unions tried to force Netflix and the other streaming services to reveal their numbers so workers could be compensated based on a realistic picture of how much their content was being viewed. The streaming services resisted this tooth and nail. Their business model — their ability to attract investors — appears to rely on their ability to keep their metrics unverifiable. The prevailing view in Hollywood is the published numbers are all fake.

Managerialism is a form of political economy in which the middle-man steps in with a claim that he has some special competence, through the exercise of which new efficiencies can be realized, or some process of production or distribution can be optimized through quantitative rigor. But a funny thing then happens. His metrics easily come detached from the underlying things they are meant to track, no doubt because the incentives of the manager are tied to metrics, rather than directly to the thing. Concern with the thing is characteristic of the craftsman, via the “internal rewards” and satisfactions that are intrinsic to some skilled practice (such as making good television), as opposed to the “external rewards” of money, or social position, or other goods that may be a second-order consequence of getting to be really good at something. But you can’t get good at something while focused on external rewards. You have to go deep into the practice itself.

As Eugyppius says: “Managerialism is an ever-advancing process of decay masquerading as an administrative system, and it has become a defining pathology of Western civilisation.” One result is a spreading “crisis of competence”, or the death of craftsmanship as an ethic. Applied to the culture industry, managerialism seems to generate products that are hard to get emotionally invested in. In the case of the Silicon Valley takeover of television, this may even be by design. The customer’s attention must remain available on multiple fronts.

It is hard to see how the deadening effect of managerialism might be overcome, as our class structure is built on it. Due to the overproduction of degree-holders, the layer of people engaged in the meta-work of abstraction grows ever thicker. It generates its own demand, parasitical on the economy of the real. If the cumulative effect is culturally suffocating, this needn’t be taken as a judgment of the personal qualities of those with bullshit jobs. Rather, they are trapped within a system that demands that they suspend what comes most naturally to a human being: taking an active and affectionate interest in real things.

This Californian elf, now the Golden State’s avatar, is the work of generations, refined over time from early Hollywood to Silicon Valley today. It’s tempting to see this mythologization as an act of idle self-absorption, a preening in the style of Barbie and Ken. But the truth is far more mercantilist. California is a massive economy, and its most defining exports are not hard goods or clear-cut services but fickle ideas.

The myth began modestly, with health seekers heading west in the late 1800s to find relief from tuberculosis in the dry air. Over time, “Go West!” became almost rote advice for chronic illness, as if the very place itself could heal. But these primordial associations weren’t enough to transform California into a global myth. The state needed a dream machine and it found one in early Hollywood.

By the Twenties, Hollywood was the face of American cinema, resplendent with all the glamor and scandal it would soon embody. Movie stars, not just movies themselves, were some of its most potent domestic exports. Studio executives understood that selling California as a paradise was essential to their business model, and they took to the task with profit-minded aplomb. Every palm-lined street, every sun-drenched beach scene, and every impossibly beautiful actor stepping out of a convertible advertised the way of life that the silver screen offered for the mere change in your pocket. 

In our day, Silicon Valley represents the latest iteration of this very same mythmaking engine. By the Eighties, Silicon Valley had surpassed Route 128 outside Boston to become the center of the technology universe, drawing brilliant founders and scientists to the beach with the very same allure that had given rise to the motion picture industry before. The visionary founder joined the starlet, and the IPO became as important as the premiere, but the underlying promise remained: California is a place that transcends humdrum human life, and if you buy its products you can get a taste.

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As we in marketing like to say, it’s “aspirational”. Even New York, the state most capable of rivaling California in cultural power, whispers about the golden elves. In Mad Men, the New York ad man Don Draper dreams of an escape to mythic California, ending the series in a wellness retreat there where meditation inspires him to make the iconic Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad. The show uses California as an outlet for Don’s recurring fantasy of reinvention, a place where the damaged protagonist could shed his skin and emerge transformed. That’s why Don’s trips to California often involve surreal, dreamlike encounters that feel disconnected from reality. California as an idea is a constructed, aspirational export. 

And what’s more aspirational than wanting to live forever? Behold the grandest of Californian extravagances yet: immortalism, a movement of scientists and eccentrics quite literally trying to never die. Like Hollywood’s promise of stardom or Silicon Valley’s promise of money, the immortalist movement offers the ultimate Californian product — the transcendence of the one true human limitation.

Aleks Krotoski, a social scientist based in New York, has written an account of her years-long investigation into the entrepreneurs and inventors currently searching for eternal life. The Immortalists is a survey of transhumanists and their efforts: a loose confederation of scientists, entrepreneurs and true believers united by the conviction that aging is a disease to be cured. These tech elites see themselves as successors to earlier “seekers”, armed with wealth and engineering confidence, approaching death as another problem yet to be disrupted by the application of capital and expertise. Their goals are straightforward if audacious: extend lifespan by preventing typical causes of death, while extending their vital “prime years” so they can remain young forever. The connection between the latest trend and broader Californian mythmaking is clear to behold throughout the book’s pages. 

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It’s obvious why such an initiative would make its home in California. For one, the state has a high concentration of extant scientific talent, with one third of the nation’s aerospace companies headquartered there. The balmy beachside lifestyle attracts reliably high earners, while Silicon Valley provides both the capital and the risk tolerance necessary for a moonshot venture like overcoming death. But there’s also a mixture of cult experimentation and alternative medicine which led to the boom of the wellness industry from the Seventies onwards. In the last few decades, the wellness craze has taken hold of Los Angeles. Erewhon, the upscale organic grocery chain, is now basically a temple, with $20 smoothies you’re supposed to be seen consuming. The logical next step after trends such as sound baths, micro-dosing and therapeutic IV drips, was always going to be living forever. 

In The Immortalists, Krotoski floats from oddball to oddball, listening intently and giving each person their due when it comes to their views on mad science, but there’s one recurring star who sits above the rest: the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He has gained significant online fame largely by posting provocative erection-related statistics and cultivating a vampiric look. He has smooth, hairless cheeks, a piercing gaze, and much plastic surgery. He has turned himself into the vampire king of California, obsessed with rare elixirs and draining blood from the young. 

Krotoski spends so much of the book quoting Johnson verbatim. It’s easy to see why: “When my body, when my mind is like, let’s go eat pizza or let’s go drink… that’s non-cooperation. I relabel those things to violence.” You can almost hear the California dialect just from the words on the page. It’s a particular blend of tech-speak optimization language and therapy-influenced self-actualization rhetoric and rapport, part Silicon Valley efficiency gospel and part Venice Beach spiritual woo. Simultaneously earnest and performative, vulnerable and branded, there’s nothing else like it, and that’s partially the point.

Krotoski’s mocking portrayal of her subjects, as vain, anxious or bored in their pursuit of immortality, is probably fair. But it misses something key in its portrayal of Californian weirdness: it’s all embellished. She doesn’t fully capture, and may not even realize, that her Californian subjects are fully aware of what they are. In reading Johnson’s words, one can find a detectable wink to the audience in everything he says. He has made himself into the character, physically and verbally, to get attention. Take his vampiric appearance. In one telling exchange with Elon Musk on social media, Johnson wrote: “the difference between Elon and me: I’ll nourish you and drink your blood; he’ll fire you and leave you to die” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to his publicized blood transfusion experiments. The darkness of the imagery, perhaps as a shield against criticism, is part of the performance.

Johnson is not the first to do this, and he won’t be the last. The routine is commonplace, especially in the health space. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, after all, knowingly markets products like “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles, a deliberate provocation that generated discourse (and thus notoriety) far in excess of the actual candles sales. The entire “Valley Girl” phenomenon of the Eighties was both authentic dialect and conscious performance, with Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit simultaneously embodying and parodying the accent in her hit single. Even the garage startup myth acknowledges its own absurdity while simultaneously perpetuating itself. The mythology of the billion-dollar garage startup has become an exportable, addictive idea that drives many to apply to places like Y Combinator each year.

California has always needed to find new dreams to sell as the old ones lose their luster. Film’s cultural dominance has waned with the rise of streaming and global production. New York has been aggressively courting film production back from California with tax incentives, and other cities like Atlanta have successfully challenged Hollywood’s monopoly. As traditional Hollywood loses ground, new innovations in the myth are needed to keep it both economically relevant and socially potent on the world stage. Californians understand this, and this is why there is such an effort to continue the myth creation. 

The immortalist movement may succeed in refreshing the California myth for another generation, proving that the state can still produce world-changing ideas. On the other hand, if it spectacularly combusts, it may reveal the myth’s exhaustion, showing that we’ve reached peak California, where the only frontier left is literally trying in vain not to die.

The truth is that California has always sold impossibility. From the gold rush’s promise of instant wealth to Hollywood’s promise of stardom to Silicon Valley’s promise of changing the world with an app, the state’s primary export has been dreams that statistically just won’t come true for most people. Yet, occasionally, just often enough to make the news, someone actually does strike gold, become a star, or build a billion-dollar world-changing company. As such, the myth rolls on, renewed.

The immortalists represent the logical endpoint of this tradition of gambling for glory. They’re selling the ultimate prize of all with just enough scientific merit to make it seem faintly possible. Whether Johnson and his cohort achieve immortality matters less than what their quest reveals about California’s enduring power to make fortune seem inevitable, to turn personal neurosis into cultural movement, and to perform transcendence so convincingly that performance itself becomes a kind of truth.

In the end, Krotoski’s book captures California early in the act of creating its next great myth. Like all the best California stories, it’s obviously fake yet somehow real. The author herself, by taking these eccentric immortalists seriously enough to write about them, becomes part of the myth-making machine she observes. She’s another New Yorker drawn into California’s orbit, unable to look away from the golden elves even as she rolls her eyes at their antics.

It’s a very old story. Johnson and his fellow immortalists are the people who went West seeking transformation and in the end decided to put on a show about it. The fact that their particular show involves blood transfusions and supplement regimens rather than surfboards and sunshine doesn’t change the fundamental dynamics. They are performing California, and in performing it, they make it real.

The film stars Gloria Swanson as a washed-up, filthy-rich silent film actress named Norma Desmond, who refuses to accept that she no longer exists front and center in the popular imagination. William Holden plays the much younger, much poorer failing screenwriter, Joe Gillis, who mistakenly turns into the driveway of Desmond’s Hollywood mansion while on the run from the repo man. There he is presented with rent-free room and board in return for editing a screenplay. But this side gig quickly transforms into a 24/7 job as a kept man whose role is less gigolo than round-the-clock admirer.

The film ends with Gillis lying dead in the pool, while the cops escort a deranged Desmond out of her house to be tried for his murder. The homicidal diva, however, is under the impression that the media’s cameras are only there to broadcast her fame, a misapprehension summed up by one of the most famous last lines of Hollywood history: “All right, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

In many ways, Desmond is the perfect 21st-century heroine. Her obsession with her own image anticipates the delusions of our selfie-addicted social media era. When Gillis first turns up at Desmond’s mansion, he finds the aging diva surrounded by paintings and photographs of herself at the prime of her popularity. She spends her evenings watching her silent celluloid image on the movie screen that lurks behind a full-length oil portrait in the living room, or else gazing piteously at herself in the mirror. At one point, Desmond tells her reluctant boy toy: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”

Sunset Boulevard was a hit, gathering 11 Academy Award nominations. It would eventually break Broadway’s all-time record for box-office receipts. And yet its theme was something of an anomaly in post-war Hollywood, as the film was neither overtly political nor particularly patriotic. It wasn’t about war, communists, or criminals; it was neither a romance nor a Western. Instead, the film was an early example of what future scholars would call post-modernism. Put simply, Sunset Boulevard was a movie about the movies.

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In making the film, Wilder was taking a risk. He had long been a favorite of Hollywood studio heads, as his films Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend had been hugely successful financially. But in Sunset Boulevard, he dared to turn Hollywood’s lens upon itself in order to expose the toxic self-absorption of the industry. As a result, and despite all critical acclaim, Sunset Boulevard was hated by the studio elites. “You bastard,” MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer was said to have yelled at Wilder. “You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you!”

The film is shot in black and white, the women sport snoods, the score presents a mishmash of tango and bebop — but its most dated element may be that it portrays unbridled self-adoration as a bad thing. Today, of course, vanity is considered quite the opposite. Narcissistic mania has become the summum bonum for Gen Alphas on TikTok, Gen Zs on Instagram, Right-wingers on X, Lefties on Bluesky, paranoids on Telegram, and all the old folks on Facebook — each and every one of them determined to mesmerize the mediasphere if only for a few seconds. The reason Sunset Boulevard remains so relevant and beloved today — with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical remake breaking box-office records this summer on Broadway — is that it anticipated our epidemic of self-absorption.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the casting. Wilder and his co-writer, Charles Brackett, riddled their screenplay with inside-Hollywood jokes about has-been actors. Instead of using actors to portray washed-up stars, he used the washed-up stars themselves. In one scene, the bridge-playing, over-the-hill silent movie star Buster Keaton plays an over-the-hill silent movie star playing bridge. Across from him at the table sits an aged Anna Q. Nilsson — the “ideal American girl” of 1919, who appeared in 200 silent films — and Harry B. Warner, who had reached the height of his fame a quarter-century earlier, playing Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 epic, The King of Kings. When Desmond bulls her way back into her old stomping grounds at Paramount Pictures, it is Cecil B. DeMille who appears, playing himself at the studio he co-founded.

Edith Head, who designed the costumes, later described her assignment as “the most challenging of my career”. Perhaps this was because, for the first time, Head had to create costumes that suggested costuming. She fitted Swanson in outdated fur muffs and cuffs, brocades, ermine, and over-the-top costume jewelry. “Because Norma Desmond was an actress who had become lost in her own imagination,” she recalled, “I tried to make her look like she was always impersonating someone.” In Sunset Boulevard, impersonating a personality is the path to greatness — a truth today’s legions of Instagram influencers know only too well.

Desmond herself costumes Gillis for the part of her leading man, dressing him in bespoke tuxedos and vicuña overcoats, drawing him into the orbit of her vanity. But despite his newfound finery, the screenwriter is a dead man walking. And that is because, for all its Hollywood glitz, Sunset Boulevard is a morality play with echoes of an earlier age.

Wilder was particularly attuned to the moral dangers of narcissism, as his family had fled a European continent drenched in images of Adolf Hitler. He knew the hazards of personality cults, which echoed his native Jewish distrust of false idols. Yet in Hollywood, Wilder had made a living out of idol worship. His spiritual dilemma hearkened back to John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which characters named Christian and Faithful are drawn to a marketplace called Vanity Fair, which in many ways resembles Fifties Hollywood. Here, money and materialism override “lives, blood, bodies, souls”, so that the worth of an individual can only be measured through his or her commodification. While Faithful manages to escape, his companion Christian is burned at the stake.

A similar fate awaits Gillis, as when the writer finally packs his bags and tries to save his soul by getting the hell out, Norma shoots him three times in the back. As the press crowds her living room, Desmond tips over the edge. Unable to comprehend that she is about to become a lurid headline, she can only interpret the attention as an increase of her power. “This is my life,” Norma says. “Just us. And the cameras.”

Of course it is. Sunset Boulevard was the first film to depict the moral failures of a world that cares for nothing but image. Today, Hollywood’s narcissism has spread beyond the backlots of Burbank; thanks to social media, anyone can now play the diva. What was once the deadly sin of vanity has become aspirational, which is why a note other than tragic sadness pervades William Holden’s final lines. “It’s dawn now,” he says, his voice rising from beyond the grave, lilting with sardonic triumph. “They must have photographed me a thousand times.”

This jejune tic is a recurring motif in Gwyneth, the hotly anticipated, unauthorized, and extremely hefty new biography of the actress and wellness empire founder by journalist Amy Odell. And somewhere between the second and third time that Gwyneth was pretending to puke with loathing, I started to think about why biographies like this are written, about who is considered worthy of one — and about the difference between having had an interesting life, and being an interesting person.

A skilled biographer, which Odell is, can craft a narrative compelling enough that it almost elides this distinction — and Gwyneth is, indeed, a piece of expertly woven and compulsively readable storytelling. But eventually, over the course of 448 pages, it’s hard not to think at least a bit about the question above and to notice that Paltrow is very much the former thing, and extremely not the latter.

The buzz surrounding Gwyneth suggested that it would make a meal for audiences dying for revelation, desperate for dirt, and aching for a glimpse of the real, human woman behind the $600 exfoliating peptide with foaming seaweed extract sheet mask. Certainly the press dutifully hyped it up, publishing sneak peeks and buzzy lists with titles like “The top ten most shocking revelations from the unauthorized Gwyneth Paltrow biography.” This, despite the fact that the contents of these lists were either not revelations at all — Gwyneth declined to participate in the biography, and so the quotes from here included therein are culled from the thousands of interviews she’s sat for over the years — or, if they are, not the slightest bit shocking. She’s grossed out by fat people, yeah, we know. She was popular in high school, obviously. She allegedly enjoyed being teabagged by Ben Affleck, who she described in a recent podcast appearance as a “technically proficient” lover… This seems far-fetched, but if true, it’s silly. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the book is that after she once had a falling out with fellow celeb and frenemy Winona Ryder she nicknamed her “Vagina Ryder”, and this only because you’d expect someone of Gwyneth’s pedigree to be a little more inventive in her cruelty.

But this, too, goes back to the fact that being born into rarefied circumstances does not necessarily a rarefied person make.

Much of the book traces Gwyneth’s trajectory from privileged childhood to Hollywood breakout. Born to actress Blythe Danner and powerhouse producer Bruce Paltrow in 1972, Gwyneth was a darling of the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival as a child and, as a teenager, attended the famous Spence School in New York City. She was both popular and rebellious, and rarely suffered consequences for the latter — partly because she could charm her way out of trouble, partly because she simply didn’t care if she got into it. She was an underachieving student — for lack of intelligence or trying, unclear — and made it into college only after her dad pulled a string or two. She also didn’t stay there long: it was shortly after matriculating at the University of California, Santa Barbara that her acting career took off. She dropped out, got famous, and never looked back.

Insofar as the book contains anything juicy, it’s in these early pages. The time Gwyneth got suspended for doodling an erect penis on a wall in the library; the time she lashed out at a friend after learning she’d been rejected from Vassar. Insofar as it reveals anything crucial about its subject, that’s here, too — not because this information was unknown, or unknowable, but because it’s the first time it’s all been assembled in one place, and into a narrative through which one can clearly discern both the contours of Gwyneth’s character and the eventual shape of her future.

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Partly the chapters about her childhood allow the reader to understand just how long Gwyneth has been doing what she does — how for her, acting and celebrity was less a dream to be chased than a birthright to be claimed. But it’s also possible in these pages to pattern match the vaguely entitled teenager Gwyneth was to the billionaire empress of celebrity wellness she is now, to see how inevitable this all was. Gwyneth is not untalented, but her talent is secondary to her success, which has been almost entirely a function of her proximity to the right people. Before she was ever a household name, she was the child of famous parents, and then the girlfriend of various famous men. Her acting career flowed directly from her having figured out how to work these things to her advantage, and from an intuitive understanding passed down from her parents that all the world’s a stage. There’s an especially vivid anecdote on this front from her Spence years: on the first day of school, Gwyneth realized that her outfit — a Breton striped shirt and loafers — wasn’t attracting the right kind of attention from the most popular girls in her class. She went home, changed clothes, came back — and found herself immediately welcomed in. It was an early lesson in the importance of a well-timed costume change, of the importance of looking the part. In some ways, one could argue, it was the first successful audition of her life.

To give Gwyneth credit, this is a skill, no less impressive for the fact that she was evidently born with it. Acting at its best is not just a pantomime of feeling; it’s the ability to show people what they want to see, to persuade whoever is watching that you are this other person, that the character you’re playing is real. But as an origin story, it is hardly the sordid unauthorized bombshell the culture was clearly and dearly hoping for. The best celebrity biographies stir our emotions, revealing previously hidden depths beneath the famous faces we know so well. But there is no secret trauma or childhood tragedy here, no behind-the-scenes breakdown that reveals Gwyneth to be better, more complicated, more human, than she appears on TV — and nor does she come off as a scheming, magnificent villain, more evil than you could possibly imagine. Instead, Gwyneth’s life has turned out exactly as one might expect for a girl born to privilege, godfathered by Hollywood royalty, and savvy enough to turn these things to her advantage.

And if her personality has developed to be somewhat less stellar than her career, this, too, is also more or less what you’d expect from a woman whose ability to relate to other people never evolved beyond the confines of a high school cafeteria. If the distasteful aspects of this are obvious enough (Vagina Ryder, anyone?), it’s also been undeniably to her benefit. More than once, I found myself wondering how much Gwyneth’s uncanny ability to cultivate attention, to emerge unscathed from everything from a scandalous breakup to a box-office bomb to a social media firestorm over jade vagina eggs, is owed to social strategies developed in the fishbowl that is the social scene at an elite New York City high school.

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But if this is the ironic source of Gwyneth Paltrow’s success, it’s also a little bit tragic in that what allows a person to flourish in the celebrity world tends to stunt their growth in every other milieu. It’s not just her, of course: fame has always created perverse incentives, and Hollywood, the original attention economy, is not exactly known for encouraging the kind of personal growth that makes for emotionally mature adults with a healthy sense of perspective.

Still, to see Gwyneth’s life laid out like this, it’s striking how much the woman herself hasn’t changed even as she’s moved from moviemaking to motherhood to managing the GOOP empire. The obsession with thinness — oh, excuse me, wellness — remains potent as ever. She continues to hold people at arms’ length, or freeze them out like a cool queen bee if they cease to be useful to her. And certainly, it casts some moments from her more recent years, like the one in which she famously paused on her way out of the courtroom where she’d just won a civil suit against a man who sued her after they collided while skiing, in a somewhat stark light. What she said that day, as she leaned in to speak to him, was, “I wish you well.”

But one suspects that what she really wanted to do — and perhaps did do, later, out of sight of the cameras and the crowds — was wait until his back was turned, and then stick a finger down her throat to mime throwing up.

This is one of the most memorable scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, a rollicking action comedy which premiered 100 years ago this week. To mark the occasion, the silent film is returning to cinemas worldwide in a 4K restoration. And it hasn’t aged a day.

The Gold Rush is set in the 1890s, when chancers flocked to the Klondike region of Canada, near Alaska. Rumor had it that the world’s largest gold reserves were buried there. Most returned home empty-handed; an unlucky few never came back at all. Causes of death included avalanches, typhoid fever, alcoholism, murder and starvation.

Into this perilous world Chaplin drops his most famous character: the Tramp, played by Chaplin himself, in his trademark bowler hat, cane and ragged suit. The Tramp, ever the optimist, fancies his chances of hitting it big.

A century on, The Gold Rush still packs a wallop. Chaplin — who not only starred in the film, but also wrote, directed, produced and edited it — has lost none of his genius. If anything, the film’s snappy gags and raffish sense of play makes it well suited to our TikTok age. In today’s world, the moment Chaplin picks up two loaves of bread, sticks forks into them and makes them dance like little feet would almost certainly go viral.

But The Gold Rush is far more than just good entertainment. It always is with Chaplin. The film is a biting critique of free-market capitalism. It lampoons an ideology — influential in the Twenties — in which everyone was expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Chaplin shows what happens when that doesn’t work: you end up eating your own boots.

The film’s political commentary rings as true today as it did in 1925. Faith in unfettered markets lives on. Since the neoliberal reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, governments have preached individual responsibility while dismantling the welfare state and removing checks on corporate power.

The results are plain to see: Western societies are marked by wealth disparity and precarity. Take the United States, where Chaplin spent most of his career. The richest are getting richer at record speed. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans have less than $500 in savings. And only one in five has more than $5,000. Any emergency could put them on the streets. “I don’t want the old rugged individualism,” Chaplin once said. “Rugged for a few, ragged for many.”

Work hard, we’re told these days, and you’ll succeed. But in The Gold Rush, Chaplin tells us the opposite: fortune doesn’t favor the industrious, it favors the lucky. At the end of the film, the Tramp becomes a millionaire. But his success has nothing to do with merit. One night, his cabin is caught up in a snowstorm and carried right next to a gold deposit. The Tramp literally struck gold in his sleep. It’s the ultimate send-up of the American Dream. As George Carlin, another comedian, quipped decades later: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Ultimately, The Gold Rush argues that the rich and powerful aren’t all that special. They owe their status more to quirks of fate — or accidents of birth — than to any intrinsic worth. It’s no wonder, then, that it was Chaplin who told this story. He always identified with outcasts — a habit which stemmed from his Dickensian childhood in London at the tail end of the 19th century. His father was out of the picture. His mother suffered from severe mental health issues, and was in and out of asylums. When she was institutionalized, a young Chaplin was sent to the workhouse. There, like Oliver Twist, he was berated for his plight. “To me it was a prison and a house of shame,” he said later. “We had gone through extreme poverty, and poverty was a crime. Even at the early age of seven I realized this.”

No matter how rich he became, Chaplin never forgot what it was like to be down and out. “My memory is so clear of the days when meat once a week was a luxury,” he told a colleague. Chaplin was certain that if only a few things had turned out differently, he’d have spent his life as a member of the underclass. “I might have become a thief in the London streets. I might have been buried in a pauper’s grave,” he said.

Instead, Chaplin became one of the most illustrious men of the 20th century. He got his start in vaudeville in the West End of London. By 24, he was in Los Angeles starring in a new art form called moving pictures. By 28, he was a global star making more money than almost anyone else on earth.

Chaplin’s extraordinary rise personified the American Dream: the penniless immigrant who became a legend in sun-drenched California. He was supremely talented — as inventive in front of the camera as behind it — but he worked damn hard too. The irony is that he did pull himself up by his own bootstraps. His creative process was simple: “sheer perseverance to the point of madness.”

It would have been easy for Chaplin to portray himself as a self-made man. That he chose instead to make the Tramp his on-screen double is a testament to his powers of empathy. No matter what, he was always Charlie from the workhouse. A shrink at the time looked into his case. “He always plays only himself as he was in his dismal youth,” wrote Dr Sigmund Freud. “He cannot get away from those impressions and humiliations of that past period of his life.”

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With the Tramp, Chaplin set out to lessen those humiliations not just for himself, but also for the huddled masses. His goal was to give the poor and downtrodden their dignity back. Humor was his weapon: “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature — or go insane,” he said.

Chaplin was a rare kind of artist: a megastar who was also genuinely subversive. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. You know subversion is dead when Barbie is called subversive, or when Kneecap, a band that projects “fuck Israel” at gigs and chants “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”, is treated as brave.

But Chaplin never missed his target. In Modern Times (1936), he went after industry. In The Great Dictator (1940), he went after Adolf Hitler. Next, at the dawn of the Cold War, Chaplin came out with Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a dark comedy that condemned the capitalist system. It was also his first film without the Tramp. Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a man who loses his job of 30 years during the Great Depression. To support his disabled wife and son, Verdoux turns to crime. He uses his considerable charm to marry wealthy women, then murders them to get their money. Verdoux is the mirror image of the Tramp. Where the latter takes misfortune on the chin, the former goes for the jugular. As Verdoux himself puts it: “This is a ruthless world, and one must be ruthless to cope with it.”

Monsieur Verdoux was satire, but it revealed the ugly toll that exclusion takes on people. “One thing I know is that poverty taught me nothing,” Chaplin said, “but on the contrary distorted and twisted my sense of values, gave me a wrong concept of life.”

Chaplin paid a high price for his subversion, as the historian Scott Eyman recounts in Charlie Chaplin vs. America. In 1922, the FBI had opened a file on him on account of possible “socialist beliefs”. Over the next 30 years, the Bureau accumulated nearly 2,000 documents on the filmmaker. By the early Fifties, Chaplin had become public enemy number one. The Cold War was in full swing, and the red threat was everywhere. Criticizing capitalism was now anti-American. The FBI, never one for nuance, denounced Monsieur Verdoux as “anti-capitalist propaganda”. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Congressional body that investigated Soviet influence in Hollywood, suspected Chaplin of being a communist.

To make matters worse, Chaplin’s private life also shocked Puritan America. He’d been married four times and had a penchant for younger women. His fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, who would remain with him until his death, was 18 when they tied the knot. Chaplin was 54.

Before he met O’Neill, Chaplin had been romantically involved with a 21-year-old named Joan Barry. After they broke up, she became pregnant and claimed Chaplin was the father. He denied it, and Barry took him to court.

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The US Department of Justice seized the opportunity to smear Chaplin, prosecuting him for transporting Barry across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”. He faced 23 years behind bars. But the case was flimsy — all Chaplin had done was take Barry on a trip to New York. In the end, he was acquitted.

Nor was Chaplin the father of Barry’s child. A blood test made that indisputable. However, back then, blood tests weren’t admitted in Californian courts. Chaplin was therefore ordered to pay alimony for a child that wasn’t his.

Although Chaplin was ultimately vindicated, the trials bruised his public image. In the court of public opinion, he was not only a communist but also a pervert. For many, the two went hand in hand anyway.

And so in 1952, when Chaplin traveled abroad, the Department of Justice barred him from re-entering America, revoking his visa, even though Chaplin had lived in the country for 40 years. The Attorney General called him “a menace to womanhood”; Congress blasted him as “left-wing and radical”. Chaplin didn’t try to go back. “Whether I re-entered that unhappy country was of little consequence to me,” he said later. “I was fed up with America’s insults and moral pomposity.”

Chaplin settled in Switzerland with O’Neill and their children. He made two more films — neither one good — and only returned to the US in 1972 to pick up an honorary Oscar. He died five years later at 88.

One question remains: was there ever any truth to the charge that Chaplin was a communist? The answer is a resounding no. How could anyone believe that the maker of The Great Dictator could support any totalitarian system?

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Clearly, Chaplin was a critic of capitalism. But that didn’t make him a communist. Rather, the filmmaker believed that the market should be subservient to a democratically elected government. Power should lie with the people. And a government of the people, by the people, for the people should look out for the common welfare. The reason: there can never be true freedom while some struggle to get by.

Chaplin’s politics were in the vein of the economist John Maynard Keynes and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal of the Thirties, which was based on Keynesian principles and carried out by FDR, was perhaps the most successful experiment in reclaiming power from the market. It delivered prosperity and social justice. FDR dedicated it to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”, or, if you will, to the Tramp.

Throughout his life, Chaplin never wavered in his commitment to the Tramp and his ilk. He supported shorter hours for the working man, and a generous minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labor. He also supported a “national dividend”, or what we would call today universal basic income.

Chaplin’s vision has lost none of its relevance. Precarity is on the rise. Governments look more impotent than ever. And AI threatens to kick millions out of the job market. In this context, we would do well to remember what Chaplin stood for. “Naturally, I am progressive,” he said. “I just want to see everybody pretty well happy, and satisfied.” In his view, no one should ever be so hungry they have to eat their shoe.

The movie was never for the faint of heart. The Los Angeles Times chief film critic, Charles Champlin, harpooned it. He was horrified by the severed limbs; “Jaws,” he wrote, “is nightmare time.” As for Spielberg: “Intimacy is not yet his strength.” Of course, Champlin missed the point. Seventies America was high on cocaine and disco and thoroughly disenchanted with almost everything else, which is to say no one was particularly interested in intimacy. It was a paranoid decade, a decade in which shark attacks resonated, as such a thing could stand for any number of demonic threats.

In 1975, the country was reeling from the oil crisis, inflation of 8%, and a battered economy. That year saw two assassination attempts on the president and ended in an act of terrorism as a bomb exploded at New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing 11 — a crime that to this day remains unsolved. America was no longer captain of the ship, master of her fate. The Grammy-winning song of the year was “The Way We Were”.

The tone of the movie is set from the opening scene: sun sinking into the ocean behind a bevy of beach-guitar-strumming, pot-smoking, long-haired college students, blissfully unaware that one of their crowd will soon be destined for dismemberment. There was something satisfying in that realization that the Age of Aquarius was about to get its just deserts. Saigon had fallen and Richard Nixon along with it, suggesting that America, naked and vulnerable, was swimming through dangerous waters in a sexed-up haze, gloriously ignorant of the savage appetites lurking beneath the surface. Of course it’s the Fourth of July. Of course it’s an allegory.

In the face of clear and present carnivorous danger, the ambitious mayor and his well-fed lawyer sidekick spew pure greed. “We need summer dollars,” rumbles Murray Hamilton, who had caught Spielberg’s notice by playing Mr Robinson in The Graduate, in yet another Seventies harbinger of American decline.

Soon, yet another corpse sinks into a blood-stained sea, but these are not the crimson beaches of America’s bravest, sacrificed for world democracy on the sands of Normandy or Iwo Jima, the men Spielberg would glorify in Saving Private Ryan. The shark-chomped bodies of 1975 were the first articulations of what would come to be called American carnage. The cop, the child, the old-salt sonofabitch, the naked hippie doing water ballet — the beast from the deep knows no difference. Not even fancy college kids who had escaped the draft were safe.

Peter Benchley was one of those fancy college kids who dreamed of writing the Great American novel. His grandfather, the journalist and novelist Robert Benchley, had been a stalwart of the Algonquin Round Table of New York’s finest wits, along with Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx. Yet Peter had found little success in the writing world. He was about to quit when he came across an interview with a Montauk sport fisherman who once hauled in a 3,427-pound Great White.

Jaws was Benchley’s last attempt to make it as a writer — and the resulting novel was smattered with faux-deep social commentary and small-town drama, including a sprinkling of the mafia and a dash or two of adultery, none of which would survive the great sausage-making of what would be heralded as the first Hollywood blockbuster. Benchley’s total advance from Doubleday was a meager $7,500.

While Benchley was laboring over drafts, another drama was unfolding 3,000 miles to the west, where Richard Darryl Zanuck, reeling from the failure of 1967’s Doctor Dolittle, was in the midst of losing his job as president of 20th Century Fox. He was fired by his own father, company founder Darryl F. Zanuck, which may have sparked Richard’s fascination with claustrophobic dramas of men intent on out-manning one another and killing the monstrous father beast. But as is generally the case with nepo babies, Zanuck fils landed on his feet. He became partners with the erstwhile head of his story department, David Brown, and the collaboration promptly blossomed into 1974’s Best Picture, The Sting.

Zanuck and Brown suddenly had some money to invest, which is why before Benchley’s novel ever hit bookstores, they could afford to see if they could develop the book into a screenplay, rustle up a director and a few actors, and make a movie. They spent $175,000 for a book that still didn’t have a title — which, in retrospect, was a bargain. Twenty minutes before the deadline, Benchley finally came up with the word that summed it all up. And just like that, Jaws hit the bestseller list and remained there for the next 44 weeks.

Zanuck was not the only one to have understood that this was the key to the American zeitgeist. The pages also landed on the desk of young Spielberg, who was disappointed to discover another director, Dick Richards, had already got his hands on it. Luckily, Richards made the mistake of repeatedly referring to the shark as “the white whale” in front of Benchley, who, instead of being flattered by the comparison with Melville, became incensed. The macropredator was the whole point — not some humpbacked vacuum cleaner of microscopic krill.

Spielberg got the job. He hired Robert Shaw to play the manliest of men — that is, the most homicidal — as a farcical send-up of the Hemingway man. Richard Dreyfuss became the preppy ichthyologist, and Roy Scheider became the New York cop, a stand-in for the urban everyman, now on notice that being a landlubber didn’t exempt you from the horrors of the deep.

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At the film’s first screening at the Medallion theatre in Dallas, the audience cheered and screamed — and one of them vomited. What followed was a tidal wave of publicity, with Jaws merch of every sort, from trading cards to beach towels. It was a kids’ movie — the bloodiest ever — and the gory opus summarily grossed more than $470 million worldwide (at that point, the top-grossing film of all time), and established its place in Hollywood iconography. Pauline Kael gushed: “The film belongs to the pulpiest sci-fi monster-movie tradition.”

As it turns out, old men and the sea never get old. Fifty years after the closing credits of Jaws, the model of what Kael called the “primal-terror comedy” has endured: shark eats man, shark eats ship, shark gets blown to smithereens. Swap shark for evil alien or mechanical dinosaur. Rinse, repeat. It’s horror. It’s comedy. And what is striking is that after half a century, the two have become one, which is perhaps a reflection on American culture more generally, arching from one hysterical pole to the next.

In October 1975, Spielberg was asked at the San Francisco Film Festival whether he would direct Jaws II. “Making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick,” he responded (don’t mention Jurassic Park). Of course, Spielberg’s opinion hardly mattered. What ensued was a school of fishy spawn: Jaws II, Jaws III, Jaws: The Revenge, Cruel Jaws, Santa Jaws.

Beneath it all lurks the secret of the movie’s extraordinary staying power. It was then, and remains to this day, a metric not only of American fear but of American aggression, a foreshadowing of a future not only of Hollywood big-budget gore-bloated extravaganzas, but of a country declining into numbness that only the most sensational of spectacles could touch. Hollywood was the first to perceive that our taste for apocalypse, once the niche purview of melodrama, had expanded its market.

Half a century later, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry as we swim, if only a little less innocently, into the depths. Because as it turns out, no one cares about old men and the sea. It’s the Great Whites, symbol of American paranoia, predation, and violence, which adorn our whiskey bottles and popcorn buckets. D.H. Lawrence had it right when he commented: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

He didn’t say it was a shark.

As early as the first Die Hard movie (1988), Willis had perfected a way of delivering his lines with a little smirk of self-awareness that suggested he was just slightly cooler than the movie, an admission which somehow made the movies cooler. For his part, Cage had embraced a style of florid overacting, which was palatable and often fun precisely because of its obviousness and self-awareness, and when he found himself in the outlandish contraption of a Nineties action movie like The Rock or Face/Off, he really let loose, taking corny melodrama to the level of camp, taking cartoon villainy to the level of professional wrestling. The boldness of these meta-comic performances by these two actors, and the great success of those movies, created a sort of action movie culture — a larger tendency in the making of those formulaic spectacles that turned their native cynicism absurdity into an ironic style of its own.

The first Mission: Impossible appeared in the middle of all this, more or less. It was a nice blend of the dank European spy thriller and bright American action movie, but its director Brian DePalma endowed it with that slightly lurid DePalma tone, and its famous set-piece of a helicopter chained to a train inside the Chunnel was pretty over-the-top, basically meta-comic like those Cage and Willis movies. Still, by the standards of the decade, Mission: Impossible 1 was pretty understated. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), on the other hand, was a full expression of the decade’s action-movie madness. John Woo, who’d directed Face/Off, — a movie to which the phrase “over the top” is uniquely inadequate — created heavily stylized action scenes that were both visually striking and a little ridiculous, and he staged the romantic interplay between Tom Cruise and Thandiwe Newton in the tones of extra-ripe melodrama familiar from his vaguely religious Hong Kong films. And, well, sometimes you couldn’t help laughing a little.

It’s easy to imagine Tom Cruise — who by this second Mission: Impossible had become a producer as well as the star of the franchise — looking back on the movie and telling his team, “Okay. Let’s not have any more of that extra-ripe melodrama stuff. Let’s not have any more half-intentional metacomedy. I am not Bruce Willis. I am not Nicholas Cage. I’m Tom Cruise. I don’t want people laughing at my movies and wondering if I’m in on the joke.” That is, the move from sodden and spiritual John Woo directing Mission: Impossible 2 to utilitarian J.J. Abrams directing Mission: Impossible 3 (2006) seems a pretty obvious and intentional course-correction. From then on, the campy excess, and the signs of directorial license and vision, disappeared. There was more excess than ever, of course, but it wasn’t campy. And there was plenty of license, but the person enjoying the license, the person whose vision informed these movies, was not some artsy-fartsy director, who might make the star come off campy or accidentally funny, but the star himself, the star of stars, Tom Cruise.

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From that point — though they grew ever more complex in both their set-pieces and their plots — the movies were no longer a little weird in their framing and tone, their look, their vision. The ambient postmodernism of the Nineties was gone. Amazingly, though, they stayed pretty good. They were thrilling and fun. They set a standard for consistency and reliability in a movie franchise that will be hard to beat. What I can say, movie-review-wise, about Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is that it’s almost exactly as good, almost exactly as fun and exciting, as the last five or six Mission: Impossibles. It’s being reported that The Final Reckoning is the final Mission: Impossible. If that’s so, then the series is ending neither on a high note nor as a disappointment, but as the sound realization of well-founded expectations.

As successful and well-made as these movies have been, they’ve also been… I’m tempted to say they’ve been a little soulless, but that’s not quite right. It’s not that these movies don’t have a soul. They do have a soul, but it’s the soul of a Scientologist. Most of what I know about Scientology I know from things Tom Cruise was filmed saying about it, and what Scientology seems to have done for (or to) Tom Cruise is to make him believe that he can do pretty much anything. More specifically, the power or value-added of Scientology seems to be that this ability to do pretty much anything flows from the Scientologist’s, or at least Tom Cruise’s, belief in this ability. It’s the belief that counts, the believer’s will, the believing willer’s power to commit, the committed believer’s power to do… something, whatever. When Tom Cruise speaks about how Scientology empowers him, he sounds absolutely ready and able to take action, heroic action if necessary, but he’s somewhat befuddled, if not mentally paralyzed, on the matter of why he might act, what purpose his superhuman powers of action might serve. But it’s also clear that, should a worthwhile purpose fall into his lap, he totally believes he’d be able to do almost anything to realize it.

This latter stretch of Mission: Impossible movies is a testament to this belief, and to the unusual powers that possibly flow from it. And luckily for Cruise, the films themselves provide him with a self-renewing purpose to which he can direct his special powers. That purpose is to exceed, in scale of spectacle and physical daring of stunts and complicatedness of plot, in each new Mission: Impossible, whatever was done in the last Mission: Impossible. It’s necessary to interject here that Cruise not only stars in and produces these movies. He does his own stunts in these them, and it is central to the meaning of these movies that everyone knows this. These stunts rise to their highest greatness and their greatest importance in The Final Reckoning.

I’m not being totally fair to the later Mission: Impossibles when I say they have the soul of a Scientologist. They are dominated by this soul, but the light of other souls flickers pleasingly within them. They are wonderfully cast, with great villains extending back to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3 and forward to the latest villain, played by Esai Morales. And when Vanessa Kirby arrived as the semi-villainous White Widow in Mission: Impossible: Fallout (2018), it felt like the movie and I were both being defibrillated. I’ve approached every subsequent MI with one initial thought: I hope the White Widow is in it.

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One funny thing about the White Widow is how, despite her sexual charge and ambiguous motives, she exemplifies a sort of children’s-movie logic in much of the franchise’s characterization. Many characters in the Mission: Impossible movies — to use the moral language of my daughters when they were little — start out mean but end up nice. Aside from the one main villain in each movie, Ethan Hunt’s antagonists always end up on his side, won over to a principle of universal niceness — which is anchored by the presence of a global threat — that his impossibly elaborate Mission is meant to serve. This is morally simple, if not simple-minded, but it works okay within the sentimental world of the franchise, which is otherwise dominated by movie machinery overcoming itself entirely for the sake of this overcoming, which is to say by the able and empty will of Tom Cruise.

This recourse to universal niceness as a global value made urgent by a global threat goes back at least to Nineties movies such as Armageddon (asteroid) and Independence Day (aliens). In the last two Mission: Impossibles, the global threat is a malevolent AI agent known as the Entity, which (who?) is rapidly taking over the world. The Entity is an even more unnerving action-movie conceit in The Final Reckoning than it was two years ago in Dead Reckoning, because it doesn’t feel so much like an action-movie conceit anymore. Maybe that’s why I wanted it to be a bigger presence in the new film. We see what it’s doing — casting a veil of confusion over people’s perceptions of the world, taking over the arsenals of every nuclear power — but we don’t get to hear the electronic thrum of its voice nearly enough. We don’t get to have the super-intelligent AI blow our minds by explaining itself.

Of course, this is because it’s a Mission: Impossible movie, a Tom Cruise production, in which the wildest, spookiest, most interesting thing to emerge in the history of the world has to take a back seat to, well, stunts. As the Mission: Impossible franchise has gone on, the daredevil stunts, and the public knowledge that Cruise is doing them, have grown in importance. The last two movies — despite the likable and beautiful cast of side-characters, and despite the logistical complexity of their individual capers and their larger plot — emit a somewhat reductive sense that they’re built for the sake of their stunts, that the film is a vehicle for Tom Cruise to show the world the insane things he has the iron will and thus the barely human ability to do.

But there’s a niggling aesthetic problem with Cruise’s superhuman self-belief. When you’re watching the Mission: Impossible stunt sequences, you inevitably start thinking about the stunt, not as a thrilling physical trial of a character in a movie story you’ve suspended your disbelief to enter as if it’s real life, but as a stunt. Instead of just worrying that the villain might get the better of our hero Ethan Hunt as the two of them wrestle with physics and luck and each other, you can’t help drifting into spell-breaking reflections, especially as the sequence extends into its ninth or tenth minute. “Wow,” you start thinking, “it’s really Tom Cruise doing that stunt. I wonder if he was scared. How does he hang on so long? How old is he now? Sixty-something? Jeez, that’s impressive for his age. For any age, really. I wonder what his wife thinks about all this. Who’s his wife now? Wait. He’s not married anymore, is he? I think I read something about that pretty Spanish actress.”

The Mission: Impossibles, then, go overboard in a way that would have forced various ironic concessions from other action-movie franchises, or in other action-movie eras. Were James Bond to motorcycle from a cliff and then parachute to the ground, he’d have to accent his landing with a cheeky adjustment of his bowtie or something, to cue the audience to chuckle at this self-aware gesture and not at the silliness and improbability of the thing itself. But the Mission: Impossibles see no need for cheeky gesturing because there’s no artifice to acknowledge. As it was the real Tom Cruise treating that rocky cliff as a motorcycle ramp, it is Tom Cruise himself pendulating gracefully under that parachute, easing down to the riverbank for that elegant landing. You might rather applaud than laugh, like someone in the stands at the Olympics.

The impressive self-creation and self-mythologizing of Tom Cruise have woven his roles as actor, producer, stuntman, and celebrity into a single entity, so to speak, one consuming presence so looming and powerful it turns the usual actor-movie relationship inside out. When you drift into those distracted reflections as he does his unlikely stunts, it starts to feel less like Tom Cruise is an actor in the latest Mission: Impossible than that the latest Mission: Impossible is a prop in the epic saga of Tom Cruise, an elaborate demonstration that he can do anything, that he’s big enough to contain anything. Tom Cruise isn’t in Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is in Tom Cruise. But this means that the films and their star were always in a strange competition with each other. The movies needed to exceed their predecessors in action-movie magnitude, and Cruise needed to loom larger than the movies, to envelop their expanding artifice in his Tom Cruise reality. As the movies got bigger, Cruise and his stunts had to grow in scale and daring too.

There’s a signal in the latest entry, though, that this existential arms-race between movie star and movie franchise had to end — Cruise’s hair. The first thing you notice when Ethan Hunt appears on screen is that he seems to have missed a couple of haircuts. His hair is weirdly long. It’s over his ears. Another character even makes a joke about it. “I like the longer hair,” Hayley Atwell’s Grace says when she and we first see him. That is, the movie resorts to a cheeky gesture of self-awareness, a bit of action-movie irony, to adjust for Cruise’s conspicuous do. But why is it an issue? Why does he have distracting hair when it has no importance to the story, and when it doesn’t look very good? The first thing I thought of, which my wife echoed, is that he has longer hair to make himself look younger than he is.

The long hair is an aging man’s ruse, a bit of artifice that can’t be denied. So it has to be acknowledged, via an ironic mention at the beginning of the aging man’s new movie. This is a queasy moment. It reminds us that there’s at least one aspect of reality that the muscular will of Tom Cruise hasn’t mastered after all. It hasn’t mastered time.

And so the Mission: Impossible franchise is ending not because it’s said all it needs to say. It’s been saying the same thing for 20 years, which never really needed to be said in the first place. There’s no reason it couldn’t keep repeating itself. The franchise is ending because its star can’t sustain his mastery over it. Tom Cruise can’t keep being bigger than his massive movies — despite the Scientology pep talks he gives himself — because time and age are making him smaller. He surely can’t keep doing those elaborate stunts. The most he can do, perhaps, is to grow his hair so it’s over his ears, and then join everyone else in laughing at it.

The Vice President has responded by denying he was talking about us, calling the media “hysterical”. History tends to suggest that this will not calm things down. With US tariffs hanging in the balance — not to mention World War III — a distraction must be found to subdue the escalating dynamic. Step forward, Netflix’s With Love, Meghan. There could be no better time for the Duchess of Sussex’s “tips and tricks” on how to become a Californian domestic goddess to finally hit our screens.

In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argued that when two sides get locked into an apparently intractable feud, unity can only be restored by finding a scapegoat onto which to load the mutual animus by proxy. But not just any “surrogate victim” will do: “all victims [must]… bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace”. To reestablish transatlantic alliances, then, ideally we need a sacrificial object who seems quite annoyingly American (to us), but also quite annoyingly British (to them). And who better than a barefoot Meghan Sussex? Rubbing pink Himalayan salt into British economic wounds, she talks about being “defined by growth” — but also seems to have a not-very-Californian addiction to bacon.

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The ostensible idea of the new show is educational. The Duchess will tell viewers how to become better hostesses by “elevating the ordinary”. This roughly translates as fiddling about with edible flowers and sticking labels on everything, written in elegant calligraphy. She wafts around an enormous Californian garden saturated with so much color that sunlight-starved British retinas can barely cope, gasping at heirloom tomatoes and inhaling various scents through delicately flared nostrils. Then she pads into someone else’s well-appointed kitchen, chops a few things up with a tiny knife, and produces aphorisms such as “rosemary is nice and grounding” and “the brightness of citrus helps so many things”.

She seems extremely keen on managing people’s “experiences”. When someone comes to visit, she wants to give them “a guest experience”; when people drop kids off at a party for Archie or Lili, she wants to give them a “parent experience”. Arranging chopped fruit on a board to resemble a rainbow, she begins with the strawberries, but generously gives the viewer permission to do “whatever feels right for you”. The mantra “Love is in the details!” is uttered several times. Sometimes it’s with a slight air of passive-aggression, prompting the cynical viewer to imagine terrible rows with Harry when he forgets to bring her morning cup of tea.

So far, so stereotypically Yank; but there are weird digressions from the template here too. As I watched, I started to think her time in Blighty had left her with more than a taste for our dry cured pork products and a trauma response to adverts for The Crown. Incredibly for an American showbiz type, she can’t actually pull off all the positivity and quasi-sincerity; she comes across as too self-conscious, and her energy too low. It’s almost as if she is one of us.

The first two episodes demonstrate this most starkly. In the first, her make-up artist and gay BFF comes to visit and she tries very hard to give him a guest experience. The repartee between them is turgid and halting, his gestures are nervous, and they both seem like introverts, dying inside. At one point, he rebukes her for assuming he has a counter in his tiny New York kitchen; at another, he looks at the stunning Montecito mountains and says the quiet part out loud: “I feel like this is all fake.” Hovering in the background, laughing and taunting the dead air between them, are the ghosts of Will and Grace. At times it feels as if she would rather be communicating entirely with labels.

But this is as nothing to the awkwardness between Meghan and fellow celeb “toddler mom” Mindy Kaling in the next episode. The gimmick is that they pretend to host a kids’ party together, minus the leavening presence of any actual children. Over the course of 40 minutes, Kaling’s natural perkiness and gifts for comic timing are slowly crushed into the black hole of Meghan’s earnestness. “I’m so glad you’re here, it’s going to be fun,” our hostess-with-the-mostess says near the beginning, a quick smile reaching neither eyes nor voice. By the end, Kaling is having to conjure up enthusiasm at the world’s least exciting party bags — mini gardening tools, seeds, and compostable pots; not a Haribo in sight — and Meghan, gazing off into the middle distance, is trying to imagine what would be happening at their fake party if there were real people present. “The kids are enjoying it, and then as the kids run off to play, at least the adults still feel they have had an experience too.” “Yes, which is what these are for,” says Kaling, gazing gratefully at her peach bellini.

It’s a mystery why the series starts with these shockers, because the following episodes are a lot better. One can only assume some high-up at Netflix decided this could only succeed as a hate-watch and so frontloaded the cringe. In later ones, our impeccably clad protagonist hosts close girlfriends on various confected pretexts — a Mahjong night, a beauty session — with whom she is much more at ease. The warmth and affection between them look genuine, and especially after a drink or three — more evidence of the secret British heart beating underneath the beige knitwear.

It is at moments like this that the series comes closest to managing what it was presumably always supposed to be: a feast for envious female eyes. It certainly isn’t a cooking show; there’s not even the vaguest pretence at offering recipes. “Who wouldn’t want this?” Meghan asks us as she surveys her bountiful garden, summing up the attitude she secretly hopes onlookers will take to take every bit of her gorgeous life. When she says she wants to show those living “in a little flat in London or small apartment in the city” that they too can have “some small piece of this”, she probably means: why not try making mint tea in a tannin-stained mug to the sound of traffic; or cut up some puny strawberries on a scarred old chopping board, so your toddler can turn up her nose, make sick noises, and chuck them at the cat? That way, you can gain even more clarity about by how utterly unlike your life is to Meghan’s serene and beautiful one.

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But the thing is, it doesn’t work. Alongside his work on scapegoating, Girard is now best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”. He thinks wanting something is just coveting whatever others already have, with no independent appraisal of its value. Most or even all human conflict stems from robotic, envious grasping at what other people want, allegedly. Peter Thiel is a big Girardian, as is Vance, or so they say. I’ve always thought the theory was far too simple. Blatant thirst-trap programmes such as With Love, Meghan are its reductio ad absurdum.

Of course, it’s true that desires can be generated via exposure to others’ desires. Wanting to try what others are already enjoying is a reasonably efficient heuristic, based on the assumption there is something genuinely enjoyable there that I might like too. But it has a limit: just ask toddlers, nonplussed by parental rhapsodising about strawberries, and unswayed by the preferences of peers. Adults, too, have minds of their own, at least sometimes; which explains why populist politicians such as Trump and Vance try to work out what those minds want, then give it to them. If anything, progressives seem more Girardian in spirit, assuming that if policies are presented with enough desirable surface glitter by celebs and influencers, our magpie minds will get onboard with the trend.

But sometimes, the more it seems someone wants you to want something, the easier it is to resist. In With Love, Meghan’s case, the desperation is palpable and it’s counterproductive. The only things worth envying in her life are the odd things here and there that seem real and unforced: her friendships, her love for family and dogs, her appreciation of nature. All the rest — the Le Creuset, the crystal glasses, the perfect blue sky, the irritatingly upbeat music — left me happier than ever with my food-spattered compost bin, my dishwasher-scratched glassware, and the iron-grey English sky. As the woman herself might say, it turns out that my viewing experience has been defined by growth.

When her delusions are exposed by her young lover, Norma, a glittering narcissist, murders him. She was played by Gloria Swanson, also a great star of silent films: Sunset Boulevard was her Salome, her comeback. It is a cruel and brilliant film, and its reach is long. Norma is fictional, but her story created the idea that the average famous, incalculably gifted woman is insane. We all know that Hollywood does terrible things to its women: objectification at best, rape at worst. We talk less about how we diminish, and erase, their art, in which they are invited to collude.

I thought of Sunset Boulevard when I watched Maria, the new biopic about Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie. It is, in many ways, a remake of Sunset Boulevard, and Jolie plays Norma, though I suspect she doesn’t know it. Norma yearned for the close-up and the scene where a lighting technician shines the beam on her is the best in the film. “Let’s get a good look at you,” he calls from his eyrie. He doesn’t mean it. The real inner woman is of no interest to Hollywood. She just reflects the light. Jolie loves the close-up too: she has internalized something.

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Most films about famous female entertainers are variants on Sunset Boulevard. We have Sunset Boulevard starring Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland (Judy), Sunset Boulevard starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe (Blonde); Sunset Boulevard starring Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse (Back to Black); now we have Maria too, the latest gilded film to call the subject of its devotion mad. You might say that Garland, Monroe and Winehouse were all mad: all were addicted to drugs, and they died young. But madness wasn’t their defining characteristic, even if these films insist on it. Their industry treated them as things, first alive, now dead: as a young actress Monroe was invited to expose her breasts to studio executives and Garland, given drugs to make her work as a teenager, was not allowed to rest. It was the same for Winehouse.

Maria is a film about the best-selling classical singer in history, and the most important opera singer of the 20th century. This is not a controversial view, and it is not disputed. Callas lost her voice early for a singer — we’re not sure why — and she had a relationship with the shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis — we’re also not sure why — who later married Jackie Kennedy. Neither of these facts, though unfortunate, can erase Callas’s contribution to music. Unless you are her cinematic biographer, that is.

Like Sunset Boulevard, Maria opens with a death bed: her own. It is 1977, and Callas is 53, or she was. She is lying on the floor of her exquisite Paris apartment, dead as newsprint. Then we travel backwards in time to the previous week. Maria, tended by servants who act as parents, is broken. She has lost her voice and her lover, the tiny Onassis. She is addicted to Mandrax, which she hides from the servants, and she feeds her meals to the dogs. This is the material of the obsessed but unseeing biographer. It is not Callas. They just use her name, as if for branding.

Sophia Lambton, classical music critic and author of The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, tells me this is fiction. Callas listened to her records all her life: Maria says she feared them. She did not call her records perfect. She was not reclusive. Onassis did not hate opera or try to thwart her career: and she left him, not he her. She suffered from low blood pressure and died of a heart attack, but she was not a drug addict.

The real Callas was made happy by music, but Maria is not interested in music. The result, of course, is lifeless, and Jolie plays Callas as a poised corpse. Craving profundity in every shot, Maria lands on South Park with better clothes. With an already-dead heroine, the only real drama is: where to put the grand piano? By the end everyone is so emotionally cauterized, only the dogs are capable of a response. The credits thank Cartier: perhaps that was the point of it all.

Maria insists Callas was cursed. Judy (2019), another retelling of Sunset Boulevard with Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland / Norma Desmond, does the same: again, it begins at the ending, a place without hope. It is set in 1969, the year of her death, when she was gravely ill. If you hoped this film might be an homage to Garland’s contribution to music — to her fleeting joy, and the joy she gave — you are wrong. There is no music, just sickness, as if that were Garland’s only legacy. Yet watch her dance with Fred Astaire in Easter Parade and outdance him! Garland’s voice does not appear in Judy. Zellweger sang for her, as Marisa Abela sang for Amy Winehouse in Back to Black (2024), and she won the Oscar denied to Garland in her lifetime. Garland thought Hollywood hated her. Whether it knew it or not, she was right.

Perhaps the most vicious retelling of Sunset Boulevard is Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022). It is from a Joyce Carol Oates novel that seethes with envy, and it dealt with Marilyn Monroe. There is a scene where Monroe’s soon-to-be-aborted son begs to live — this scene is set in her vagina, while, elsewhere, his useless mother, who was really an autodidact and the greatest comic actress in film, chokes on JFK’s cock. Monroe is reduced to loveless acts in pursuit of a father who will not return. Blonde is framed as a search for the father, and, in such quests, the heroine is turned again into a child, though, in Monroe’s case, an obscene one: a child who cannot even be a child, though in reality she could steal a scene from Jack Lemmon. Some sick child.

But this is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder’s, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema’s most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.

When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More specifically, a nubile young woman who rises from a bathtub to seduce main character Jack Torrance, and then reveals her true form as a sore-ridden, saggy-breasted crone, cackling at her own deceit. 

It’s a scene that I suspect plays differently depending on the viewer’s sex. For a man, the horror comes from identifying with Jack. He, too, is aroused by the youth and beauty of the ghost’s first form; he, too, is appalled when he realises he has been tricked into lusting for old, degraded flesh. For a woman watching, the horror isn’t about what you want. It’s about what you are — or what you will become. You will age into monstrosity, and your only power will be the power to disgust. Every female body contains the terrible fact of its own future.

Coralie Fargeat’s new satirical body-horror The Substance contains a lot of visual nods to The Shining: corridors with sinister geometric carpet, blood pouring down walls, a bathroom decorated in an upsettingly lurid shade of red. But the most important nod of all is this: it’s a movie about the horror of female ageing, in which the ultimate nightmare is a woman’s body made grotesque by time. This time, though, it’s not a male filmmaker seeing this horror from the outside. It’s a female filmmaker seeing it from the inside. 

The film’s concept is a bit complicated and pretty clever. Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is an Oscar-winning actress turned fabulously successful aerobics instructor (shades of Jane Fonda), just hitting her 50th birthday — which is the point at which “it stops”, as her repellent producer (Dennis Quaid) tells her. “People always ask for something new.” She loses her show. She loses her celebrity. She loses her purpose. 

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Enter the substance — a mysterious black-market medicine that promises to create the best version of you. When Elisabeth injects it, she gives birth to a whole second self through a gory vaginal split in her back. The new her (played by Margaret Qualley) is young, luscious and beautiful, and takes the name Sue. The only snag is that, while Elisabeth and Sue have separate bodies, their existence is shared: one of them can live for seven days while the other lies insensate. Disturb that balance, and you pay a price.

Of course, the characters (character?) can’t simply follow the rules. As Sue steps into Elisabeth’s old life and job, it becomes unbearable to sacrifice herself so the older body can live. “Just one more day,” she whispers to Elisabeth’s prone body, as she draws another dose of serum from the spine. The cost is borne by Elisabeth, who becomes more decrepit with every liberty Sue takes. Unable to coexist, they end up in a battle to survive that neither ultimately will win. Sue will end up savagely kicking a wizened, hunchbacked Elisabeth to death. 

There are more gruesome parts of the film, but for me, this moment of obliterating overkill directed at the despised figure of female age was the most horrible. Sue, of course, is ensuring her own hideous death by murdering Elisabeth. But in that moment, she cares less about her own life than she does about destroying the saggy, sunken portent of her own future. Elisabeth’s body represents everything she fears becoming, and everything that she will be, because Sue is Elisabeth and Elisabeth is Sue. 

The writer Victoria Smith dissects this particular form of ageist misogyny in her book Hags. “From the moment we are born female,” she writes, “we are conditioned to feel ashamed, not just of our appearance, our biology and our desires, but also of other women and our connection to them.” One way to manage this entrenched internalised misogyny, argues Smith, is through “hag hate”, which “provides a means to pacify that fear and shame by directing it onto the older woman.” The enthusiastic way in which some younger women embraced terms of abuse for middle-aged women like “Karen” and “terf”? That’s hag hate. The young woman understands, correctly, that to age as a woman is to become hated; her futile defence is to hate harder than anyone else.

But the self-destruction begins with Elisabeth’s choice to take the substance rather than accept her own decline into maturity. In an interview about the film, Demi Moore has said, astutely, that “it’s not about what’s being done to us [us here being women] — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves.” And having worked to Hollywood’s punishing physical standards since she was a teenager, Moore knows a few things about this violence.

Inevitably, as a young woman Moore was told that she wasn’t thin enough (“before I ever even had children”, said Moore, in a phrase which ever so slightly and heartbreakingly suggests she might have accepted some justice in it after having children). She doesn’t, however, see those comments in themselves as the most harmful thing inflicted on her: “those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”

Yet all the while Moore felt inescapably inadequate, her body was the peak of commodifiable perfection as far as the film industry was concerned. In Indecent Proposal (1993) she played a woman so gorgeous that a man would offer a million dollars to sleep with her. For going topless in Striptease (1996) — and for appearing to be fully nude on the poster, which may have been more important for the film’s commercial prospects — she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million. 

It would have been sensational for any woman to appear naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But it was Moore who did it, in a 1991 shoot by Annie Leibovitz that drew both feminist praise and moral majority ire. It was talked about by everyone for most of that summer. Moore might never have received much critical recognition for her performances, but her body has always been significant in itself. It stands for the ideal.

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Which is why it is shocking to see her naked in the early scenes of The Substance. Her breasts are a little less perky than the last time you probably saw them, her butt a little less perfectly round. In the mercilessly full-screen close ups on her face, you can see that her skin’s plumpness is fading, its texture not so refined. She looks undeniably like an older woman. She does not, however, look her age — which is 61. She doesn’t even look her character’s age of 50. She could pass easily for 40-something. 

And that is partly the point. “Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad,” Moore has said. But it also points to a different kind of horror taking place off-screen. Moore has denied ever having plastic surgery, despite extensive speculation that she had undergone procedures including breast implants, fat transfer and eyelid reduction. Regardless, her body speaks of relentless discipline in diet and exercise: slim, toned and exquisitely proportioned, even if some parts of her are very slightly drooping. 

Keeping the hag inside you at bay requires constant vigilance. While Moore looks 40-ish, stars who are actually in their 40s have begun to look nearer to 20. This month, Dazed declared the advent of the “Undetectable Era” of beauty — the beauty itself is detectable, but the means used to achieve it are not. “We strive for dramatic results,” explained one surgeon. “The undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

This, of course, is the dream that drives Elisabeth to the substance: to be younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That possibility — of youth stretched into decades — is not dystopian anymore, or at least not dystopian if you have access to the money and expertise that Hollywood success can offer. You can look as poreless and full-lipped at 30 as you were when you were a pre-teen. A beauty that looks born, not made, is there for the purchasing.

No procedure, though, can bargain away time forever. The portrait in the attic (or in the case of The Substance, the unconscious 50-year-old body in the closet) is still there, awaiting revelation. The hag is in her bathtub, waiting to be found. The horror of female ageing is that you can’t kill the crone inside yourself. She is you, and the alternative to reconciliation with her is mutually assured destruction. The only way to live, in the end, is to accept your mortality.

His words of wisdom came to mind with renewed relevance when, after hours of listening to union leaders, state senators, small-town mayors, mid-west Lieutenant Governors, and other various and sundry lawmakers drone and splutter into the microphone at this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the actor and director Tony Goldwyn waltzed up centre stage.

“Hello, Chicago!”

His voice was rich, warm and inviting, his gaze direct and guileless, his delivery straight from the Academy Theater on Wilshire Boulevard — smoothly evincing the supreme artistic feat of artlessness. “Wow,” he said. “How about that AOC?”

To be honest, it didn’t really matter what the hell he said. What mattered was his presence, which coalesced what had been one minute before a rag-tag bunch of rabid networkers, lunch-box pols and sign-toting riff-raff, and sanctified a ritual of celebration. Everyone knew that Tony Goldwyn stood on the dais of the United Center as the incarnation of Fitzgerald Grant III — not a real President of the United States, but the one he played on TV, the one from Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal.

This kind of deliberate and fully conscious public performance that conflates art and life has become common in American politics. In the weeks after Kamala Harris became the Democrat’s nominee, as Chris Rock and Joy Behar made the rounds of Democratic fundraisers, treading the tailored lawns of ritzy Long Island mansions, it was as if the “forests wild” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — that enchanted grove of magic and misperception — had been transported to the Hamptons. In short, the lines separating entertainment, politics, news media and money had been irrevocably breached. Nor did it take Rod Stewart mocking Donald Trump for turning orange or George Clooney denouncing the ex-President as a “xenophobic fascist” to suggest that there was something about celebrities that might power Kamala to the Oval Office.

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Already, stars and household names were beginning to tweet and Insta their full-on Kamalamania, as out marched the splendorous legions of Kamala’s LA posse, from Cardi B to Charli XCX — not to neglect Lizzo. Prognostications of Kamala’s chances caromed across the star-struck commentariat in language that had little to do with the geography of the electoral college or, say, the swing districts of Georgia or Michigan, tending instead towards one of those Maps of the Stars they hock on Hollywood Boulevard, promising vicarious visions of, well, everyone up to and including the starlets of RuPaul’s Drag Race  — each of whom had declared their support for Kamala. To be honest, in the days before the convention I was tempted to do nothing but exhaust my allotted 2,500 words with a list of bold-faced names, send the invoice to UnHerd, and call it a day.

Donna Langley, Chairman of Universal Studios, was on Kamala’s side, as was Chris Silbermann, managing director at Creative Artists Agency, and Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Barry Diller had opened the coffers. All of which gave wonky reporters and political oddsmakers licence to start pontificating as if they, too, were in the business. Across the board, Harris’s selection of a running mate struck many as an episode of The Bachelorette. The old gray lady herself, The New York Times, could not resist the temptation of summing up Harris’s choice of Tim Walz in TV terms: “If Ms. Harris’s campaign started out as Veep, it has now taken a detour to Ted Lasso.” Even the staid Wall Street Journal descended to the language of Swifty Lazar, shrewdly (if unoriginally) noting that Harris had cast her Vice Presidential nominee as Coach Taylor, from Friday Night Lights.

All of this surprised absolutely no one, as American politics and Hollywood public relations offices had been banking on suspension of disbelief long before there was such a thing as “real” housewives. Which brings us back to Tony Goldwyn on the DNC dais — the actor, director and nepo baby extraordinaire. There he stood, as aristocratic as Hollywood aristocracy gets, confident in his ability to emcee the world’s political future.

Hollywood and Washington share such hubris — and something else. They are both founded on family businesses, from John Adams and his son Quincy to the Rockefellers of New York, the Kennedys of Massachusetts and the Udalls of Arizona, not forgetting the feuding Hatfields and McCoys presently known as the Obamas and the Trumps. Meanwhile, the West Coast offered its mirror image through generations of Barrymores, Coppolas, Douglases, Fondas and Redgraves. And as is the case with all royalty, the line eventually ends in imbecility and decadence. Thus, the Kardashians.

As a rule, the family originator comes from nothing. Tony Goldwyn was the grandson of Szmuel Gelbfisz, a glovemaker from Gloversville, New York, who way back in the winter of 1913 had gone west to produce Hollywood’s first major motion picture. He changed his name to Samuel Goldfish, then did it once again, becoming Sam Goldwyn.

In 1924, Goldwyn sold his motion picture business to Louis B. Mayer — himself the penniless son of a scrap metal dealer. Mayer was the genius who first perceived that Washington and Hollywood were twins separated at birth, and that a smart studio executive might seize the mantle of Shelley’s rusticated Romantic poets and become legislator of the world.

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In this spirit of entitlement, Mayer rallied all the support he could behind the ill-fated presidential candidate Herbert Hoover. He delivered the two biggest stars of the era to the conservative cause: Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, and despite the ensuing Great Depression, Mayer’s efforts paved the way for Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Gary Cooper and Walter Pidgeon to fly their freak flags of conservatism. It took the opposition a few years to catch on, but by 1940 more than 200 stars — including Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart and Groucho Marx — collected themselves into “Hollywood for Roosevelt”, and the Hollywood liberal was born.

The battle lines separating Left Coast Whigs and Tories were fatally drawn during the Hollywood Blacklist, which I happen to know a little about, as my father fronted for the most famous of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, thereby complicating the rest of his Hollywood career. Reactionary California politics did not bode well for Dad, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and a screenwriter at Metro. In the wake of McCarthy’s purges, his not-so-secret lefty agenda met steady streams of opposition, as Right-wing Hollywood discovered its prophets in the faux-cowboys who roamed the backlots of Warners and Universal: Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and the greatest beneficiary of all who named names, Ronald Reagan.

Since the Gipper left office in 1989, liberal Hollywood has grown more and more dazzling, while the Republican star has waned. The days when conservative glitz and power reigned from Bel Air to Hancock Park may seem quaint and far removed from greybeard Clint Eastwood conducting a rambling conversation with a chair on the stage of the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, not to mention last month in Milwaukee, when septuagenarian Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt as a public display of loyalty to SAG pension collector Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the trope of the Hollywood liberal has remained strong and steady. The fact that my father owned a Bentley, an Aston Martin, a Jaguar, a Porsche, a gull-winged Mercedes and a beach house in Malibu never abated his enduring rage on behalf of the world’s oppressed. He dreamed of curing all that ailed America through film, and throughout his volatile career he would retain an urge to sneak in the line, the message, the meaning. As a self-professed member of the American aristocracy — that is, as a Hollywood liberal — he would take it upon himself to light the path towards liberty and justice for all, much in the way that George Clooney took it upon himself to declare Biden’s tenure as leading man had gone kaput. 

Clooney was not the first Hollywood royal to assert his divine political right. The movie star and the political star have long circled one another’s gravitational fields, each struggling to establish who was the sun, who the mere planet. On the one hand, such tensions resulted in a number of extraordinary connections: Rat Packer Peter Lawford and JFK’s sister, Patricia; Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden; Arnold and Maria; Food Network star Sandra Lee and ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. There were grotesqueries, too, typified by the moment in 1972 when Sammy Davis Jr. threw his arms around Richard Nixon — a bromance now claimed to be a result of Davis attempting by any means necessary to alleviate his monstrous burden of back taxes.

Some affairs were more fleeting. Frank Sinatra’s dedication to American liberalism came crashing to earth for the most Hollywood of reasons. When JFK came to Palm Springs, he chose not to stay at Sinatra’s place (even though he had installed a helicopter pad for the occasion), but at the manse of rival crooner Bing Crosby. Legend has it that a furious Sinatra took a sledgehammer to the concrete landing pad. Thus it came as no surprise that when 1980 rolled around, the famously irascible Chairman of the Board donated $4 million to Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign.

Gradually, the princes and princesses of each world came to understand they were all in the same solar system after all — namely, the business of impersonation, improvisation, persuasion and make-believe. On day four of the DNC, the actress/activist Kerry Washington took over Tony Goldwyn’s job as host of the proceedings. She had played President Grant’s love interest, Olivia Post, in Scandal — his partner through seven seasons of quickies in the closet, hot make-out sessions in public parking garages, and Oval Office oral sex.

The actuality of make-believe had become palpable. Who cared that Tony wasn’t really President Grant, or that Washington wasn’t really his paramour? Wasn’t Kerry, like Kamala, crisis-solving America? Politics and the movies were both matters of life imitating art imitating life. And after 124 episodes of preparatory pantomime, real and fake had lost their distinctive features.

Certainly, the chanting hoi polloi of Chicago did not care to parse differences. By the end of the week, the political proceedings had become a mash-up of every meme and tweet that might ever have sparked a flash within a neuron, only to recede into the sub-consciousness of our national ADD. Case in point was the flitting appearances throughout the week of the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who had uttered lines such as: “I should be President, or something” as Selina Catherine Meyer on Veep, a show that has seen its viewership skyrocket more than 300% since Harris became the nominee. Louis-Dreyfus — who had emceed the final night of the previous DNC — had won six Primetime Emmys for her role as Meyer, so it was natural that when Harris got the nod, the actress vowed to be “extra-involved”. Thus did Kamala-Selina-Julia become a single trope.

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Which gets to the heart of the matter: our present political predicament has gone beyond questions of truth and post-truth, fact and alternative fact, actor and politician, saviour and grifter. We have lost the thread when it comes to what philosophers call “epistemology”, that is, our knowledge of what constitutes reality. For some, it’s cause for celebration, as Hollywood and Washington revel in ambiguity and distraction. If you haven’t noticed, ambiguity and distraction are where the money is.

Proof of concept came when the world’s first black woman billionaire took the stage. The mononymous Oprah needed less than 15 minutes to collapse the antiquated Hollywood-Washington duality into an Oprahfied field of logic in which petty distinctions no longer matter, such as being president or playing one on TV, thereby out-faking and out-flanking Donald Trump’s strictly 20th-century lies.

By the time Kamala hit the stage to talk about the strength of knowing who we are and where we’ve been and where we’re going, the Democratic National Convention had locked up every possible nuance of text, subtext, and metatext. Congratulations were due all around, most especially to Oprah and Julia and Tony and Kerry for reuniting those royal twins separated at birth — Hollywood fame and Washington power — and making aristocracy equal populism.

These are not terrible ambitions. To the end of his days, my father cherished his desire to legislate what was best for everyone else, and stood ready to protest anything otherwise. When the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences made the controversial decision to award an Honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan — the man who had prospered by naming names during the Blacklist, the director who was never mentioned in our house without the epithet “bastard” — my father, now in his eighties, drove his Jaguar from the Hollywood Hills to the Academy Theater to stand across the police lines and picket, joining the riff-raff relegated to the wrong side of Wilshire Boulevard, no longer an aristocrat, at long last a civilian.

To mark the release of his memoir, Everywhere an Oink Oink, Florence Read spoke to Mamet about the death of storytelling, antisemitism in America and his zeal for Donald Trump. Here is a selection of his comments.

ON THEATRE:

In addition to having a Director, they have a Managing Director, and the Director is now called the Artistic Director. What was he before, if it wasn’t artistic? […] The theatre is not only dead, it stinks. […] It’s “culture”, right? Nobody likes culture. It’s nonsense. Now we have political commissars who say, in addition to the Artistic Director, in addition to the Managing Director, we have to have a Director of Diversity, who’s on top of everything. And we’re all going to pay attention to this person who tells us, you don’t have enough black women in the play, or you don’t have enough trans people. Whether you’re black, or trans, or gay, you have the right to hear a story. If somebody’s not telling you a story, then that theatre stinks.

ON AUDIENCES:

Broadway had a huge audience that was largely middle class and Jewish. And they were people who worked and lived in the city. So the only plays that were put on were those that reflected their experience. They only endorsed the plays that reflected their experience. But all those people have moved away. There is no more audience in New York. So who comes? People from out of town. So the two things that they can see are either trash or filth. They can see pageants. I don’t want to go to Disneyland to see a thoughtful roller coaster. Right? I want to go to Disneyland for a thrill. So New York is now Disneyland. I don’t want to see a play which is thought provoking. What the hell do I care? I want to have either a thrill or a dog-treat. And the dog-treat is diversity. Please, tell me I’m not a racist. I’m not a transphobe. These people are shaking the audience down.

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ON CRITICS:

Critics have always been a bunch of brainless whores.

The national press is completely co-opted — it’s Pravda. It’s absolutely Pravda. No one’s going to put on a play that’s not going to be approved by the press. And the press is there to approve the play. Right? What they’re doing is the equivalent of the Stalinist plays “Me and My Tractor”. One doesn’t have to worry about criticism, because nobody is going to put on a play which is not going to get a good review. And so what happens is the people on the Left enjoy having differences about minor points of doctrine. Because that makes them feel that they’re intellectually independent.

ON POLITICS:

In America, there’s no such thing as an independent voter. An independent voter is a liberal speech defect.

Western culture is completely bifurcated. What’s happening now is that the conservative side has said, “wait a second, what’s wrong with the Judeo-Christian ethic? What’s wrong with the laws? What’s wrong with judging people?” Martin Luther King said he had a dream that people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. It was his dream and that dream came true to the largest extent. And then the wokists came in and said “no, we must judge people by the colour of their skin”. And the conservatives said, “you know what, I’d rather vote with Dr King”. The conservatives are done with the Left. We’re not looking for anything from the Left because there’s nothing there.

ON CANCEL CULTURE:

It’s called fascism. It’s my way or the highway. And cowardice is contagious, because we’re herd creatures. […] So if everyone is saying “Jesus Christ, x, y, or z might limit my ability to get ahead, I’m gonna hold my tongue”, we start limiting the things we can say. And then because we don’t want to feel like hypocrites, we start limiting the things we think.

Relationships are broken off in Hollywood, people lose your number. Your manager, your agent, they just go away. That’s unfortunate. Hollywood is dead.

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ON HOLLYWOOD:

It’s a phoney-baloney business. The movies have always been about putting images up on a bedsheet and selling popcorn. Right? The whole idea that there’s any sagacity in the movies is nonsense. There were a few magnificent works of art made in a hundred years, a whole bunch of really good movies and a lot of crap.

ON FILM SCHOOL:

Film school is warehousing. You learn nothing in film school. The only thing it fits you to do is to be an executive. Which is to say somebody who doesn’t know anything, hoping rather than to make a good movie to get the job that some other executive has. Because that’s what bureaucrats do.

ON ISRAEL:

If Hamas had not been voted in, Gaza would be the richest city in the world. It would be Singapore. What are the Jews doing to Gaza? Nothing. They said, take it. PS, they said, if you need medical help come across the border. PS, if you guys are gay, go to Tel Aviv, we’ll welcome you. We aren’t going to kill you, we’re glad to have your business. Gaza is at the end of the Mediterranean, and it’s right off the Suez Canal. It’s the most valuable real estate in the world. And they want to kill the Jews. It doesn’t make sense. The Jews are, and have always been, so happy to say: “For God’s sake, let’s be partners.” […] The most diverse country in the world is Israel. And they want to kill it. Because it works. The answer is “from the river to the sea”. You all have to die.

ON JUDAISM IN AMERICA:

We were second-class citizens. We always existed at the mercy of the country. […] So our answer was always to work harder. […] We had to figure out a way to do the thing that nobody wanted to do, because that was the only thing that was left. A good example is family law. And a good example is the movies. Jews have always been outsiders. What always happens, going back to the fall of Jerusalem, is that when things get tough, people turn on the Jews. It’s the equivalent of kicking the cat or screaming at the secretary.

I don’t see the Jewish culture anymore. People got into the habit of going to the temple the same way they went to the dentist. […] Go to an evangelical church, or go to a black Baptist church. Those people are praying to God ecstatically and with their whole hearts. So when you go back to these assimilated Jewish synagogues, it’s like taking a bath with your socks on and no water. They’ve got so effing woke. We don’t need some rabbi to tell us to be kind to black people.

ON DONALD TRUMP:

Trump was the best president since Abraham Lincoln. […] He brought peace to the Middle East. He closed the border. He made us an energy exporter. He had the best rating among African Americans of any president ever. And the country was at peace and prosperous in the world. All of a sudden, he gets kicked out. And the world is a mess. But because the liberals cannot defend their position, all they can do is indict Trump. He’s not generating anger. He’s talking to reason.

He’s got a big mouth, so do I. The question is, who do you like in a fair fight with your back to the wall? Who would you rather have: Joe Biden, who’s a senile old bag-man, or Donald Trump, who’s a scrapper and loves his country.

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ON FREE SPEECH:

I don’t think any speech should be banned. […] And it’s my right to make up my mind about what you say. […] The question is, who gets to say what counts as hate speech? That’s where the power is. […] The most terrible thing in the world was the idea that there were certain crimes which are hate crimes. The question is not what did the person do, but what do we think about their motives in regard to certain societal norms which we have today. There’s no such thing as a love crime. All crimes are hate crimes, right?

If you gave me all the fame and power, it’s still poison, it’s tainted. In return for what? In return for my conscience, in return for my soul, in return for whatever it has pleased God to give me as a gift for making up stories. I say thank you. I’ll play these.

One such casual — my cousin — has an approach to the MCU that embodies this form of “detached involvement”. He buys tickets to each new release, not for the cinematic journey but for the shared cultural moment. He engages with the films peripherally, often multitasking on his phone, sometimes snoozing or even leaving to eat a meal in his car. He only goes so he can watch the post-credit bonus scenes so he can talk about them at the water cooler. To him, the rest of the film is a palatable time-waster.

Yet relying on this was never going to be enough — and finally the Marvel Universe is starting to unravel. Its latest instalment, The Marvels, which reportedly cost $250 million, looks set to be a flop, joining the ranks of its other failures this year, Ant Man and The Wasp. Meanwhile, one its new stars, Jonathan Majors, whose portrayal of the time-bending villain Kang the Conqueror was intended to revitalise its brand, now faces domestic violence charges.

Marvel’s imperilled big-budget approach to superhero cinema is a far cry from my comic-crazed youth, spent in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania and the tidewater of North Carolina. Back then, collecting comics was more than a hobby; it was a rite of passage. I remember the visceral thrill of the hunt, driving from town to town, seeking the next instalment of narratives plotted by unsung creators such as Mark Gruenwald and Jim Starlin. These stories — particularly Starlin’s multi-part, multi-crossover Infinity Gauntlet saga — wielded a raw energy that their cynical deployment in subsequent movie adaptations could scarcely capture. In the pages of Starlin’s decades-spanning magnum opus, characters were not just avatars of power but embodiments of philosophy and human frailty. Thanos, with his nihilistic love affair with Death, was a villain of Shakespearean complexity, his every move in pursuit of power a stroke in a grand, dark saga of narrative ambition.

Crucially, these quests weren’t crafted for universal accessibility on the big screen; they were a haven for us nerds, a testament to our dedication to trivia, continuity, backstory, and our little imagined community. And as soon as they were repackaged into a blockbuster formula, they alienated those of us for whom every detail was a breadcrumb on the trail to the heart of a vast and intricate universe — our universe.

My pilgrimages to San Diego’s Comic-Con from 1998 to 2004 charted a similar journey from niche to mainstream. With each visit, the infiltration of Hollywood became more pronounced. The Comic-Con I first stepped into was a labyrinth of cardboard boxes overflowing with dog-eared comics, a place where the most valued currency was knowledge of back issues rather than the sheen of new video games or action figures. The comic vendors, custodians of this lore, guided us to hidden gems and long-sought-after back issues. Artists and writers, the unheralded architects of worlds and weavers of dreams, sat slump-shouldered at cluttered tables, ready to discuss the art of storytelling with anyone who held a passion for the craft.

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As the years progressed, however, the tide began to go out. One could watch, almost in time-lapse, as the old guard of vendors began to vanish, their places taken by the glimmering displays of upcoming blockbusters and the latest video-game tie-ins. Promotional materials, once modest handouts, grew into towering banners and ostentatious set pieces. Discussions of Jack Kirby’s artistry and the nuances of his Fourth World saga were edged out by panels dominated by sound bite-spewing celebrities and sneak peeks of next summer’s tentpoles.

By 2003, the transformation was nearly complete. The convention floor, once a haven for the comic faithful, became a temple of multimedia franchising meant to captivate not just fans, but a global audience. And yet, the Comic-Con of that era still retained vestiges of its roots — the sight of cult icons such as a then-controversial Kevin Smith, who mingled with fans in a way that would seem alien amid today’s polished celebrity walkthroughs.

But this evolution wasn’t just about a changing industry; it was personal. It marked the end of an era when conventions were a crucible for forging individual identities within the collective of fan culture. Each of us, clutching our own satchel of back issues, could craft a unique persona built on the esoteric knowledge of story arcs, character histories and creator biographies. Two decades ago, you could count on your fingers the number of individuals who could navigate the complex mazes of various crossovers — but when you met them, it was like meeting a brother.

And then came the beginning of a new, albeit less intimate, chapter. Soon everyone would get to be a vague Captain America fan, clad in a shirt with his logo, without knowing any of the hundreds of unique tales that Mark Gruenwald had told about the character. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, considering that Starlin, one the Greats, did not attain vast wealth from his creation due to the nature of work-for-hire agreements.

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As for the future of comics, can Marvel reclaim its former glory? While Disney, with its billions invested, might be hoping for a resurgence, it’s hard to see what it might look like. Despite Marvel’s continued efforts to extract fresh concepts from its comic division, the process seems strained. Currently, its loss-leading print division is going through yet another of its frequent “reboots” — a laborious effort that feels more like a tired publicity stunt than a thrilling narrative reset. Timeless, a new series designed to lay the groundwork for Marvel’s forthcoming tales, is set in a dystopian future that features a showdown between “Power Man” and “Immortal Moon Knight”. Such a trite narrative, for all its attempt at grandeur, smacks of desperation — a flamboyant plea for fans to hold on just a little longer in the hope that we’ll have something else for you, another place to park your money.

But perhaps it also speaks to the only way forward for Marvel: to see its decline not as a cause for mourning, but an opportunity for a reinvigoration of creativity. After all, comics still possess the potential for remarkable storytelling — provided the creators’ vision is given centre stage. Consider Amazon’s admirably faithful adaptation of Invincible, the blood-and-guts superhero story that catapulted its creator Robert Kirkman into the limelight. Or take Adi Shankar’s The Guardians of Justice, an overlooked Netflix jewel that makes Watchmen seem practically pedestrian. It was a spectacle of creative freedom, one that somehow attracted an extraordinarily diverse cast without pandering to the patronising, focus-grouped tropes of the big studios.

And outside of Marvel’s studios, the brilliance within the superhero genre also still sparkles. Japan is leading the way here — in the extraordinarily inventive manga of My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man, both flourishing under the stewardship of their Japanese creative teams rather than corporate interests.

Yet perhaps the greatest solace can be found closer to home. More than anything, the twilight of Marvel reminds me of the death throes of another genre: the Western. And how did that end? In Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and David Milch’s Deadwood — masterpieces of genuine passion rather than commercial viability.

Schwarzenegger can legitimately call himself a self-made man. He came to the US with no money and an unpronounceable name and a skill that was barely viewed as a skill and had no obvious practical application: what are you supposed to do with biceps the size of watermelons? With fanatical discipline and a lot of personal charm — along with the benign bullshitting the Austrians call schmäh — he parlayed his skill into movie stardom and eight years as the Governor of California; he wasn’t that bad a governor, either. If the US had a different Constitution, he might have become President.

If you watch the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, the movie that first introduced Arnold to a mainstream audience, it’s clear that even as a neophyte he viewed what he did as self-construction. He compares himself to a sculptor. “You look in the mirror, and you say, ‘Okay, I need a little bit more deltoids, a little bit more shoulders,’ so you get the proportions right. So what you do is you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay on each side. And, you know, maybe he does it an easier way. We go through a harder way.”

Schwarzenegger’s gift for canny, accessible analysis is no doubt present in his new self-help book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. Judging by the book promo, the tools are rooted in common sense. Have a vision of what you want to achieve, work hard to achieve it, promote yourself whenever you can, reinvent yourself. I wouldn’t argue with any of this (well, maybe the self-promotion), and especially not the last. If Arnold is anything, he’s a dedicated reinventor. Consider the penitential regimen of exercise and nutrition needed to transform a more or less ordinary looking adolescent (he began body-building at 15) into a hybrid of animated athletic trophy and anatomical illustration. Then consider what it took to transform such a person into a movie star.

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In this regard, much of his success came from his embodiment of masculinity, or a particular kind of it. Given Schwarzenegger’s staggering proportions, the great knotted wedge of his torso, the arms like thighs and the thighs like trunks, the jaw that might have been designed to crush bones, we should speak of hypermasculinity. The actors who embodied manhood from the Forties through to the Seventies were physically ordinary or extraordinary only in their beauty, such as Paul Newman or the young Brando. John Wayne and Jack Nicholson were actually kind of dumpy. Jimmy Stewart was a weed. It’s true that bodybuilders before Arnold became action heroes — notably Steve Reeves, who played Hercules in low-budget spear-and-sandal pictures — but they weren’t stars. They were barely actors.

If Schwarzenegger began his career as a growling, jut-browed human tank processing over the rubble of his adversaries, he learned to work his size and menace more agilely. Then he learned to work against them. His best acting is in comedies such as Kindergarten Cop, Twins and Junior, in which his character becomes pregnant via an experimental drug. His comedy is the comedy of masculinity placed in milieus where masculinity has little use, and is even a disadvantage. How is a little kid likely to react when a man Schwarzenegger’s size and with Schwarzenegger’s accent asks him “Who’s your daddy?” It’s the comedy of a giant trying to repair eyeglasses with the tiny screwdriver and even tinier screws that are sold as eyeglass-repair kits.

This gameness and deftness with which Arnold parodies his masculinity — maybe all masculinity — actually makes him more masculine. In a post-Freudian, post-feminist age, we’ve learned to be suspicious of men who make too big a deal of their manliness: they’re either closet-cases or sociopaths. Maybe what I mean is that we’ve learned to be suspicious of men who are humourless about it. And, as my wife pointed out, humour is one of the ways men have always made themselves attractive to women (and perhaps to other men). If a couple of guys are chatting up women at a bar, you can tell which one is dominant because he’ll be the one to crack a joke.

It turns out that Schwarzenegger also trained to make a butt of himself. In a recent interview, he reveals that his tutor was the veteran comic Milton (“Mr. Television”) Berle, who bullied him through take after take of a single joke and called him “Nazi”. It is indicative of the humour that offsets Schwarzenegger’s tendency towards self-promotion. (From the same interview: “There’s a schmäh with everything. Sometimes people take schmäh meaning you’re lying, which is not what it is. It’s kind of like, you wrap it up in a more attractive package. In order to sell something you have to have the schmäh”.) But then self-promotion is inherent in the self-help genre. Why would you take advice from someone who isn’t great at what he does — great at life — and how do you know he’s great unless he tells you, over and over and over?

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Schwarzenegger’s self-promotion has always seemed heaviest when he is talking about his political career — though, unlike other political self-promoters, he actually matches his claims with political action: see his fleet-footed response to the 2007 wildfires that swept Southern California. Other times, it’s not clear what the didactic purpose of his political career is. Consider his decision, against medical advice, to be sworn in for his second term as Governator with a broken femur. I wouldn’t listen to anybody who told me I should attend a long public ceremony while standing on a recently broken femur, even one that had been bolted back together. To his credit, I don’t think Schwarzenegger has ever said that. But I also don’t think Tony Robbins actually said that his fans should walk on fire, yet it was something he did at his “seminars”, and a number of attendees tried it. (They sued him after they were badly burned.)

But who hasn’t made a few mistakes? If you want a self-help book written by someone who hasn’t made any, that leaves you with the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Vedas, and the Buddhist sutras. And look how well people follow their advice.

Judging by the material already published, I suspect the contents of Be Useful will be unexceptionable, and probably as good as any advice can be that isn’t given in person, by somebody you know who isn’t a god or a saint (or maybe a chatbot). Yes, we’re talking about an actor who became famous for wise-cracking as he pounded someone’s face to jelly and, before that, for declaring (in Conan the Barbarian) that the best thing in life is “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”. But we’re also talking about a tough but warm-hearted gym trainer who reads Nietzsche and the Stoics. He’s demanding. If your reps are half-assed, he’ll make you redo them. But he understands failure; he probably even sees the value of it. “Good job, dude,” he’ll tell you. And you’ll be grateful.

Sometimes his leniency is frustrating. I’m thinking of the speech he gave to the American public after January 6. It was an affirmation of American values and a warning against fascism, delivered by someone whose own father had fought for the Third Reich. That’s what makes it so moving. The speech, however, was notable for its refusal to denounce individuals apart from the coup-leader-in-chief. To me, that’s its one failure. The violence the former president inflicted on our nation was abetted by thousands of allies and followers. They should have been called out. But I’m writing as someone whose father was driven out of Austria following that country’s annexation into Greater Germany. Schwarzenegger’s father may have been in the crowds that cheered Hitler as he entered Vienna; he would have been wearing a swastika armband, since he belonged to the SA.

But Schwarzenegger’s forbearance may speak to an essential sweetness of character. A man can have such a character even if he makes a fortune playing a killing machine or sexually exploits women. Maybe what I mean is really childlikeness. The Governator (one can’t really speak of him as the former Governator, can one? It’s unlikely there’ll be others) gave his January 6 speech using a prop that he invoked as a metaphor for democracy. It was the sword from Conan. In a recent promotional video, he uses the same sword to slice open a carton of the new books. Even grown men love their toys. And as schmäh, it’s priceless.

But the movie stars were contemptuous of the New Form, and hung back until the dam broke. (I recall casting discussions in New York in the Seventies themed: “Do you think he would consider doing a Movie of the Week…?”) Still, television and film rubbed on, misharnessed, until the current amalgamation. In 2013, I wrote and directed an HBO film, Phil Spector. On hearing of it, my young son said: “Dad, you’re doing a Made-For-TV Movie. That’s shameful.”

Now the new technology has, again, upset the applecart. Streaming has forever disrupted the old means of distribution, which, after all, is the determining factor in disseminating information — and, so, in determining content. Industrial production requires and rewards economies of scale and expenditure. The corporation buys in bulk, with neither time nor interest in that which one might call artistic integrity, which a comptroller, looking at numbers alone, could only understand as insubordination. The actually talented — those disposed and able to bring their idiosyncratic vision (art) to manufacturing — are as much of an obstruction as Chinese devotees of Feng Shui would be to the Hyundai production line. (To disrupt a production line is the original meaning of sabotage.)

There is a hopscotch effect in show business — it may be universal, but this is the only racket I know. The entrepreneurs and adventurers jump on the new thing. Some become successful, and the creators, actors, hucksters and thugs may exist in some sort of equilibrium until the tide turns.

With the coming of television, producers searched out the famous, to draw the viewers, but also hired the unknowns to work cheap. Early TV scripts were farmed out, one or several at a time, to individual writers (previously known as “writers”). There was a writers’ room, generally, only in comedy shows. No writers’ rooms were required for horse operas, and Warner Television churned them out on their lot, distinguishable only by their theme-songs. With the success of The Industry, land values increased. The movie lots — belonging to Paramount, Warners, Universal, Fox — cut down or eliminated the backlots where the films were made, turning them into cash. (Century City was the backlot of 20th Century Fox.)

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Independents then took to the streets and the countryside, to film on location — a process greatly simplified by the invention of the Steadicam in 1975. Now, one didn’t need to lay “dance floor” to allow the heavy cameras to move; and the more sensitive film stock lessened the need for elaborate lighting. Filmmaking, then, migrated first away from Hollywood, and then out of the United States, as the unions caught up with the economies enjoyed on location.

When I first showed up, movie scores were recorded on a soundstage in New York or LA by a full orchestra, the conductor watching the film projected, full-sized, behind them. Today they’re recorded over the internet, or its equivalent, by musicians in some Baltic Land, while the conductor watches the film on his iPhone. The number of working film musicians in Hollywood decreased from thousands in the Forties to virtually none today. But the number of writers increased.

Music is, of course, the universal language (except for Disco), but writers of English-language films require only the entry-level skill of speaking English. So, Hollywood, in the age of mass streaming, and tsunamis of “content”, needs writers. The writers work in Hollywood, rents here go up, but salaries go down. This is the ancient contretemps between the workers and the owners, capital and labour.

The workers, however, have always been split between the crafts and the industrial unions. Marx, that jokester, said that all the worker has to sell is his potential for labour. Well and good for a miner or cotton-mill girl; but a craftsperson, let alone an artisan or artist, has something more to sell: the productions of his unique talent and skill — and, to be Marxian, its potential beauty. Artisans have little in common with those on the assembly line; in Hollywood, however, they are in the same unions.

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As for the unions, like any organisation evolved into life, they develop their own hierarchies and agendas, which more closely resemble those of management than those of the shop floor. They take form from the struggles of shop stewards, delegates, and negotiators within the union; as with our government representatives, they live in a hermetic world, separate from those they are elected to represent, and amassing power through their control, which is to say, their manipulation. The relation of union leadership to management is like that of opposing parties in Congress. Whatever differences they profess or portray, they play golf together, and, on the golf course, complain or joke about their constituents, who make it so tough to get along.

Interchange between the parties may sometimes appear static, but it is always in flux. Greater pay causes an influx of union members, which gives the union more clout in making demands, and more dues with which to enlarge recruitment, “research”, and similar bureaucratic metastasis, and to raise the salaries of their litigators and staff. Successful wage hikes force management to reduce profits or forgo modernisation.

Or changes in technology may incite management to attempt to cut employment, prompting the unions to insist on the status quo. The negotiations that follow inevitably result in higher costs to the consumer, which weakens the producer. Finally, these, like all negotiations, are a game of chicken, played by teams with catchy slogans on their sweatshirts: “We owe it to the stockholders”; “We owe it to our brave union and martyrs.” (Essentially the teams’ mascots.)

The United Auto Workers negotiated the richest deals in the history of organised labour in the Sixties — workers won great benefits in wages and pensions, but, 20 years later, American Automakers were, effectively, paying three sets of salaries where the Japanese, unhampered by unions and thrilled to employ automation, could make a better car cheaper, and so, captured the market.

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Few gold rush miners got rich. The big money was made by the folks who sold the shovels. On the other hand, the Aboriginals of Australia were doing swimmingly for millennia, until the coming of the Europeans in 1780. The newcomers saw what they thought were ignorant savages; but the Aboriginals had worked the land, and managed it, through inventive technologies of crossbreeding, fertilisation, and controlled burning, and could find water, and both sustain and consume the odd local fauna. The Europeans could do none of the above, and starved until the next ship arrived. They drove off, killed, or enslaved the Aboriginals, who were displaced by a technology (firearms), which has the power to coerce, but none to create.

The slash-and-burn methods of Australian Aboriginals can be called primitive, or magnificently effective methods of environmental control — harnessing natural processes for human sustenance, through understanding of the cycles of growth-and-decay. The ash of the burnt-over areas fertilised the ground for new growth, not only of planted crops, but of shoots and berries to attract and support the food-source wildlife.

A similar, though unintended, example can be found in the auto industry. Allied bombers destroyed the industrial capacity of both Germany and Japan, and then American money rebuilt them with new technologies, to compete with American production’s outmoded plants and the cumbersome employment contracts based upon the old technologies.

Q. Are technological changes beneficial? A. To whom, at what time? Radio wiped out Vaudeville; some performers persisted, but it was only for a while (as did some Neanderthals with the advent of homo sapiens).

Has society benefited by the ubiquity of streaming? Endless internet outlets have resulted in the proliferation of chaff, and the inevitable reduction of writers to the status of stoop labourers. Yet thwarted inspiration will always search for an outlet, which can most easily be found today in the writing of refrigerator magnets — for if they do not amuse, shock and delight, they aren’t purchased. The consumer here has a choice, as he does not with industrial entertainment (buy the subscription and take it or leave it). One, however, cannot spend the evening with a glass of vodka appreciating a refrigerator magnet.

How will it all end? It will not, but will continue, will-he, nil-he: the unfolding Grand-Guignol of human nature, rushing, like the wild river in flood, unchecked, and so on, carving its own banks and channels, while some in the lowlands adapt, flee or pray, and some, thinking themselves immune, picnic on the high ground, clucking at the spectacle, and suggesting to each other that Something Must be Done.

With thanks to Pat Shipman for ‘Our Oldest Companions’.

Copyright © 2023 by D. Mamet

Ever since the cancellation of the Sussexes’ Spotify deal, it’s been unclear what they’d pivot to next. A Kardashians-style reality show? A wellness empire, à la Gwyneth Paltrow? A high-profile divorce with all the sordid trimmings (and, for Harry, perhaps a sheepish return to the royal fold)? But this week, the next chapter of the Harry and Meghan saga was finally revealed: the pair has purchased the screen rights to Meet Me at the Lake, the New York Times bestselling romance novel by Carley Fortune, with the intention of turning the story into an original film for Netflix.

In many ways, this is a logical next step for the couple — especially for Meghan, given her pre-marriage Hollywood career. The path from acting to producing is well-trodden in the film industry, and has been a particular boon for mid-career actresses who want to pivot away from being in front of the camera. Mila Kunis, Reese Witherspoon and Margot Robbie have all become powerhouse producers, with a sixth sense for finding under-the-radar content that’s ripe for adaptation.

And yet, within minutes of the announcement dropping, a negative narrative had solidified. Far from an unremarkable or even savvy move in an industry one of them already had strong ties to, this development was presented as just another example of the couple’s desperation to stay relevant (“Harry and Meghan ‘buy film rights’ to romance novel to ‘revive media careers’”) as well as their eternal depthless narcissism (“Six ways the book ‘bought by Harry and Meghan’ mirrors events in their lives”). Us Weekly quoted an “insider” who seemed to confirm the personal connection: “The story really spoke to the Sussexes and has a lot of parallels to their own life. Harry and Meghan both think it’s the perfect choice.”

But even if we take at face value the alleged and much-discussed similarities between this book and their lives (and more on that in a minute), this all seems fine. I am no particular fan of the Meghan and Harry Post-Royal Tour de Victimhood, now in its third year, but the fact remains that they do have a Netflix deal, and they have to do something with it. Channelling their efforts into scripted media, for a platform full of ridiculous but compulsively watchable romantic fare, is as worthy a project as any. Unless you were hoping to see the couple’s relationship with Netflix implode in the same spectacular fashion as their Spotify one, it’s difficult to see the issue here, let alone be outraged by it.

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But there’s the rub. Weren’t some people clearly hoping for exactly this? At some point, the public sentiment surrounding the Sussexes curdled from curiosity into contempt, from critiquing their various choices to finding fault with every single one of them. This phenomenon was arguably visible long before their exit from the royal family — as Buzzfeed noted in 2020, the British press had, for years, been chastising Meghan and Harry for the very same behaviours that earned Will and Kate effusive praise. Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how thoroughly Meghan in particular was villainised. Everything she did, from touching her pregnant stomach (“Virtue signaling, as though the rest of us barren harridans deserve to burn alive in our cars”) to eating avocados (“a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all round general environmental devastation”) became evidence of her innately terrible character.

With Megxit, there was her ultra-memeable complaint that “not many people have asked if I’m ok”, and then came the Oprah interview, which was met with nothing short of fury. And while even the couple’s fiercest critics used to concede that whatever else you thought of the Sussexes, they did seem to be really and truly in love, that goodwill has lately vanished amid recent rumours of marital discord; now, every step Meghan takes outside her home without Harry is suspicious.

And when it comes to their latest project, every jab reads like the living embodiment of that joke about how, once you hate someone, even the most innocuous things they do begin to seem obscene and infuriating. (“Look at that bitch eating chicken. Why you eating chicken, bitch?!”)

Obviously, scapegoating people has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time; obviously, there’s a certain amount of fun to be had in ganging up to hate on someone who has been deemed an acceptable target. But the feeding frenzy surrounding Harry and Meghan’s every move reveals the problem with this: not that it’s cruel (although it is that, too), but that being maximally uncharitable has a way of making you stupid.

Which brings us back to the much-hyped similarities between Meet Me at the Lake and the lives of the couple who want to adapt it, which have been foundational to the media coverage of this project, for better and for worse. Having actually read the book, I regret to say that these alleged parallels are absolute baloney, and that any attempt to make this into an example of Meghan and Harry’s desire to make everything about themselves is utterly contrived. The nadir of this is probably the allegation that one of the eerie commonalities between truth and fiction is, and I am not making this up, that the characters in the book at one point drink martinis together: “The Times previously reported that Harry’s favourite drink is a beer — while Meghan loves a martini or two.” Look at that bitch, drinking a martini. Why you drinking a martini, bitch?!

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At this point, it’s hard not to be at least a little sympathetic to Harry’s insistence that he and Meghan have been treated uniquely unfairly by the media, even if the specifics of his complaints tend to err on the side of absurdity. Yes, the couple often behave like a pair of entitled jackasses, but they’re also invariably assigned the role of jackass whether they’re acting like this or not. Of course, it’s easy to understand how a narrative like this becomes so ubiquitous. It’s not even sinister: the people writing these articles have a job to do, and that job is to explain why any of us should devote a single brain cell to the continued, stateside saga of the former Sussexes. And the best way to do that, in a media landscape fuelled by outrage, is to convince people that there’s something bigger happening here than a pair of rich people making a lucrative investment that is basically guaranteed to pay out.

But the truth is that, with the possible exception of its Toronto setting, Meet Me at the Lake has no real parallels to Meghan and Harry’s own meet cute. It’s just a well-written romance that effectively employs all the usual tropes and has inspired an avid fanbase, which pretty much guarantees that any movie based on the story becomes a massive success — any of which would be more than enough reason for a pair of savvy producers to snap it up.

For all these reasons, I expect that Meet Me at the Lake will do well onscreen. It has all the upmarket Hallmark vibes of The Notebook with the sass of a Nineties rom-com: a little sweet, a little spicy, and just enough will-they-or-won’t-they tension to make the ending satisfying. But as for what it says about Meghan and Harry, it’s nothing all that exciting, and it’s something we already knew: they may be a couple of dilettantes when it comes to podcasting or memoir or documentary, but they’ve always had a talent for knowing what a good love story looks like.

If America has produced only the occasional James McNeill Whistler or Charles Ives who might make a plausible case for inclusion in the Western high-art canon, it has produced no shortage of geniuses whose works have delighted hundreds of millions if not billions of people around the world. America’s greatest composer, George Gershwin, wrote jazz, just as America’s greatest artists, from Jackson Pollack through Andy Warhol, were undeniably pop. The list goes on, from Hollywood writers, directors and stars; to Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson and the other founding geniuses of American jazz and blues; to Walt Disney, who gave us Mickey Mouse; to Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and dozens of other songwriters and performers who shaped rock and roll. What makes art American is the exuberant marriage of high and low, often at a large profit.

This summer is no exception, with transcendent work from the country’s two greatest pop talents. What has defined the director Christopher Nolan’s genius to date from Memento to Inception to Batman Returns to Tenet has been his endlessly inventive manipulation of the inner workings of the feature film form to tell stories in ways that reshuffle your brain — a talent founded on an acute awareness of the way the medium uses time. It should be mandatory viewing in all undergraduate philosophy seminars. With Oppenheimer, Nolan has transcended both the normative frame of Hollywood cartoon blockbusters and his own puzzle-palace constructions to make a big film on a world-shaping subject, centred around one of the 20th century’s most important and enigmatic characters. The result is a once-in-a-decade film that marks Nolan as perhaps the most dazzlingly brilliant directorial talent that Hollywood has produced since Orson Wells.

American pop music audiences have also been enjoying a generational talent this summer in Taylor Swift, who is perhaps both the single most gifted and also the most routinely downplayed and ignored pop music icon that America has produced over the past three decades. The mature version of Swift is a brilliant songwriter-storyteller who can hold large football stadiums containing 50,000 or more people spellbound while standing alone on stage for large portions of her three-and-half hour-long shows, which she performs without any breaks.

Only a few individual stars in the history of pop music have been able to mesmerise stadium-sized audiences by standing on a stage alone: David Bowie and Michael Jackson both come immediately to mind. But where Bowie and Michael Jackson were both great dancers, Swift is not — which makes her stage presence all the more remarkable. Her charisma comes from her singular focus on songwriting as a vehicle for mastering her own feelings and communicating them to her audience, which has proven fanatically and deservedly loyal.

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The multifarious reasons why Swift has not received her due from America’s pop culture taste-makers over the past decade, despite her near-unimaginable level of global fame in the end all boil down to one thing: Swift is a single white woman in a pop medium at an identity-obsessed, politically-divided moment when her particular identity is deeply unfashionable. The fact that she seems as utterly devoted to her craft as Christopher Nolan makes her even less sympathetic to critics who would prefer that her talent wasn’t so outsized, or that her songwriting wasn’t rooted in the storytelling tradition and strong female characters of country music, or that her skin was a different colour, or that she was a gay man or lesbian instead of a straight woman who develops needy crushes on men, or that she was an outspoken proponent of sex in marriage instead of wreaking vengeance on her long list of ex-boyfriends, or whatever else. Good luck to them.

But beneath the triumphs of Nolan and Swift, American pop culture hasn’t been looking particularly healthy this summer. A case in point is the writer’s strike that has paralysed Hollywood for months, and was recently joined by the guilds representing directors and actors. The strike, which shows no signs of being resolved any time before autumn, is a fearful response to the impact of new technologies on the industry, which are in part a response to the cratering of the film and TV business over the past four years. In turn, Hollywood’s problems are only the latest in a series of culture industry cataclysms that have overtaken American journalism, book publishing and the music business, and which make both Nolan and Swift seem more like the freakish end-products of bygone eras (Nolan released his first feature film in 1998; Swift’s eponymous first album came out in 2006) than harbingers of future glory.

While the implosion of each of America’s culture industries may look different up close, it is not hard to see the common factors at work. These range from the consolidation of once-thriving industries and the monopolisation of distribution channels to the stamping-out of competition, the ongoing detachment of monopolistic conglomerates from their audiences and the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator blockbusters to pay for the resulting losses. As America’s culture industries have decayed into anti-competitive, risk-averse monopolists, they have imposed layers upon layers of mind-numbing and increasingly politicised bureaucracy on their productions that make real creativity all but impossible. Looming above all these developments is the threat of push-button culture-production driven by AI, whereby studio executives can fulfil their dystopian dreams of licensing the likenesses of dead actors and actresses and feeding them into software owned by tech conglomerates. This would dispense with the need to negotiate for the services of pesky writers, directors and actors, along with Hollywood’s century-old hodge-podge of unionised guilds.

That’s what the strikers are fighting against. And from a distance, it is easy to wish them good luck. As a consumer, though, it is easier to wish that a giant fault-line might open up beneath Los Angeles and swallow the creators of endless hours of unpalatable dreck along with their bosses at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and other industry giants which, as their names indicate, are no longer entertainment companies but tech companies, pursuing the filmed entertainment business as a sideline to their insanely profitable monopolies.

Among the other things that Hollywood’s new industry leaders have in common is that they produce oodles of stuff that nobody seems to be watching. In the second quarter of last year alone, Netflix lost 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada, while earning a total of $4.3 billion on the year. Yet even that relatively modest net profit is deceptive, since Netflix amortises its content over a period of four to five years, while spending close to $20 billion each year on new productions. In reality, then, the company is burning cash in the hopes of a future profit while losing subscribers, a business model that is clearly headed for the rocks. When Hollywood writers and actors demand their “fair share of the profits”, they might think twice about what it is they are asking for.

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The dirty secret of the Hollywood strike, then, is that no one is making money. How did that happen? The short answer is that Americans have stopped going to the movies. In 2022, movie theatres sold more than 800 million tickets – nearly twice the number sold in 2021, but less than two-thirds the number sold in 2019, before Covid. In 2002, movie theatres sold nearly 1.6 billion tickets, or nearly twice the current number. These numbers are even more depressing when one considers that, prior to the dual release of Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s less exceptional woke doll movie, Barbie, this summer’s two biggest box office attractions were the latest Raiders of the Lost Ark movie starring a now 81-year-old, digitally-enhanced Harrison Ford, and the new Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise, each the 7^th sequel in a series.

Similar declines can be seen throughout the American culture industries. Total album sales in the recording business 2001 were 762.8 million. In 2022, the recording industry sold 100 million albums, in all formats. Besides Swift, who as a 17-year industry veteran is a comparatively fresh face, the acts who make money touring overwhelmingly made their reputations many decades ago, when the industry was still healthy enough to create stars such as the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles. Revenue from periodical publishing, whether in print or online, declined from $40.2 billion in 2002 to $23.9 billion in 2022 –— a loss in raw dollars of almost 50%. Factoring in inflation, those numbers are again much worse.

Innovation-wise, the last great American pop culture decade was the Nineties — the last decade of the century that saw America’s rise to global pop culture pre-eminence. In television, the Nineties were book-ended by The Simpsons (1989), which kicked off a surge in witty, prime-time animation, and The Sopranos (1999), which ushered in quality scripted cable television. There was plenty of fare such as Dawson’s Creek (1998) available, too. In Hollywood, the Nineties was decade of indie studios such as Miramax, and birthed the world-class writers and directors Stephen Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino along with stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon. Alternative rock birthed dozens of highly creative and financially successful new acts, from Nirvana to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, while rap music reached new creative and commercial heights with Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Jay Z. The last two American literary fiction writers who have attracted any real critical attention, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, made their debuts in 1987 and 1988, respectively.

So what accounts for America’s pop cultural collapse? The short answer is digital technology, which led directly or indirectly to monopolistic stagnation in every one of America’s culture industries in response to disruptions of prior business models.

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Hollywood’s main initial antagonists were the streaming services; these have since eaten old-fashioned movie studios and production companies whole by spending billions of dollars on content regardless of whether or not there was an audience. The race to become Hollywood’s Uber left smaller competitors without the ability to competitively distribute their products, with the resulting monopolistic structures imposing top-down uniformity on an industry that had formerly boasted about the audience being king.

In turn, the transition from the big screen to the small screen that streaming services and their users demanded made it near-impossible to create stars, who depended on big-screen magic and the industry’s promotional cycles. The strategy of overspending and then dumping new content into the marketplace made it hard for even the most original creators to stand out from the surrounding oceans of sludge. Cashing big checks from Hollywood’s would-be monopolists may have helped writers, directors and actors to pay for their swimming pools, but they also helped to kill the golden goose.

The extent to which these practices have alienated large parts of Hollywood’s traditional audiences may never be entirely clear, since the streaming services refuse to release even basic audience numbers for their shows. In part, that’s because companies such as Apple and Amazon are content to see entertainment as a loss leader. In Apple’s case, it’s an adjunct to the company’s marketplaces, which are linked in turn to its hardware; in Amazon’s case, entertainment is largely a way to draw some segments of consumers to the company’s immensely profitable marketplace, and keep them there. Freed from workaday competitive constraints, and with access to nearly unlimited piles of cash from their patrons’ primary, profit-oriented businesses, new Hollywood’s culture bureaucrats can give free rein to fashionable pre-occupations such as conducting Me-Too corporate witch hunts, ensuring equity in writer’s rooms, and injecting woke politics into shows that audiences refuse to watch.

Unlike Hollywood, the music industry has been largely unimpressed by the advent of woke-ism. Their business is rebellion, which took a weird turn when free file-sharing services such as Napster and Limewire started encouraging users to routinely violate artists’ copyrights. The result in the Nineties was music industry-wide campaigns in which aging rockers testified before Congress in the hopes of convincing or else forcing their fans to obey copyright law, and buy records. Brilliantly sensing an opportunity, Steve Jobs created the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, essentially using sleek hardware to take control of the music business. Waving his hardware around like an old-time gangster, Jobs explained to the moguls that they were no longer in the music business: They were in the 99-cent singles business, with Apple getting the biggest cut.

After Jobs’s iPod, and its accompanying iTunes software, ate the music business, by essentially establishing a version of file-sharing that was now under Jobs’s control, the big music companies woke up and decided to go into the streaming business, taking pieces of Spotify and leaving the artists they had once nurtured on steaks and cocaine with a diet of pennies in return for their back catalogues. As record sales plummeted, the music industry stopped paying big advances or otherwise investing in the music they were putting out, and artists could no longer get paid for recording songs. As the star-making machinery broke down, scouts looking to sign the next big thing went to YouTube, and nurtured new talent on social media platforms such as TikTok. Needless to say, none of these platforms select for songwriting talent. Today’s Taylor Swift might find a home in Nashville, but would be an unlikely candidate to be nurtured by one of the major labels, which are no longer in the business of finding talent and making stars.

Book publishing saw successive waves of consolidation, which left four conglomerates competing to publish the same best-sellers while dumping mid-list authors — the vast talent pool from which authors suc as Wallace and Franzen had emerged. As the audience for literary fiction shrank, the products of the big four publishing houses became ever more formulaic. In turn, the publishers began to rely on sales to institutions that could turn their products into mandatory reading. This new linkage, once reserved for niche textbook publishers, meant that the publishing houses were more easily swayed by academic fads, and by the censorious doctrines of younger woke employees who had more recently graduated from high schools and universities.

The failure of American book publishers to produce interesting new work, and new literary stars, was also linked to the destruction of America’s once-thriving ecosystem of newspapers and magazines, which had formerly employed hundreds of book critics who served as independent gatekeepers and taste-makers, on behalf of their readers. Today, the number of full-time book critics employed by independent newspapers and magazines in America is perilously close to zero.

Aside from gazing longingly at the night sky in the hopes of spotting the occasional shooting star, like Oppenheimer or the next Taylor Swift album, it is hard to see how America’s culture industries imagine they will escape from their decades-long spiral of anti-competitive practices, creative sterility and dwindling audiences. In order to return the culture industries to health, what is needed is kind of broad anti-monopolistic legislation aimed at the tech industry that has often been promised but seldom actualised over the past two decades. While both Democrats and Republicans like to talk about punishing monopolists, such talk has so far proven to be a way of driving up the size of the checks they receive in order to further polarise the country while cementing Big Tech’s monopolies over pipelines and platforms that connect creators to their audiences.

If Hollywood’s striking writers and actors are serious about benefitting their audiences in addition to paying for their swimming pools, they might start by demanding an end to the stranglehold of monopolistic practices and same-think over the products they produce. Now that would be a show worth watching.

And so it is with some trepidation that I learn of an imminent remake of Clue (1985), the hilarious whodunnit written and directed by Yes Minister’s Jonathan Lynn. Like all the best cult films, this one was a commercial failure on its release and was rescued only by the loyal fanbase that developed thanks to the advent of VHS. Fans have been tantalised with the possibility of a remake for years now, but with Ryan Reynolds apparently confirmed to star, it looks like it’s soon to become a reality.

As an adaptation of the board game Cluedo, Clue really should have been awful. It succeeded because Lynn followed the lead of Murder by Death (1976), in which screenwriter Neil Simon observed the conventions of the murder-mystery genre while simultaneously sending them up. Where we might have expected a perfunctory script with two-dimensional recreations of the game’s characters, Clue offers a series of farcical set pieces interspersed with snappy dialogue from an ensemble cast whose quality would surely be impossible to replicate today. Are there any young actors currently working in Hollywood who could possibly rival the comedic dexterity of Madeline Kahn, Eileen Brennan, Christopher Lloyd or Tim Curry?

And yet, I wonder whether my fears are rooted in pure nostalgia, a sentimental need to protect the memories of my childhood from desecration. As a boy, I would marvel at Tim Curry’s shapeshifting virtuosity. I remember my utter astonishment on learning that the villain Rooster from Annie, the killer clown from the mini-series It, and the impossibly muscular 10-foot-tall demon from Legend were all played by the same actor.

Clue was a particular favourite. Curry’s performance is the beating heart of this improbable farce, in which his capacity for razor-sharp comic timing and physical buffoonery is showcased to perfection. Rewatching the movies of our youth always carries a degree of risk; more often than not, we are confronted with the realisation that our favourites were utter dross, only bearable when seen through callow eyes. But revisiting Clue as an adult has been a pleasure. It’s completely daft, of course, but it has no pretensions to high art and is executed with clockwork precision, building gradually to its three frenzied climaxes.

And so it seems unfeasible that another actor could improve upon Curry’s star turn as the butler Wadsworth. We have already seen the experiment carried out in the case of one of Curry’s other best-known roles: the transvestite alien Dr Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Laverne Cox was impressive in the 2016 television version, but one could not quite shake the feeling that there was an imposter in those fishnet tights. Richard O’Brien, the show’s creator, once remarked to me that Curry’s interpretation of Frank N. Furter was “definitive”. So why bother attempting to improve on the unimprovable?

Creatives in Hollywood are often accused of laziness in rehashing tried and tested formulae. Yet the attempt to recreate an already popular film takes a certain chutzpah that I can’t help but admire. Has there ever been a remake that has satisfied fans in every respect, or that hasn’t been damned from the moment of its inception? The task is Sisyphean. The filmmaker is trying to win over an audience that is bound to be hostile.

One solution is the “requel”, a combination of a sequel and a reboot that follows on from previous storylines but introduces new characters to supplement the original cast. This technique is engineered, one might say cynically, to satiate the nostalgic appetites of older fans while cultivating new ones. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) allowed moviegoers the opportunity to be reacquainted with the key figures from 1993’s Jurassic Park (played by Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum), alongside some new younger cast members to take care of the more physically demanding action sequences.

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But requels are invariably a mess. The Han Solo of The Force Awakens (2015) feels like a dioramic approximation of his former self, and the Luke Skywalker of The Last Jedi (2017) is a veritable changeling. When Prince Akeem returned to our screens in 2021 for a requel of Coming to America (1988), the traits that made him so compelling had been mercilessly sanitised. The effect of all such character revivals is akin to our frustration at the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a strange doppelganger with none of the flair or caustic genius of the fat knight of the Henry IV plays.

But perhaps we ought to resist our natural cynicism. Yes, remakes are about milking cash cows — usually ageing ones with desiccated udders — but there’s nothing new in the reworking of popular stories. With the exception of Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Shakespeare always borrowed his major plotlines. As You Like It was written barely a decade after the publication of Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, the text upon which it is based.

Of course we forgive Shakespeare because he always surpasses his sources, but there is an ideal here that writers might wish to emulate. Poets of the Elizabethan era were informed by the imitation theory of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. That is to say, great art could be produced through a combination of both imitation and invention. We might apply this concept to cover versions of pop songs. These can often amount to little more than karaoke but, in some cases, can surprise us with the audacity of their reinterpretation.

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The same can be said of movie remakes. Those that succeed only do so because they are able to blend imitation with invention. One thinks of John Sturges’s transposition of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) to the American wild west in The Magnificent Seven (1960). Then there is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Franz Oz’s remake of 1964’s Bedtime Story. Steve Martin and Michael Caine are able to generate more explosive comedic chemistry than David Niven and Marlon Brando in the original, and the added feminist twist at the end is masterfully done.

Gus Van Sant’s 1998 version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was mauled by critics who resented the very concept of a shot-for-shot remake, one that copied the camera tracking and editing of the original. To put this criticism in the terms of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, our auteur had committed the sin of pigritia (indolence) by failing to invent in the act of imitation. This criticism was seemingly universal, but it was based on a false premise. There are significant differences in Van Sant’s version — which I will not spoil here — and these are all the more potent due to their infrequency. To my mind, the remake is a success, precisely because it is able to modify our perspective of the original in surprising and sinister ways.

So perhaps we ought to embrace the inevitability of the remake. The retelling of existing stories is the oldest story of them all, and some of our greatest artists have produced their best work by drawing on the collective imaginations of their predecessors. The miserable quality of current Hollywood remakes isn’t so much proof that the concept is flawed, but rather that the leading practitioners of the cinema seem to lack the ingenuity to reignite our interest.

As such, I am keeping an open mind when it comes to the remake of Clue. Madeline Kahn is, of course, irreplaceable, and whoever assumes the role of Mrs White may as well steel themselves for the unflattering comparisons. Yet if the filmmakers can avoid pandering to modish identity politics, and find some inspiration in that febrile no-man’s- land between the expectations of a devoted fanbase and the need to innovate, it is possible that our inevitable disappointment can be assuaged.

Yes, you want her, look at her you know you do.
Possible she wants you too, there is one way to ask her.

In the new version of The Little Mermaid, presumably out of deference to our evolving, post-MeToo sensibilities surrounding sexual consent, that line has been subtly changed. In 2023, Sebastian’s advice is: “Use your words, boy, and ask her.”

Not so romantic, but in this case, the question does seem necessary, since Ariel’s feelings are far from obvious. While 1989 Ariel makes it quite clear that she’s keen, our contemporary one, played by the pop singer Halle Bailey, has no thoughts of kissing at all — because, in a truly massive departure from the animated source material, she’s forgotten she needs to in order to win her freedom.

It’s not hard to see how the film’s writers might have talked themselves into giving their new Ariel amnesia: it’s not very feminist to have your heroine spend the bulk of her screen time voicelessly thirsting after a man, after all. But in stripping Ariel of her goal — stay human by seducing the prince — the writers have effectively gutted the character: now, she wanders vacantly through every scene with neither purpose nor agency.

I realise that this is a very adult complaint about a film that is ostensibly for children — but then, I’m not sure children are The Little Mermaid‘s intended audience. Like so many of Disney’s live-action remakes, this movie is for the now-middle aged millennial women who grew up watching (and loving) the 1989 original — only to become scandalised, as adults, by their heterocentrism, their whiteness, their phobias and isms. While Disney World is embroiled in an ongoing conflict with Florida governor Ron DeSantis — a sort of proxy war for the soul of the nation — the Disney content mill is plagued by the same anxieties as much of its adult audience.

The beloved but problematic cartoons from the bad old days remain available on the Disney+ streaming service, but come affixed with a hectoring title card that you cannot fast forward through: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” it reads. “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

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Meanwhile, many of its newer offerings are meant to be part of that future, explicitly catering to progressive sensibilities — and, perhaps equally important, sparking consternation among conservatives. The Little Mermaid — with its vague handwaving in the direction of consent culture, its dutiful nods to the environmental damage wrought by humans on the undersea world, and a black actress bringing the house down in a traditionally white role — is clearly intended to be part of that “more inclusive future”. As is the 2022 movie Lightyear, which featured an, albeit chaste, lesbian kiss, and Frozen 2, which was animated by an anti-colonialist message.

In fact, that heady mix of liberal millennial guilt and Nineties-era nostalgia is an animating force behind much of today’s most controversial entertainment, from the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters to the release of new, sensitivity-edited editions of works by Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine. Kids don’t notice this stuff, but adults do, which is entirely the point: all these choices generated a backlash from the Right, which in turn generated a backlash to the backlash from the Left, which in turn generated months’ worth of frantic coverage from a media establishment that relies on rage-clicks to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, in the quest to make The Little Mermaid inclusive, Disney seems to have forgotten that it should also be watchable, and the resulting film feels at once bloated and muted. Gone are the fish playing musical instruments, the whispering moray eels who recruit Ariel to Ursula’s lair. Bailey, a phenomenal singer, is miscast as a character who is silent during most of the story’s pivotal moments. And yet, more positive reviews, while noticeably cagey about the quality of the film itself, lavish praise on both her performance as Ariel and on the Disney corporation for selecting her. “If these films are to have any purpose beyond being nostalgia-powered cash-ins, it must be to allow all children — not just the white ones — to see themselves as Magic Kingdom denizens,” suggested the Guardian, while a Variety critic adds that, “the most important thing about remaking this particular favourite for a fresh generation is maintaining the fantasy that any of us can be Ariel”.

In other words: even if the movie is bad, it has the best intentions. It’s on the right side of history. And isn’t that what matters?

In this framework, any objection to movies such as The Little Mermaid can be understood as conservatives having a meltdown over the mere inclusion of diverse characters on screen. Perhaps this is true in some cases. But I suspect that what people really object to is a Hollywood apparatus that does not seek to entertain an audience so much as hand-hold it to the morally correct conclusions.

When Ted Lasso — a show featuring a multiracial cast, strong female characters, and an uplifting message of sportsmanship, self-betterment, and general decency — became the subject of backlash during its recent third and final season, it wasn’t because people suddenly became incensed by its diversity. It was because it started featuring scenes that could have migrated out of one of those dramatised instructional videos they show during DEI compliance training: such as the locker room lecture about looking at nude photos that followed a massive celebrity leak. If people balk at this, perhaps it’s less because they disagree with the substance of the message, and more because they resent its intrusiveness — can’t a guy just enjoy a TV show without having lessons in moral betterment foisted upon him, Sesame Street-style, by a bunch of actors dressed up as footballers?

At the root of this is the notion that art is inherently political, and hence that every mainstream entertainment property must necessarily double as either a morality play, or a salvo in the ongoing culture wars. For those who subscribe to this framework, there is no opting out; if your film doesn’t announce its politics, a set of politics will be assigned to it by a critical apparatus that is increasingly incapable of understanding art in anything but crude identitarian terms. One of the more incisive reviews of The Little Mermaid, written by Wesley Morris of the New York Times, describes the film as “everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval”. He’s right. And yet, even as he notes that the film is something of a trainwreck — and even as he admits that obsessing over the political correctness of movies like this is “a misery” — he nevertheless insists that it, and the other Disney films like it, are “important, culturally reparative work”. And so he reinforces the idea that art described as “important” need not concern itself with being beautiful, or moving, or funny.

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Critics and creators alike are increasingly caught in the trap of the “important” movie, which substitutes political pieties for a good story and markets itself on controversy instead of hype. Long before The Little Mermaid hit cinemas, progressives understood that they were basically obligated to support it for political reasons; even now, the narrative persists that anyone who dislikes the movie must be a racist troll (that is, unless they’re denouncing it for not being woke enough). And the “important” movie is many things: explicitly moral and painstakingly diverse. Checking its privilege. Centring marginalised voices. Sparking conversations and moving toward a more inclusive future. And yet it is invariably bad in every way — including the ways in which it attempts to do better.

Consider the original Little Mermaid, a story about a young woman who yearned for independence; who made a reckless, impulsive bargain in the hopes of pursuing the life she wanted; who learns that choices like this have a ripple effect well beyond the confines of one’s own life. Now consider the politically correct version of the same story, in which Ariel is conveniently saved, by amnesia, from knowing what she’s done — and hence deprived of any opportunity to own it, to reckon with it. The former story is about a girl who does things; the latter is about a girl to whom things happen. Which of these is supposed to be a vision of female empowerment, again?

This is perhaps the worst thing about Disney’s contemporary remakes: not that they are blatant cash grabs, but that they are infantilising. The original Little Mermaid placed infinitely more trust in its intended audience of children than the new version places in those same children, now that they’re grown up. And while it still includes that moment, at the end, in which Sebastian waxes wise about autonomy — “Children got to be free to lead their own lives” — it’s hard to fathom, after two hours and fifteen minutes of Ariel stumbling like a hapless sleepwalker through her own story, that anyone really believes it.

The original Fatal Attraction was uninterested in these questions, but the new reboot — an eponymous TV series — evidently thinks they’re important. Starring Lizzie Caplan as Alex, and Joshua Jackson as Dan, Fatal Attraction 2023 subverts its predecessor simply by being curious about its villain. Although the first two episodes reproduce both the plot and perspective of the original — Dan sparks a connection with Alex and then impulsively has an affair with her while his wife and daughter are out of town — the show then flips the script in episode three, depicting all these events again, but from Alex’s perspective. In the parlance of the contemporary culturati, it centres her.

Perhaps this was inevitable. We live in a moment in which every bad girl seems destined for a sad origin story. What began as a call for strong, complex female characters has evolved over the years into a conviction that lady villains in particular deserve better — and that their misdeeds must stem not from a deep-seated character deficiency, but from that oh-so-trendy contemporary explanation for everything: trauma. This is how Cruella deVille’s aspirations of dalmatian genocide become the product of a childhood tragedy, while Maleficent — a powerful woman whose name literally means destruction — is reimagined as a misunderstood victim of the patriarchy.

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Whether these reimaginings truly improve the story in question is debatable; I, for one, found Maleficent much more intriguing when she was not a sympathetic figure shaped by suffering, but rather a deranged etiquette obsessive, incensed by nothing more or less than her exclusion from an infant’s birthday party. But there has always been a certain cohort of cultural critics who, under the auspices of feminism, take umbrage at such characterisations — who interpret the existence of a bad female character as veiled commentary on the state of women at large. When Fatal Attraction was first released in 1987, the LA Times review lambasted it for being “hateful” — “a clear attack on women’s sexuality, the independent woman and the career woman”.

Of course, in 1987, this wasn’t necessarily an erroneous assumption. The “career woman”, financially autonomous and sexually independent, was a controversial figure in a country consumed by panic over the prospect of ladies working outside of the home. The central concern surrounding the career woman was less that she would eat married men alive than that she would emasculate her own husband by out-earning him — but still, she made people nervous. If men in the Eighties were frightened of encountering a character like Alex Forrest, they had to be even more worried that their wives might look at her — with her successful career, cool New York City loft apartment, and penchant for acrobatic sex — and find her at least a little bit relatable, even aspirational.

The notion that Alex had a tragic backstory of her own, one that might render her more complex, if not outright sympathetic, was in fact nascent during the filming of the original Fatal Attraction — at least in the mind of the woman who played her. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Glenn Close recalled consulting psychiatrists to understand Alex’s motivations:

“There’s no way for the audience to know what her past was. It’s only hinted at when she looks at him giving the bunny to his daughter and then throws up in the bushes. Nobody would say: well why did that happen? Whereas I asked that and the psychiatrist said if she was molested at an early age, and what she was made to do made her gag and throw up, then that’s her trigger.”

Whether psychiatrists were using this word in this way in the late Eighties, the notion of the trigger is, itself, very now. It also conveniently subsumes any sense of control over a character’s decision-making under a slick veneer of therapy-speak. To envision yourself being set off in the manner of a loaded weapon is a different sort of objectification from the one feminist critics so often excoriate, but objectification nonetheless. A gun, after all, can’t fire itself.

There are signs that the new Fatal Attraction has taken to heart the criticisms of Close and others — and not just when it comes to the portrayal of Alex. The most famous thing about the 1987 film is its ending — in which Alex is shot dead by Dan’s wife after she attacks the couple in their home; but almost as well-known is the fact that this scene was re-shot at the last minute: in the original script, Alex slits her own throat and frames Dan for her murder. Close reportedly hated the new ending, as did several critics who found it tawdry and out of keeping with Alex’s character — and the new Fatal Attraction seems to have jettisoned it in favour of the original. The series features a dual timeline: one depicts the circa 2010 seduction. Another takes place in the present day, where Dan has just been released from prison, having been convicted of murdering Alex.

But rather than a win for the original film’s critics, the new Fatal Attraction may be sending them a cautionary message: be careful what you wish for. In this iteration, Alex does indeed have more depth. We see how her fear of abandonment — the “I hate you, don’t leave me” mindset that is characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder — both poisons her relationships with other people and makes her a fierce, competent advocate for victims of violent crime. At one point, she provides a somewhat brutal reality check to a man who’s being defrauded by his grandson but is hesitant to press charges: “You get to decide if you want to be with the people that hurt you, or alone. But it has to be one or the other, because those are the choices that you have.” One gets the sense that she’s speaking from experience, that as a victim is how Alex moves through and perceives the world herself. She is vulnerable and manipulative, tormented and tormentor. But while seeing the world through her eyes is riveting, it is also deeply unsettling.

As it turns out, to see the fullness of a person does not necessarily make that person good; sometimes, it only makes them more terrifying. Yes, we all contain the capacity for evil. Yes, some people are motivated to do terrible things not because they’re sadistic monsters but because they’re unwell, or desperate, or traumatised from an abusive past. But at the end of the day, we are still talking about a woman who breaks things and hurts people. Faced with the kind of romantic disappointment virtually every person experiences at least once — and a disappointment that is not just ordinary but, considering the married status of her paramour, entirely predictable — Alex chooses to go to extremes.

All of this makes Alex Forrest both a natural yet somewhat uncategorisable addition to the current entertainment landscape. Today’s Hollywood is a place where the only thing more bankable than a female anti-hero is a nostalgia property. But it is also a place where truly dangerous women go to die — or at least, to be rendered toothless by retellings that chalk all their bad acts up to PTSD. They are thus robbed of the agency that made them such interesting and effective villains in the first place.

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There is a fine line between revealing a character’s humanity and excusing her behaviour, a balance that seems to present a particular struggle for television in the post-#MeToo era: writers are too quick to explain away the moral ambiguity of female characters with some kind of sexually traumatic backstory. Critics are too quick to accuse those who don’t do this of just hating women, full stop. Nobody has quite come out and said that women can’t be straight-up villains anymore, but in this tepid, fearful climate, it’s no surprise that people struggle to create female characters: bad, strong, or otherwise.

And yet, if the first two episodes of Fatal Attraction threaten to make you root for Alex — Dan, as played by Joshua Jackson, is so smarmy, and so entitled, that the prospect of seeing him taken down is not without its appeal — the third-episode twist reveals that Dan is not, and never was, the catalyst for what comes next. This is Alex Forrest’s show; this is Alex Forrest’s game. And while all of this makes Alex more interesting, crucially, it does not redeem her. It does not make her relatable.

In fact, in centring Alex, what this new take on Fatal Attraction really does is to hold her accountable. She is human rather than supernatural in her badness. She makes up stories to justify her choices, the way all human beings do. But she is bad: she orchestrates and manipulates. She tests people in the cruel and imperious manner of an Old Testament God, just for the dark pleasure of lashing out and punishing them when they fail her. Because however sorry you are for disappointing her, you can never be sorry enough. Because in her mind, you’re the bad guy.

You have to love the fairytale serendipity of that backstory: one chance encounter and a life is changed — but another kind feels increasingly common. While watching Normal People, I looked up Daisy Edgar-Jones and learned that she was the privately-educated daughter of a film editor and the former head of entertainment at Sky. Does that make her performance any less impressive? Not a jot. But it does make her a nepotism baby.

Back in February, a young Euphoria fan called Meriem Darradji tweeted: “Wait I just found out that the actress that plays Lexie is a nepotism baby omg [crying emoji]. Her mom is Leslie Mann and her dad is a movie director lol.” Darradji’s surprise was surprising. Apatow has a distinctive surname and five of her seven big-screen credits are in movies directed by her dad, so she’s hardly working undercover. Still, the phrase took off with TikTok users, who quickly improvised a taxonomy of nepotism — actors with wealthy, well-connected parents are less suspect than those with bona fide movie stars in the family for example. Some said how disappointing it was to click on the Wikipedia page of a hot young newcomer and see that their parents already had their own blue-linked entries, while others were enthralled by this Hollywood quasi-aristocracy.

Whether the phrase is contemptuous, affectionate or ambivalent depends on who’s using it but, as the softness of the word baby implies, the tone is usually more playful than angry. It’s an amusing way to interrogate privilege, inequality, the limits to social mobility and the promise of meritocracy. Nepotism, which entered English from the Italian in the 17th century, isn’t quite the right word for this phenomenon. It strictly means favouring one’s relatives with privileged positions, which is easy to achieve in business and politics but less so in an industry where employment is episodic and unpredictable. You couldn’t make Succession about a family of actors because there is no glittering prize to bestow on a favoured son or daughter. The advantages that second-generation celebrities enjoy are more nebulous. Connections, of course. A familiarity with how things work, from film sets to the paparazzi. And, let’s be honest, genes: beautiful people make beautiful people. (Exhibit A: Zoe Kravitz.)

No industry, therefore, has as many nepotism babies as modelling, where the likes of Lila Moss, Kaia Gerber, Iris Law and the Hadid siblings make the old tradition of scouts plucking gorgeous unknowns from provincial shopping centres seem quaint. Conversely, musical talent does not seem to be hereditary; very few major artists have famous parents. In fact, as Julian Lennon or Jakob Dylan will tell you, there is such violent suspicion of anyone seen to be trading on a famous surname that failure is more likely than not.

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Acting, a field in which looks and charisma go a long way but aren’t enough on their own, falls somewhere in between. Hollywood has always been a place where the American dream could seem like more than spin. As the title of his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, indicates, Kirk Douglas literally went from rags to riches. Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes and orphanages. “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house,” she said. “When I heard that this was acting, I said that’s what I want to be. You can play.”

At the same time, it was an industry where dynasties mattered: the Barrymores, the Hustons, the Fondas. Liza Minnelli, Carrie Fisher, Jamie Lee Curtis and Isabella Rossellini all had at least one very famous parent. No doubt it is easier to get a break if you’re the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher but many of these celebrity scions felt anxiety about their privilege and how it was perceived. Nicolas Cage changed his surname from Coppola to avert suspicion of favouritism and begged interviewers not to mention the fact that his uncle directed The Godfather.

“I’m really a product of nepotism,” Jeff Bridges once told me. “I was literally carried onto a film set when I was six months old… Usually one of the hardest things is getting your foot in the door so that was kind of handled. But I had to prove to myself that I didn’t get the job because of whose son I was — that I had some real talent. It took a few years for me to say, oh, OK, I guess I have some value of my own.” Of course, Bridges went on to have a far more substantial career than both his father Lloyd, who is best remembered for the Airplane! movies, and his brother Beau, which suggests that ultimately it’s the work that counts. That takes time though.

It was a while before it became obvious that Ben Stiller or Michael Douglas were stars in their own right. “As the child of someone, you get access other people don’t have, so the playing field is not level in that way,” Gwyneth Paltrow (daughter of Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow) recently explained to model Hailey Bieber (daughter of Stephen Baldwin). “However, I really do feel that once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good because people are ready to pull you down and say… ‘You are only there because of your dad or your mum.’” The phrasing is typically tone-deaf — are other actors half as good and working half as hard? — but Paltrow earned her place. Like Stiller and Bridges, she eclipsed her parents.

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Nepotism babies inspire ambivalence because most of them are clearly talented and apparently charming. A list of the most interesting young actors around would include Dakota Johnson, Margaret Qualley, John David Washington, Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keough. Even those whose unusually prestigious debuts would appear to scream nepotism — Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper in Licorice Pizza; James Gandolfini’s son Michael playing the young Tony Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark — garnered great reviews across the board.

Perhaps the only really glaring case of unearned familial privilege is Brooklyn Beckham, who is true celebrity royalty in the sense that he has nothing to offer except his bloodline. Fame is both his birthright and, in lieu of discernible talent, his job. The smart ones are honest about their advantages. “I think I’ll get a couple chances on their name and then if I suck, I’ll get kicked out of the kingdom,” Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) told People. “And that’s what should happen.”

This new fascination with nepotism reminds me of the fuss, a decade ago, about old Etonian or Harrovian actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne. They were obviously gifted, and nobody seriously believed that the headmaster of Eton could phone a movie director and secure a plum role as easily as a starter job in the City. Yet there were so many of them, all at once, that something smelled off. Individuals became lightning rods for a broader concern that the game — meaning society rather than Hollywood — was rigged.

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That debate came in the wake of the financial crisis and the Occupy movement. Talk of nepotism babies coincides with another wave of economic anxiety and heightened awareness of inequality. Yet the conversation is for the most part refreshingly clear-eyed, curious and nuanced. It’s not the individual that matters; it’s the ecosystem. If there is still diversity of experience and opportunity, and most actors haven’t grown up in the industry, then a nepotism baby is an object of curiosity rather than a systemic problem. There is a healthy sense of perspective, too. As long as people like Eric Trump exist, one can’t get too het up about Maude Apatow.

I think that Bridges and Paltrow are right to suggest that Hollywood is not a meritocracy in the short term but becomes more so in the long term. Talent outlives good fortune. The perfect test case is Sofia Coppola, who experienced what you might call a nepotism baby do-over. After Winona Ryder dropped out of The Godfather Part III, Francis Ford Coppola cast 18-year-old Sofia as Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. She bombed. On top of her lousy screen presence, the impression that the role was entirely undeserved inspired such brutal reviews that she gave up acting all together. “I didn’t realise how much pressure I would be under — people want to see Francis’s daughter fall on her face,” she told Entertainment Weekly. A decade later, though, she directed The Virgin Suicides, a debut so confident, distinctive and unbeholden to her father that she could start again. You can’t help noticing that all of her films have been about the privileged and unhappy.

The dominant narrative in the press is that Republicans, or at least a significant cohort of them, were participants in the Senate Watergate Committee’s search for the truth in 1973 and not strictly partisan or obstructionist. This narrative, of course, has enjoyed renewed popularity because of the obvious comparisons between Watergate and the serial high crimes and misdemeanours committed by President Donald Trump.

One question, uttered on June 28, 1973, supposedly exemplified Republicans’ bipartisanship. “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Tennessee Senator Howard Baker famously asked John Dean, President Nixon’s former White House counsel, who was now fessing up to his role as desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. For some reason, the context of Baker’s very first question to Dean has been forgotten. The ambitious senator was not engaged in a bipartisan search for the truth; rather, Baker was creating a firebreak that he hoped would protect Nixon’s presidency against what he realised had been three-and-a-half days of extremely damaging testimony. But there was one very large hole in Dean’s cool and detailed account. His first direct meeting of any consequence with the President had not occurred until February 27, 1973, more than eight months after the June 17th break-in. So while Dean believed he was carrying out the President’s wishes, he could not actually offer direct testimony about what Nixon knew and did in the earliest and most crucial phase of the cover-up.

Baker’s gambit gave every evidence of working — for two weeks. Then, in mid July, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of an extensive, voice-activated tape recording system that promised to resolve what appeared to be an insuperable obstacle: who was telling the truth? As the late Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians, wrote, “discovery of the tapes undid Baker’s careful handiwork. The tapes made irrelevant his question to John Dean… [Because now] Richard Nixon himself could answer Baker, and in indelible words.”

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Kutler’s observation was an understatement. Baker’s question had transmogrified into a battering ram against Nixon, until he was ultimately forced to give up the tapes, and it was his own words, more than any other single factor, that forced him into a humiliating resignation.

And what Baker did after his strategy backfired should not be forgotten either. He did not give up on his aim of being seen inside the GOP as the senator who saved Nixon’s presidency, a reputation that he hoped would put him head and shoulders above his party rivals for a future presidential run. While the president fought his way through the courts for months, hoping to avoid having to turn the tapes over to the special Watergate prosecutor, Baker and the minority counsel, Fred Thompson (a future Tennessee senator), desperately attempted a rearguard action. They sought to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency in the break-in, rather than the White House and Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was one of the most cynical acts in a scandal brimming with them.

About two weeks before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report, in mid-July 1974, Baker and Thompson leaked their findings of alleged CIA complicity to the press. They landed with a thud, and were completely forgotten once the president released on August 5 what instantly became known as “the smoking gun” tape: an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and his top aide Bob Haldeman discussing how to use the CIA to impede the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Baker finally had the answer to his question.

Baker’s reputation suffered no lasting damage, in or out of the GOP. When his devastating question was remembered, as it often was, it was taken out of its intended context. And Baker exhibited no abiding impulse to correct the misunderstanding after Nixon’s disgrace was complete. Indeed, as time went on he absolutely welcomed the erroneous interpretation.

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If rose-colored glasses and wishful thinking drive the false narrative about Watergate bipartisanship, the same cannot be said for the driving force behind the other misleading narrative. Here, vested interests, reputations, and a lot of money are at stake.

Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post before Katherine Graham of Watergate-era fame, is frequently credited (albeit erroneously) with coining the saying that “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” That phrase is the problem in a nutshell. Those who wrote the first rough draft of Watergate have persisted in doing everything to ensure the first draft is also the final draft, aided enormously by the press writ large, eager to bask in the reflected glory.

The ubiquitous narrative about Watergate is still largely the one laid out in All the President’s Men, the 1974 book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, which became an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster starring Robert Redford in 1976. As the literary critic Wilfrid Sheed noted, Americans might be getting fuzzy about the details of Watergate, “but at least they remember the movie: a couple of nosy journalists and an informer, wasn’t it?”

No one much noticed the degree to which the book was a product of, and influenced by, a passing fancy at the time, the so-called “New Journalism.” Books in this genre employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in books that purported to be nonfiction. “Woodstein” exploited their factual authority as journalists while simultaneously enjoying the license granted novelists. The result was a gripping newspaper procedural focused most intensely on the first eight months or so of the scandal — but one that was a very narrow slice of that history and bore only a faint resemblance to what had actually gone on inside the confines of The Washington Post.

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Most notably, All The President’s Men neatly sidestepped the truth that a troika — not a duo — was responsible for the Post’s coverage. Barry Sussman, a city editor who became the special Watergate editor in mid-July 1972, had been indispensable in producing the stories that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, managing editor Howard Simons believed that if any one individual, rather than the paper as a whole, deserved a Pulitzer, it was Sussman, not Woodstein. As Simons told Alan Pakula, director of the feature film, “Barry made acceptable the work of two junior reporters . . . [who] didn’t understand what they had often and couldn’t write it.”

Other principal actors slighted, if not maligned, in Bernstein and Woodward’s fabulistic account were the three federal attorneys assigned to prosecute the Watergate burglars; a slew of FBI agents doing the investigating; and the grand jury empaneled to hear the evidence, issue subpoenaes, and draw up indictments. The Watergate cover-up was not broken by the press, but by the legal pincers these actors built, which inexorably closed in on those who had committed perjury during the January 1973 trial of the burglars or otherwise conspired to obstruct justice. No one has ever conveyed a more balanced account of the press vs. the government’s role than Sandy Smith, a legendary reporter for Time magazine who broke as many important stories about Watergate as anyone in the Washington press corps, including Woodstein. After Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, Smith observed,

There’s a myth that the press did all this, uncovered all the crimes . . . It’s bunk. The press didn’t do it. People forget that the government was investigating all the time. In my material there was less than 2 percent that was truly original investigation. There was an investigation being carried out here. It may have been blocked, bent, botched, or whatever [at times], but it was proceeding. The government investigators found the stuff and gave us something to expose.

Finally, there is one last aspect that tells us more about the false narrative presented in All the President’s Men than any other element in the book. It involves the shadowy figure who became as inseparable from the book as the authors themselves, i.e., Sheed’s informer, aka “Deep Throat,” aka W. Mark Felt, the number two executive at the FBI when the Watergate break-in occurred. From 1974 to 2005, Bernstein and Woodward, wined, dined, and gave lectures for which they were handsomely paid, telling and re-telling stories of their reportorial prowess, with their cultivation of Deep Throat the apex of their Watergate reportage. Both journalists were hailed constantly for their supposed fidelity to their über-secret source. You could remove their fingernails and they still wouldn’t reveal Deep Throat’s identity.

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It was actually a phoney mystery. A wizened, razor-sharp retired newspaper editor named Frank Waldrop, who was said to be “absolutely wired [in] to the FBI”, told the Washingtonian magazine, when asked about the Deep Throat guessing game in the spring of 1974, “Read the February 28 [1973] and March 13 [1973] Nixon presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size.”

Nonetheless, that Woodstein held fast to their pledge of confidentiality to Deep Throat was widely accepted at face value. And it was true that they had, more or less, abided by all the “deep background” stipulations Felt laid down when he agreed to be a source for newspaper stories. But it was also true that Bernstein and Woodward had glaringly violated these same stipulations when writing their book. The public became aware of Felt’s existence as a source; his instrumentality in the stories; what he told Woodward and when. His words were supposedly quoted verbatim, and information he supplied Woodward was linked to specific Post stories, even exact passages. The only fig leaves left for Felt to hide behind was his risqué code name, after a pornographic film popular at the time, and the fact that he was identified as having worked at an unnamed “executive branch” agency.

Eventually the guessing game grew so popular, but wearying and tedious for the authors, that in 1976, Woodward developed a gambit that relieved the pressure while doing nothing to lessen public interest. Now celebrities in their own right, the duo declared that someday, they were fairly certain, history’s most famous whistleblower would come out of the shadows, claim his just reward by writing a fascinating book, and receive the acclaim that was his due. But until then, they were going to keep their word — unless Deep Throat were to die before publishing his story. No one imagined this was an entirely unilateral decision, just as the decision to include him in the book had been. Felt was already furious over the book’s serial violations of the “deep background” arrangement. He was not asked, and certainly did not agree, to be identified in the event of his death. Yet Woodward and Bernstein acted if this were a signed agreement stowed away in a safe-deposit box.

The dénouement finally occurred in May 2005, when Felt’s family and his lawyer outed him in the pages of Vanity Fair, hoping to cash in on the untold story. Bernstein and Woodward grudgingly admitted that Felt was Deep Throat, and the identification finally allowed for careful analysis about what Felt’s design had been all along — or what the late Christopher Hitchens said “rank[ed] as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.”

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Woodstein had long fostered, of course, their preferred interpretation of Felt’s motive: Deep Throat was a selfless, high-ranking official intent on trying to protect the office of the presidency from a criminal in the person of Richard Nixon. Felt “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency],” they wrote in 1974, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Actor Hal Holbrook’s brooding portrayal of Deep Throat in the film version had then turned Woodstein’s portrait into something indelible.

But then a curious thing happened. In his own 2005 book about Felt, The Secret Man, Woodward backed away from Felt-as-principled whistleblower, and offered a far more pedestrian — and bureaucratic — explanation familiar to anyone who has laboured in the federal government. Felt leaked because he “believed he was protecting the [FBI]” from a corrupt, lawless president. Eventually Woodward reluctantly threw a third element into his admixture of motives: Felt was “disappointed that he did not get the directorship” following the untimely death of J. Edgar Hoover, who had died seven weeks before the break-in.

The sale of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers to the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas for $5 million in 2003, however, along with the release of the FBI’s Watergate files, opened the door to an independent assessment. When Woodward’s raw notes from his conversations with Felt were finally opened, none of the above explanations made sense. But a new one did: that Felt’s actions were entirely and only consistent with the “war of the FBI succession,” a no-holds-barred, vicious, internal struggle to succeed Hoover that had been going on for years. Felt leaked not out of pique or bitterness, not to protect the FBI, and not out of any concern over the office of the presidency. His sole aim was to destroy Nixon’s confidence in the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, smear presumed rivals for the job, and steer Nixon toward appointing Felt himself. Richard Nixon was Felt’s only ticket to the directorship and the idea that Deep Throat ever intended to bring the president to ruin was absurd.

It defies belief that two of the most celebrated investigative reporters of their generation did not understand Felt’s true design contemporaneously, or, say, no later than 20 years after Nixon’s resignation. That Bernstein and Woodward still pretend otherwise tells one everything one needs to know about their first rough draft.

It was a fable, almost as self-serving as Felt’s leaks.

“We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva’s story to unfold,” it read, alongside a photo of its newest cast member. “If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist.”

And then, just in case you didn’t get the message, there was a follow-up tweet: “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.”

Suggesting millions of Star Wars fans are a bunch of racists-in-waiting might seem like a peculiar PR strategy. But if you were to plot the marketing trajectory of Star Wars alongside the fall of traditional journalism, a pattern would begin to emerge.

Today’s predominant mode of cultural engagement began incubating on Tumblr around 2010, spread to mainstream media in the lead-up to America’s 2016 election, and now dominates the entire cultural apparatus up to and including Hollywood itself. It owes much to the 2008 recession, and the mass layoffs in media which fundamentally transformed how news was covered.

Imagine a horde of freshly unemployed veteran writers, alongside new journalism grads, desperately trying to claw out a livelihood in a world where writing had been completely devalued. (It was not unusual, at this time, to be told that the job you were applying for paid not in money but “exposure”.) Gone was the $2-per-word magazine staff writer position; gone was the local shoe-leather reporting job that might launch a lifelong career. Now, a writer’s best option was freelance blogging, churning out listicles and aggregated new stories at $15 a pop — and with a quota, which at some outlets ran as high as 20 posts per day.

The pressure to produce content on such an accelerated timeline spawned a lot of half-arsed, hastily-executed work (“10 Times Brad Pitt’s Butt Made Me Want To Die: A List In GIFs”) but also created a constant scramble for something, anything, to write about. Social media, then in its infancy, was a lifesaver: as a reporter at MTV News, I could curate a quick roundup of Twitter or Tumblr reactions to last night’s Game of Thrones episode in less than 20 minutes, which allowed me to meet my quota while also prioritising more interesting, time-consuming work (for instance, getting a trauma surgeon to assess whether it was actually, medically possible for The Mountain to crush Oberyn Martell’s skull like a grape).

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At the time, this interface between reporters and random posters was both friendly and fully symbiotic: the writers got free content, the posters increased their internet clout. And crucially, nobody took any of it all that seriously; even being cruel could earn you a coveted place in the Celebs Read Mean Tweets roundup on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

But, in 2014, as cash-strapped media outlets chose to prioritise opinion journalism (quick and cheap) over investigative reporting (time-consuming and expensive), the news cycle became increasingly outrage-driven, and our thinking about the type of post that was deemed worthy of coverage changed. The saga of Justine Sacco had recently introduced a hungry populace to the joys of playing hunt-the-racist on Twitter. The US was becoming more tribal, and art, in turn, more political. The ridiculous culture war known as Gamergate consumed the discourse for months on end, as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Liking this movie — even just liking the idea of it — meant you were one of the good guys. Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person.

The new Star Wars trilogy, then, was perfectly positioned to become a flashpoint in this newest culture war — a war that directly benefited a media economy in which controversy meant clicks. Its first piece of promotional material could not have been more perfectly designed to provoke the ire of the franchise’s less-enlightened fans: a teaser, released in November 2014, featuring the actor John Boyega dressed as a stormtrooper.

This is not to say that the Star Wars publicity department wanted racists to take aim at the trailer, but given the number of pieces about “racist Star Wars fans” which followed over the next 24 hours, they would also have had to be idiots not to realise they’d stumbled on marketing gold.

At the same time, celebrities had cottoned on to the value of clapping back on social media. Responding to a random dickhead was no longer undignified or beneath them, but the quickest, easiest way to get positive press. So when Boyega made an Instagram post addressing the black stormtrooper controversy, the internet went wild.

A representative post about Boyega’s clapback reveals how easy it was to map this new, slightly sanctimonious mode of media coverage onto the existing social media-based story model. All you needed was a vaguely clickbaity headline (“JOHN BOYEGA SHUT DOWN RACIST ‘STAR WARS’ HATERS WITH FOUR SIMPLE WORDS”), followed by 250 lightly editorialised words about the incident, followed by two embedded tweets showcasing the alleged racism, rounded off with Boyega’s post and a boilerplate link back to the Force Awakens teaser.

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But what it also reveals, in hindsight, is how this mode of coverage blurred the boundaries between identifying a trend and manufacturing one. The two embedded tweets in that piece had a total of 11 retweets between them, suggesting that the sentiment within them were anything but popular. If not for the existing practice of trawling Twitter for “people are saying” stories — and if not for the absurd expectation that journalists should post new material every hour — there would never have been any reason to dig them up. The racist haters would have simply languished in obscurity, their tweets lost to the sands of time.

This would have been a good time for culture writers to step back, both from the quota model of journalism and from its engagement with stupid social media controversies. But this was 2015, which was followed by the year in which progressives abandoned all pretence of being culture war noncombatants and went all-in on sneering contempt. The purest form of this shift is Molly Fitzpatrick’s article, “Angry baby-men hate the new Ghostbusters trailer”.

In hindsight, the “baby-men” article marked a point of no return. The ossified smugness of it, the right-side-of-history certainty, the way that books and movies and television and music now sorted automatically on political grounds into things one ought to be either for or against. By the time the new Ghostbusters was actually released, the criticism of it was not criticism so much as a celebration of its mere existence, so that any assessment of whether it was good or not became entirely irrelevant. (It was, for the record, not good.)

And Star Wars was an opportunity like no other to stick it to the baby-men. It was about strong female characters, and intergalactic diversity, and standing up against the fascist forces of the Trump admi… uh, I mean, the Empire. By the time The Last Jedi came out in December 2017, the American Left had so thoroughly fused its pop culture with its politics that it was no longer possible to discern if the “Resistance” movement people kept referring to was the one with the spaceships, or the one with those ludicrous pink hats. By 2020, every Star Wars news cycle included stories about how the franchise’s forays into diversity continued to infuriate its toxic fanbase.

This brings us back to Obi Wan Kenobi and Moses Ingram, a story whose trajectory is as good an example as any of how Hollywood has learned to leverage this aspect of the discourse. On 22 May, Ingram told The Independent that she’d been warned about racist Star Wars fans by none other than the execs at Lucasfilm, and took a light jab at the lack of diversity in the franchise: “If you’ve got talking droids and aliens but no people of colour, it doesn’t make sense.” The Independent led with that quote, and the interview was dutifully re-reported over the next few days by multiple outlets — under such provocative headlines as “Lucasfilm Warned ‘Obi-Wan’ Star Moses Ingram About Racist ‘Star Wars’ Trolls”. And within a week, Ingram began posting screenshots of abusive messages she’d received on Instagram, including one calling her a “diversity hire”.

From there, it was a short distance to the “don’t be racist” tweet from the official Star Wars account. As of this writing, it has been retweeted upwards of 30,000 times, and dozens of mainstream media outlets from NPR to the Daily Show have run at least one story about it.

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None of this is to say that racist Star Wars fans do not exist. They do; the question is whether they are emboldened, even incentivised, by this continued, bizarre symbiosis with an outrage-driven media that relies on them for content. Consider one of the top citations in these stories, a YouTube video titled “Obi-Wan Series Is Going To Be AWFUL Because It’s Hiding Behind Diversity AGAIN!”, apparently made in response to Ingram’s 22 May comments in the Independent. The video is objectively offensive (the word “darkies” appears in the thumbnail), and the creator, an account named MechaRandom42, seems to specialise in intentionally inflammatory content with an anti-woke bent. But it is content that people mostly don’t watch: within the past month, she has posted multiple videos per week, most of which have paltry view counts in the 1,000-2,000 range.

The official Obi Wan Kenobi trailer posted a month ago by Disney has been viewed 11 million times. The “hiding behind diversity” video, on the other hand, has 13,000 views — the bulk of which came after journalists started citing it in their coverage of the controversy.

Who benefits from this? The trolls do, of course. They’re getting exactly what they want, their status and influence growing with every indignant squawk, every angry celebrity video response. But they’re not the only ones. A media class that makes its living on outrage gets a story that does numbers. Moses Ingram gets an outpouring of support and waves of positive press coverage. The studio execs behind Obi Wan Kenobi get the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from persuading a bunch of impressionable people that the best way to signal their moral correctness is by putting more money in Disney’s pocket. Everybody wins.

Except the art, of course. In a culture that cannot conceive of appreciating something you love unless it’s part of a righteous backlash against the angry baby-men you hate, art loses every time.

Today, the veils and jewels have been replaced by fishnet body stockings and six-inch lucite heels, but the intrigue surrounding strippers remains — as does society’s conflicted relationship with them. These women (and they’re almost always women) inspire a mess of competing sentiments: we pity them. We envy them. We want to help them and also just want them, sometimes at the same time. Against a modern-day backdrop of shifting sexual mores, strippers occupy the dual archetype of cautionary tale and aspirational figure, fallen woman and girlboss. They are the living embodiment of feminist agency, but also agents of the patriarchy. That the strippers themselves tend to disagree on all of the aforementioned points makes things even more complicated.

Meanwhile, the eternal fascination with sex-adjacent professions — strippers, phone sex operators, and, lately, the online purveyors of self-produced porn on OnlyFans — periodically coalesces into a pop cultural moment. The last one, in the mid-Nineties, gave us a glut of films including Showgirls, Striptease, Spike Lee’s Girl 6 — and, in an entertaining riff on the intersection of objectification and emasculation, The Full Monty. In keeping with the more purity-centric conventions of the time, these stories were mainly warnings: taking one’s clothes off for money was an inherently undignified enterprise, the purview of desperate women (or, in the case of The Full Monty, recently unemployed steel workers) faced with the choice to strip or starve.

Now, 30 years later, the wave of stripper content appears to be cresting again, this time in the form of multiple memoirs from current or former strippers, and this time without the implied subtext that these are the stories of fallen women. Genre-wise, the books run the gamut: Wanting You To Want Me, by Bronwen Parker-Rhodes and Emily Dinsdale, is a collection of first-person narratives and photographs from more than a dozen strippers, many still employed in the industry. The Ethical Stripper, by Stacey Clare, is a pro-sex-work, pro-labour argument steeped in the language and politics of contemporary social justice activism. Paulina Tenner’s Laid Bare: What the Business Leader Learnt From the Stripper is a run-of-the-mill business book dressed up in nipple tassels and a thong.

The only thing any of these titles have in common is a nominal (and in the case of Laid Bare, painfully contrived) connection to stripping. And yet, this loose mutual affiliation is also the most striking thing about them: that in our present moment, what used to be considered a dead-end job for desperate women might now also be a launchpad to greater things, at least for those with the means to make it so. Both Stacey Clare and Paulina Tenner are strip club veterans, now leveraging that experience to become thought leaders in activism and corporate strategy, respectively. Their credibility is burnished, not diminished, by their affiliation with what is still understood by many to be a seedy, exploitive industry.

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It’s worth asking whether this credibility is deserved. For Tenner, the stripper connection feels desperately gimmicky — “In many ways company culture, no matter how evolved, is like a stripper’s arse,” reads one chapter opener — and only serves to highlight the relative dullness of the subject matter. (Despite the author’s best attempts to dress it up, the truth is that company culture is a great deal less interesting than a stripper’s rear end.) For Clare, the connection between the world of stripping and her central subject — the movement for sex workers’ rights — is both more organic and better executed. Her book artfully interweaves education with titillation, offering a detailed history of sex work activism in the UK alongside anecdotes from her own experience in strip clubs. That this narrative strategy in itself mirrors the push-pull of a striptease can’t be an accident: Clare clearly knows how to keep an audience’s attention.

And yet The Ethical Stripper is, in certain ways, even more tortured and grotesque than Laid Bare when it comes to massaging the truth. In service of its argument for fully legalised sex work, Clare dwells at length upon the labour issues inherent to stripping as a trade — including brutish club owners, exploitive business practices, and coercive customers — yet doesn’t engage with the potentially fraught nature of the work itself. In one anecdote about her experience with badly-behaved men at strip clubs, Clare writes of being “pretty much coerced” into a full-contact lap dance with a patron (in violation of the strip club’s cardinal “no touching” rule), yet her scorn is directed not at him but at the policies that constrained them both: “I consented because in truth I actually prefer giving full-contact dances, so it never feels like a violation, but I took a risk by breaking the rules of the club on my first night. It was a perfect example of how consent  is undermined time after time by the economic context of the business model the industry is built on.”

Meanwhile, the notion that being paid to simulate sexual intimacy with strangers night after night might do something to a person is simply absent. And in lieu of reckoning with it, Clare tends to fall back on the rote identitarianism that has come to dominate so many progressive spaces. What might have been a compelling discussion of workers’ rights in an industry that is historically, and perhaps innately, hostile to women instead becomes a bunch of empty bluster about the importance of “the narrative”, the scourge of “whorephobia”, and the “appropriation” of “sex worker culture” by drive-by eroticists with (pun intended) no skin in the game.

It’s deeply strange to encounter this particular form of cultural gatekeeping amid what is supposed to be a conversation about worker’s rights: everyone from investigative journalists to Hollywood writers to practitioners of pole-dancing as a form of fitness are dinged for encroaching on stripping as if it were a protected identity category rather than what progressives insist it is: work. In an extended lament over the film Hustlers, Clare complains not only that its promotional events exploited strippers, but that the plot (based on a true story about NYC strippers who drugged their clients with MDMA and ketamine and then robbed them blind while they were passed out) would only create more stigma against sex workers.

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But then, to focus at such length on offences given by a movie is a luxury in itself — which somewhat undermines Clare’s argument that strippers like herself represent an important faction within the larger category of marginalised persons known as sex workers. Publishing a book at all, let alone complaining within it that a Hollywood film failed to adequately represent your culture, implies a certain degree of privilege. But more than that, Clare fudges the lines between stripping and other, more dangerous forms of sex work in a way that feels a bit appropriative itself.

There is no better rejoinder to this approach than the collection, Wanting You To Want Me. The book features not only first-person narratives from a variety of different strippers who wouldn’t otherwise tell their own stories, but also this line, in the introduction, which captures the inherent tension of trying to roll up stripping and escorting and porn and prostitution into one big, sloppy sex work burrito: “[Strip clubs] are a form of escapism for everyone who enters, punters and strippers alike — an an enclave of desire and disappointment.” And yet, even in an environment steeped in sexual frisson, “the encounters that take place inside have very little to do with sex”.

Indeed, stripping is one of the few forms of sex work that not only leaves sex purely in the realm of unfulfilled fantasy, but in which the lack of satisfaction is the entire point of the thing. The men who frequent strip clubs are paying explicitly to be titillated, to be teased within an inch of their lives, and then to leave, without ever having touched the object of their desire. Why? What does this say about the men, about the nature of the transaction, about what is being really being sold when money changes hands in the Champagne Room?

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And what are we to make of the fact that amid this glut of stripper-themed literature, only the women of Wanting You To Want Me — the ones who not only will never write a book but may never do any job apart from this one — are willing to dwell in the uncomfortable, unvarnished complexity of the work they do? There are no easy answers here, no unified narrative. But there is honesty: about how stripping can be a source of both shame and freedom at the same time, about the diversity of relationships that incubate within the confines of a strip club, about wanting to stop but also not wanting to, about the rapid-onset despair that comes when the fantasy can no longer sustain itself.

“Always at some point it happens that the balance tips and they want something that you can’t actually give them,” one seasoned stripper notes. “They realise that this make-believe isn’t actually gonna come true, and it becomes too sad or too pointless and hopeless.”

Of course, books like The Ethical Stripper cannot afford to be so honest. But perhaps this is the lesson: that the most compelling narrative, whether it belongs to a stripper or someone else, is one that does not seek to sell anything extra, be it a business strategy or a worthy cause. The most compelling story is just the truth: that stripping is hard, and fun, and sad, and exciting, and messy, and human, and it’s no surprise that 200,000 years later, we’re still writing songs about it.

A name from the pages of legend: one of the finest independent bakers in all Hertfordshire! Surely, surely…

And it was then, peering through the glass, that she saw it. A squat golden figure, grinning and goggle-eyed. There could be no mistake: here was E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, made entirely of marzipan.

Sarah knew at once that this was a gift from the gods. Only a few weeks before her father had taken her younger sister, Mary, to see E.T. at the cinema. Both had wept buckets. What was more, her father adored marzipan. She looked for a price tag. One pound seventy-five. Bargain!

If you’re wondering how I know all this, the answer lies in an online report on the BBC’s “Beds, Herts and Bucks” news page a few weeks ago, though I may have added a little fairy-tale stardust of my own. The marzipan E.T. figure still exists, which is why it made the news. As Jim’s daughter Mary explained, she found it after his death last year, perfectly preserved. A miracle? Well, not quite. Her father might have loved marzipan, Mary said, but he had enjoyed E.T. so much that he never wanted to eat it. “I am now its keeper,” she added, “and I’ll never eat it either.”

For those of us of a certain age, the only thing more terrifying than the prospect of eating 40-year-old marzipan is the realisation that fully four decades have elapsed since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. ruled the box office. I was almost eight when my parents took me to see it. I well remember my fascination with the basic premise — dwarfish alien botanist, disastrously stranded in the cultural desert of suburban California, is desperate to find his way home — and can even more vividly recall my utter desolation when it seemed the ugly little fellow’s race was run. And I’m happy to report that Spielberg’s film has lost none of its power. We watched it with my son during one of the lockdowns, and my wife’s decision to invest in a huge packet of tissues was richly vindicated. (He cried too, but not as much as me.)

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This is Tolkien's world

By Dominic Sandbrook

The story behind E.T. is well known, and has never better been told than in the review by Time’s critic, Richard Corliss, a few days before the film’s release in June 1982:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Steven, who lived in a mythical land called Suburbia. His house was just like everybody else’s house; his family’s car and dog and swimming pool were just like everybody else’s too. But little Steven’s dreams were different. He dreamed of telling the stories of his strange land — wonderful tales of his home and his school, his parents and especially his friends — and making them shine like new. So every night he would tiptoe outside his ranch-style house and make a wish on the brightest star in the suburban sky. Over and over he would whisper, “Help me tell the story …”

E.T. is a fairy-tale about growing up in suburbia and dreaming of the world beyond. It’s a film about feeling different and struggling to fit in, about the outsider hiding within us all. It’s also, very famously, a film about a child — the hero, Eliott — wounded by his parents’ divorce. Spielberg had been deeply hurt by his own parents’ separation in the early Sixties, and had actually been working on a fictionalised version of their story before he turned to E.T.. And even now, 40 years on, it remains a sublimely affecting account of what family trauma does to an impressionable child — all the more so because it is, of course, a child’s escapist fantasy.

But E.T. is also very obviously a film of a particular era. The late Seventies and early Eighties are much in vogue at the moment. ABBA — peak years 1976 to 1981 — have retaken the stage to rapturous applause, albeit in digital avatar form. Star Wars’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, created by Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas in 1977, now has a Disney series of his own. A fourth Indiana Jones film, continuing the story Spielberg and Lucas began in 1981, is out next year. Even Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, which currently dominates the box office, tries to recapture the spirit of the mid-Eighties, Ronald Reagan’s shiny, swaggering, shoulder-padded heyday, when it was forever morning again in America.

There’s an obvious generational explanation for all this. If, like me, you remember sobbing at the cinema as E.T. lay dying, then you’re probably in your late forties or early fifties, easy prey for the nostalgia industry. Life is more complicated than it used to be: more hectic, more stressful, more fraught with compromise and disappointment. As the accountants at Disney’s streaming service know only too well, it’s natural to yearn for the simplicity and innocence of childhood. When you watch E.T. now and feel the tears pricking at your eyeballs, are you crying for the alien, or for Elliott — or for yourself?

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Were the late Seventies and early Eighties really a more innocent time, though? No, of course not. Flick through the pages of any newspaper and you see stories just as heart-breaking and hair-raising as any you’d find today: revolution and war in the Middle East, bloody repression in Poland, a child-abuse panic in America, terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland. For Spielberg’s generation, the scars of Watergate and Vietnam were still painfully raw – as were memories of the Holocaust, which his Orthodox Jewish parents had often discussed with him when he was growing up. “I was a scared kid,” he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone in 2007. “I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way of transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives.”

But there was a palpable difference between then and now, and you need only rewatch a film like E.T. or the original Star Wars to see it. For all Spielberg’s talk about private horrors, both films are fundamentally, unselfconsciously optimistic. People are decent, Han Solo has a heart of gold, and tomorrow really will be brighter than today. In E.T., for example, much of the tension surrounds a shadowy group of government agents who are determined to capture the alien for themselves. At first glance it seems all very Watergate, echoing Seventies conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation or The Parallax View. But it turns out that their leader, “Keys”, is actually a thoroughly decent fellow, a grown-up version of young Elliott himself. Official America, in other words, isn’t so bad after all. “I’ve been wishing for this,” Keys says at one point, “since I was 10 years old.” It’s hard to imagine a US government agent in 2022 being given a line like that.

Both films also share a fundamental faith in modernity itself: in science, technology and the idea of the future. In Star Wars, it’s true that the ships and uniforms are battered and grubby, reflecting a sense of decline since the Empire replaced the Republic — a very Roman theme. But none of the characters ever doubts that technology is good for them. There are no environmental costs; you can fire up your speeder as often as you like without worrying about climate change. Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence, except for the barman at the Mos Eisley cantina (“We don’t serve their kind here”). Like E.T.’s alien plant-enthusiast, droids are useful, good-natured, even kind-hearted. They’re not trying to take over the world. They’re just trying to help.

If you want an insight into the mentality behind films like E.T., perhaps the best place to go is the Nasa visitor centre at Cape Canaveral, a vast monument to the optimism of a vanished age. The entire experience is infused with a sense of faith: in America, in technology, in progress, in humanity itself. On the screens above you, a succession of elderly men and women with reassuring Midwestern accents talk of comradeship and teamwork, duty and commitment. None of them questions whether it was worth it, or doubts that they were doing the right thing. And the entire experience is underpinned by a sense of narrative, a story driving towards a moment of apotheosis. That moment, of course, is 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. “The first thing I think about when I think about the Sixties,’” Spielberg told Rolling Stone, “is when we landed on the moon.”

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By Sean Thomas

But my overwhelming impression after visiting Nasa a few months ago, rather like my feeling after rewatching E.T., was simply one of nostalgia. Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind was more than a half a century ago; for children today, it is as remote as the Battle of the Somme was to children in 1969. To put it bluntly, the moment has passed. The Space Race is over. Nasa’s government funding has dried up; it relies heavily on private sponsorship now. When we think of technology today, we often think of the costs, not the benefits. Despite the miracle of the Covid vaccines, a believer in scientific progress today runs a gauntlet of cynicism and disillusionment. And who now believes in the future?

So if there was a film in the summer of 1982 that foreshadowed our present, it wasn’t E.T.. It was a competitor released just two weeks later, which performed very poorly at the box-office but became one of the most aesthetically influential science-fiction visions ever made. With its neon cities shrouded in smog and pollution, its streets crowded with rogues, immigrants, whores and replicants, its nightmarish future of driving rain and endless night, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner could hardly feel more different from the moral universe of Spielberg’s fairy-tale. But today our world seems closer to Scott’s vision than to Spielberg’s. And perhaps that’s why E.T. still commands such power, as a reminder of what we’ve lost.

All of which, of course, brings us back to that marzipan. As Jim Robson’s daughter Mary told the BBC, they would get it out now and again in the intervening years, to remind them of days gone by. “It was nice to see it again, it’s like a familiar face, so finding it wasn’t sad because it just always made us laugh,” she said wistfully. “I took it home to look after and I haven’t put it away. I like to see it every day.”

A bittersweet story, then. But perhaps the last word should go to St Albans’s equivalent of the engineers behind the Apollo missions, the director of Simmons Bakers. He was pleased to hear that their creation had lasted forty years, he said. “But I still wouldn’t recommend eating it.”