Why Movies Don’t Matter Anymore

Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed for GQ, and he dropped this truth bomb:

“Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives,” he said. “When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it… We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”

When asked what he believes has replaced movies, he said, “Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’”

Is he right? Of course, he is. Everyone knows it. Everyone can see it. If they can’t, they’re too much inside the bubble to see reality anymore—which is part of the problem. Hollywood has always been a bubble, but over the past decade or so, much of the American cultural elite—book publishing, media, movies, news—has concentrated into its own ecosystem that, quite frankly, leaves out the majority.

Chris Gore and Clifton Duncan discuss it honestly, in a way you won’t hear in the mainstream.

They ask the question whether Quentin Tarantino coming up now would get any deal with a studio or the same kind of attention. On the one hand, no way. On the other hand, it’s hard to say. Tarantino has shaped so much of what modern American cinema has become, we’d have to try to imagine what the industry would look like had he never came along.

But I get the general point that the industry has become too puritanical, too DEI-oriented, ever to embrace someone like Tarantino whose work, by nature, does not follow the social code of the Left.

Hollywood is staffed top to bottom with people like Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR who is as devout as any true believer can be in the new religion that has overtaken Hollywood. Wokeness or social justice or whatever you want to call it can best be described as a movement controlled by people whose self-image is the most important thing.

Their church, their utopia is what is important. They believe their vision reflects the country now—that it reflects the world—and that things will never go “back to normal.” Is there a way back? I hope so. Either these massive corporations fire their CEOs and the overly-cautious decision-makers at the top and hire people who aren’t “woke,” or else Hollywood will have to collapse. There are no other options. The “woke shit” doesn’t sell. No one likes it except for a small cabal of people who would also tell the Emperor that his clothes are lovely indeed.

Yet to deal with the problem, people have to be able to say the truth out loud and they can’t say it. Nobody can even ask the right questions. Most people are afraid to ask: if America consists of mostly white, heteronormative normies, why does every movie look like it sprang out of an intersectional, multi-cultural, anti-colonizer, two-spirit, non-binary, anti-Zionist throuple wedding in Berkely?

They can’t ask that or say it, even though everyone is thinking it. They can’t say it because the controlling ideology on the Left now is GOODNESS. We have to be GOOOOOOOD. We can’t offend. Women can’t be sexual unless they are queer and non-binary. In the New Improved Paradise, sex can be as explicit and graphic as anyone can possibly imagine—with the sole exception of white, hetero dudes. White straight guys are the bad thing. They’re scary. They can’t even sit with us, much less play with us.

Most humans are drawn to macho men and sexy women. They’re not into the gay thing mostly. That’s just the plain truth of it. The “woke” want them to be. They want everyone to be so totally down with it so no one ever feels marginalized or offended or sad. So they’ve mostly either eliminated any “normal” interactions between people, or they have to always make sure the salad has a variety of toppings so as to leave no marginalized person behind.

I was watching a scene from Friends the other day, a show I didn’t really watch that much when it was the one of the highest-rated show in the ’90s—or ever. (It premiered in 1994 to 21.5 million viewers.) In those days, I though it was fine, but as with everything else, we had an abundance of great shows to watch back then, so it didn’t particularly stand out for me. But watching it now, I was shocked by it, because it’s been so long since I’ve seen just normal people doing normal things. Real-life normal things with good-looking characters and well-written dialogue.

I thought, That is what we’re missing now. We’re missing “normal.” And no, I’m not saying white. But I am saying when non-white people are used to make the executives feel safe, it rings hollow. It just does.

So what happened to normal? I know Gen-Z isn’t supposed to be “normal” and maybe that’s why everything is so weird all of a sudden? The “woke” religion would mean Rachel would have to get an abortion because every woman MUST GET AN ABORTION every time they get pregnant. But we didn’t see it that way back in the 1990s. We still believed in “safe, legal and rare.” We still believed babies were precious. So this scene in Friends is touching but it would never be written today.

Why? Because everything always has to be ON MESSAGE. And that means in complete alignment with the platform pushed by the Democratic Party. It’s suffocating, it’s lifeless, and it is killing its host.

Do I really want to watch Scarlett Johansson in anything now that I know how political she is every five seconds? I’m not so sure. Do I really need to be lectured by a celebrity about how they’d move out of the country or light themselves on fire if Trump won? No. I don’t care what they think and I don’t need to know what they think.

I don’t care what Robert De Niro thinks or if Rob Reiner wants everyone to be afraid of Christians because he, too, must always be on message. That is not what we want from our celebrities. Trust me, we don’t. So why do they feel the need to constantly foist their political opinions upon us? Because they always need to win. But unfortunately for them, that also means they have chosen one group in America whose money and eyeballs they want. Everyone else? Tough luck.

That’s the big picture problem. Hollywood has disdain for people who are not like them, who don’t drive the cars they drive, eat the food they eat, read the news they read, vote for the people they vote for. That’s the problem with NPR, with the New York Times, with the Democrats. It’s all the same because they have formed one massive fascist-like blog of groupthink. And guess what? It’s dull.

It isn’t totally a wasteland. The Curse on Showtime is a great show, and so is Ripley on Netflix. Both of them are true to what they’re supposed to be about. They don’t keep one foot in do-gooderism and one foot in the story. They just tell the story.

When all else fails, how about just offering up NORMAL? You know, like Field of Dreams.

The thing is, people are still mostly normal out there in America. Left, right, white, black—they’re normal. But Hollywood isn’t anymore. Hollywood is weird.

You want to know why Sound of Freedom made so much money? Because it was normal. Top Gun Maverick? Normal.

The Box Office Tells the Tale

It isn’t so much that the movies theaters have emptied out. It’s just that the thriving business that made Hollywood so much money for so long has taken a hit. Why? Because it got weird. It’s not normal anymore. You can only bring in crowds if you’re telling a story that is mostly universal, something almost anyone can get amd identify with. Barbie did well because so many people grew up playing with Barbies. Not rocket science.

Around 20 years ago, Big Hollywood became fixated on packing theaters with easy IPs and routine franchises. Then the perfect storm hit when that reliance on formulaic storytelling crashed into COVID pandemic and the Great Awokening. The ruins left in the aftermath of that storm is where we are now.

The Oscars, however, are an entirely different matter. With last year’s Oppenheimer, finally, we had the rare pairing of big box-office success and artistic flair that used to be common among Best Picture winners. That is the direction that Hollywood and the Oscars should head in, whether they do or not is an open question.

Here are some charts I found and adapted, showing how the box office has evolved since 1990. As you can see box office really starts to climb after the Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings franchises kick off the boom era.

Here are the profits made in billions:

This also matches up with how many films were released in a given year. Until COVID hit us, studio output just kept going up:

Where the Oscars are concerned, however, we see the exact opposite. As the film industry profited and grew, profits for Best Picture winners tanked.

No one paid much attention to this disconnect, because Big Hollywood was making so much money. But the same forces that helped kill Big Hollywood have also killed the public interest in Oscar movies. Until last year.

There will always be movies on offer—on streaming, on premium cable, and occasionally in theaters. That isn’t going to address Jerry Seinfeld’s observation that movies don’t matter. What will fix that? Here are some suggestions.

1. Make Hollywood normal again. Cast as wide a net as possible, like Hollywood used to do. That means ending the pathological need to be GOOOOOOOOD and think about serving audiences. God knows we need it.
2. Drop the woke crap—for the love of all things holy. Stop it. Think majority, not a marginalized minority. Stop mandating that every relationship be interracial. Stop making it seem like everyone in America is LGBTQIA—we aren’t. Stop forcing your opinions and your lectures down our throats. We don’t care. WE DON’T CARE.
3. There is a reason 150 million people watched the Super Bowl and it wasn’t because they liked football. It was because we all wanted to be a part of a shared experience, under one roof, watching something simple that we could all understand, not to mention the Taylor/Travis love story in the middle of it. NORMAL.
4. If you don’t have the stomach for it, hire people who do. Let Ricky Gervais host the Oscars. I promise you, the problem will be solved overnight. The public will realize that the Oscars have gotten over themselves finally. Hire David Mamet to write screenplays. Bring back all the men who have been purged—bring them all back. Armie Hammer, Kevin Spacey, Nate Parker, Woody Allen, and yes, Jerry f*cking Seinfeld.
5. Extend an olive branch to the people on the Right, the real counterculture. John Nolte just wrote a great book called Borrowed Time. It would make an excellent movie—yet, the Left is too pristine, too GOOOD to touch it. He writes for Breitbart. He says politically incorrect things. But guess what? He’s a great writer. Option his book and people will come, Ray.
   Invite back all of the people you have banished from Utopia. Bring them back. This “us vs. them” thing, it ain’t working out so well. And why would anyone want it to be that way, anyway? Do you really think it’s possible to run a business like a utopia in a capitalist country?
6. Stop trying to fix the world when you can’t even fix yourselves. It is not your job to right society’s wrongs, to preach or teach. Your job is to observe humanity and write about it honestly and in a way that entertains all of us. So many talented writers and directors are being sidelined because they’re white men. Why? Is Hollywood a film school now? No, unleash the greatness. If you build it…

If Hollywood can do that, if they can get over themselves and remember that America is a big country full of lots of different kinds of people. There are so many interesting stories that aren’t being told right now, because they can’t be told right now, because no one can tell the truth right now. I have to have hope that someday they will. But until they do, movies will only matter to the small hive mind on Film Twitter that likes it this way. I don’t. I miss the days when movies had a broad reach, movies important enough to move the needle.

Now, I think I’ll do what I always do when I feel hopeless about Hollywood. I put on a movie made at almost any other time except right now. Whenever we do that, when we watch a film like Field of Dreams—which was a hit and a Best Picture contender—we remember that movies back then were not in the business of trying to wash away humanity’s sins. They were just trying to tell a good story.