On just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments and the novel – Douthat in NYT:

‘When “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” debuted together late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success “Glicked” — a reference to the portmanteau of “Barbenheimer” that described the joint cultural triumph of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in the summer of 2023.
It was painful because the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a famous doll, but no less creative for all that) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate.
Whereas “Wicked” and the “Gladiator” sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays — through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments.’

(…)

‘I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’s villainous Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” is supposed to be cultural ferment: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”’

(…)

‘Certainly that’s the feeling I had reading a lot of “best of” lists from movie critics this year. The films the critics really loved often felt incredibly marginal, more microtargeted even than the old art-house circuit. But the reviewers weren’t being unusually snobbish (my own favorite movie to date, “Anora,” has only made $13 million in North America); the list of genuinely commercially successful movies was just an incredibly dispiriting round of sequels and spinoffs and reboots.’

(…)

‘And novel reading, even more than reading generally, is in obvious eclipse: There are (some) good novels but hardly any that seem genuinely important.
It’s possible that the idea of an “important” work of popular art, like the idea of movie stardom, simply can’t survive the transition to the digital era. The journalist and novelist Ross Barkan has done interesting writing on this theme, borrowing from Bret Easton Ellis’s concepts of “Empire” and “Post-Empire” to describe a shift from the post-World War II culture that gave us big stars and big movies and Great American Novelists to a culture that’s too fractured for any artist to matter at that kind of scale. (Barkan argues that the brief cultural dominance of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce was a fleeting throwback, like the last light from a dying sun.)’

Read the article here.

First things first, The Third Man quote is always appreciated but the cuckoo clock comes from the Black Forest in Germany.

Oppenheimer culturally relevant? Perhaps because of let’s’ say the content. I found the movie over-estheticized and slightly boring. I skipped Barbie.

(I wrote about Anora, unfortunately only in Dutch. You can read it here.

The post-empire feels very imperial, and the novel had been declared death so often that one almost got the feeling that the novel and God are the same.

But cultural pessimism is always titillating – and sometimes the pessimism comes with good arguments. Sometimes. Most often the pessimists confuse their own demise with cultural demise. In other words, cultural pessimism is the malady of elderly men.

That’s not to say that you need to be an optimist.

When it comes to culture the best thing is to be a stoic.