Out of the Frame
<p><em>Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in<br />
2005 to nine billion dollars,</em> comes today&#8217;s report on the status of<br />
the film industry.</p>
<p>The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about<br />
gay sheepherders.  The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by<br />
one movie that flogged us all for our supposed racism in a wearisomely<br />
familiar way, another that rehashed left-wing grievances against a<br />
minor and ineffective demagogue who&#8217;s been dead for pushing fifty<br />
years, and a thriller that made an Islamic suicide bomber out to be<br />
a saint and Americans parasitic villains.</p>
<p>Call me crazy, but I can&#8217;t help but think there might be some tenuous<br />
shred of a hint of a connection here&#8230;</p>
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<p>Hollywood is still capable of producing a decent flick now and<br />
again (I think the last really good one I saw was<br />
<cite>Firefly</cite>).  But if George Clooney was right when he said Hollywood should be<br />
proud to be out of touch, it&#8217;s got more and more to be proud of every<br />
year.  I&#8217;m no conservative and no prude either, but I have not even<br />
the slightest interest in a movie about two sad losers with penises<br />
compulsively buggering while their lives and marriages fall apart<br />
around them.  Cripes &mdash; if you held a contest to come up with a<br />
story concept that would repel the heterosexual 96% of males, and<br />
people of both sexes who go to the movies to be <em>entertained</em>,<br />
you couldn&#8217;t do better than that.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t bother telling me what I&#8217;m <em>supposed</em> to feel about<br />
<cite>Brokeback Mountain</cite> or what a philistine I am for dismissing<br />
it out of hand, or why it would be good for me to see it.  That&#8217;s exactly<br />
my point; I don&#8217;t want to pay $9.00 to see a movie because somebody else<br />
thought it would be good for me.  I buy entertainment from Hollywood, not<br />
moral prescriptions, and if Hollywood now thinks its job is to improve<br />
my character it can just fuck off.</p>
<p>It happens that in America in 2006, Hollywood is trying to pound<br />
wacky left-wing political correctness down our throats, but my<br />
complaint would be identical if the movie industry were taken over by<br />
Christian evangelicals and persisted in cranking out edifying tales<br />
from the Bible.  Fuck <em>all</em> that noise; the harder you try to<br />
&#8216;uplift&#8217; me in either direction, the more I&#8217;ll gravitate to the simple<br />
thalamic pleasures of gratuitous nudity and big explosions.</p>
<p>Actually, I expect Hollywood&#8217;s drift to get far worse.  All<br />
indications are that the people who greenlight films live so deep<br />
inside the bubble world of elite bicoastal left-liberalism that<br />
they&#8217;re barely aware anything else exists.  And to the limited extent<br />
the are aware, they feel little but contempt for people on the<br />
outside.  This kind of problem tends to be self-reinforcing.</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s difficult to serve customers that you feel little other<br />
than contempt for.  Sooner or later, they tend to notice the contempt.<br />
And go elsewhere. I expect those box-office receipts to keep falling;<br />
the interesting question, now, is when Hollywood&#8217;s narcissistic,<br />
dysfunctional culture will break under the resulting strain.</p>
