One of the most critical features of the Modern Structure is the relationship between the media as a capitalist business and the media as a channel of the Cathedral.
Context
There’s a ton of history here. I saw it suggested recently (by @clarkmicah ?) that the BBC was deliberately constructed as a counterbalance to the right-of-centre newspaper industry. Hearst newspapers in the US also had a right-of-centre bias.
(I’m using the term “right-of-centre” not to imply that some tendencies on the right are closer to an objectively determined “centre” than some others on the left, which I don’t think is even meaningful, but because subjectively from an #nrx point of view, things like Fox News are still leftist, just a little less so.)
Since the early 20th C, the Cathedral has increased its control over media industries, but not completed it. In both Britain and the USA, Rupert Murdoch has established media business with right-of-centre alignment and significant market share.
There are two forces pushing these businesses to the right: First, the owners of media businesses tend to be right of centre, particularly in the 20th C, because the left and the right largely lined up with interests of labour and capital respectively, and business owners are by definition capitalist. Secondly, because the cultural elite are always to the left of the population, there is market pressure pushing media businesses towards the right to attract audiences.
In the 21st Century, the first of those forces has declined to the point that it can be practically ignored. What is crucial is the tension between market forces impinging on media and Cathedral orthodoxy.
Question
It has been suggested that key parts of the media industry, notably Hollywood, are effectively insulated from market pressures. @Stoner_68 said on twitter:
“It takes more than cocktail parties to convince studio execs to take multimillion-dollar losses, over and over again.
It’s as if risk isn’t even a factor. But that can’t be true. They know someone will reimburse their costs.”
I remember Spandrell claiming something similar a month or two ago.
The theory is that either the government or another source of funding (Soros is often mentioned) are subsidising the media; that the only goal of Hollywood etc. is propaganda, and they are only pretending to be profitable businesses.
This is not insane. Obviously, the BBC is, by design, almost totally resistant to commercial pressures. A rich guy can own a newspaper and run it at a loss as a propaganda organ. It would be possible to subsidise movies that pushed a favoured point of view.
A key fact is that the movie industry is extremely opaque financially. Much is written about “Movie A cost X dollars” or “Movie B lost Y dollars”, but these are always guesses by people writing without direct knowledge of the actual receipts and spending on the movie. It is therefore not impossible that the movie industry is running on hidden subsidies and would otherwise be losing money.
However, I do not believe that is what is happening. The general assumption is that the studios are secretive about money because they are ripping off minor investors, writers, actors and everybody else in the world. That seems to me the more likely explanation. The stories become public often enough: The Lord of the Rings went to court and was settled, also the TV series Bones (good detail here),
The main reason for believing that American movies and TV are profitable industries is that they behave like profitable industries do. They pay shitloads of money for top performers. They copy the most successful products until everyone gets sick to death of them. Several of the big studios are public companies with very large market capitalisation.
That is not to say that the movie industry is solely motivated by profit and uninfluenced by ideology. That is obviously untrue. The people in the industry are overwhelmingly left-wing, and their bias clearly influences their product.
There are films made which are not intended primarily, or necessarily at all, for commercial success, but to validate the film-makers view of themselves, and to impress their social and professional peers. “Oscar bait” and art house films both fall into that category. However, while not aimed at profit, these movies are made on limited budgets to at least limit the losses, and to make it possible for them to be profitable.
The big budget films are quite another matter. They are clearly made for profit, because they are managed in the same way as other profit-making enterprises. Actors are paid their market rate based on how likely they are to make the film successful. Huge amounts are spent on promotion and marketing. The studios push some of the financial risk onto top actors and directors by paying them percentages, and those actors and directors are willing to take the percentages because they expect them to be valuable, which they usually are.
Even these big movies carry political bias. They are made by the same people as the more indulgent films, but with the addition of big money and big investors. There is also the influence of the media culture, which also has a left-wing bias and therefore will reward bias in the films with favourable publicity. A film that is seen as having right-wing elements can cause social and professional problems for those involved.
But in spite of all that, nobody is putting hundreds of millions into movies that they don’t expect to make them a profit, and nobody is deliberately wrecking big-budget movies for political motives. Occasionally they accidentally wreck them, but not as often as some people seem to think.
The finances of movies are somewhat opaque, but there’s a lot of business interest and they’re not completely secret. There’s a rule of thumb that a film will break even if its worldwide box office gross is about two and a half times its production budget. That’s taking into account the cost of marketing and distribution, the payments that are made as percentages of the gross, and the other income from TV, DVD rights, spinoffs and so on.
This is a good site with estimates of movie financials.
It’s not possible to validate the truth of that rule of thumb, but the industry acts as if it’s true. Movies that appear to make profits are treated as successes, the people involved and the ideas involved are used again. Movies that appear to make losses by this rule are treated as failures; they aren’t repeated and the people involved will command lower payments for future projects. There are sometimes disputes about the shareout of the profits, these go to court with expensive lawyers and are generally settled quietly.
For this to be all an illusion would involve so many people that faking the moon landings would be easier. Most big-budget movies are profitable. The Last Jedi grossed 1.3 billion from a 220 million budget, so by the rule of thumb it made over half a billion in profit. 2016 Ghostbusters grossed 230 million from a 144 million budget, so it lost the studio money – one of those accidentally wrecked by political bias, in my view. Note that if The Last Jedi had lost money, that would also be put down to its social / political agenda, but the studios believed it was a good investment despite that agenda, and they were right.
Because of the big money going to the most successful, “tournament” style economics apply. Many of those involved in the industry outside of the blockbusters are doing badly; they are underpaid for their work, or losing money on their investments, but they accept that because they are trying to win their places in the top rank that makes the big money. Most fail, but the few who succeed make enough to make entering the tournament attractive. That is one part of the basis of the “art house” sector.
Could a less politically-correct Star Wars have made even more money? Quite possibly, but they would have needed actors, writers, and so on that would have been affected by media opposition to political incorrectness, and managing high-value, temperamental stars is difficult enough at the best of times.
As far as spending money on propaganda goes, blowing tens of millions of dollars on big-name actors who are already on your side anyway just isn’t a sensible use of funds. A few foundations like Soros’ are spending tens of millions a year on propaganda, but they’re making much better use of it than that.
Future
The really interesting question is about the trends. Hollywood is making big money, but sometimes losing it too, and the business side can be held hostage by the demands of politically biased creatives. Audiences might get so irritated by the industry’s politically correct smugness that they lose interest. Ghostbusters is evidence that that is possible. Alternatively, someone might be able to compete with the whole Hollywood establishment by producing movies with the same attractive features but a political tone more in line with the audience. It’s easy to say that the iron grip of leftists is too strong to allow that, but don’t forget Rupert Murdoch managed to do it to the newspaper and cable TV industries. I think it’s significant that newspapers, even in the 1980s, were in decline, while cinema is strong and growing, but the precedent is there.
Oscar bait movies are industrial products. They’re profit, not goodness. Ok, maybe the actors and directors foresake cash for doing a good thing, but there’s gold in Oscar bait.
The films rely on audiences trusting brands like Oscar and BAFTA as ‘best film’, then they make films that target the voters. Voters like it, win awards, audiences go. These are nearly all low-budget, sub-$20m films. Even without nominees that’s not many seats, rentals, TV sales to recoup a lot of cost. But Oscar winners are hugely profitable. 12 Years a Slave was 10*. Even good nominations like The Theory of Everything was 8*.
These award ceremonies have actually been gamed to promote new, low budget films to an audience outside of the popular windows.
What’s going to kill this is that the Oscars are in decline and everyone is getting film advice from friends rather than awards.
The Irish author James Joyce stated that the two erroneous approaches to literature are the pornographic and didactic tendencies. Pornography wants what it does not have and didacticism doesn’t want what it does have. True art, he states, avoids these tendencies and is static, describing the world as it is, not how we want it to be. Nevertheless, one of the most popular text books on Joyce used in America is by a woman who develops the theme that Ulysses is about the wrongness of Anti-Semiticism. (Other works of JJ, which do not mention Jews, are ignored.) This seems to indicate that Americans, even of the academic class, cannot even comprehend the purpose of a literature which is not primarily didactic. As a result, Hollywood is at time more preachy than Chinese literature was under Madame Mao.
It comes, I suppose, from a culture which is mainly commercial, so that literature naturally assumes the role of a form of advertisement. Those who are sufficiently powerful and organised to use this service tend to be the Feminist lobby, the Homosexual lobby, the Black and Immigrant lobby, the Cripple lobby and the Jew lobby. There are doubtless others, which I can’t think of at the moment. Ghostbusters is a film which (apparently, I haven’t seen it) is excessively filled with feminist gripes.
These various lobbies to some extent overlap: it is sometimes hard to separate Lesbianism and Feminism, for example. Also, women who compete in the same job-market as men present with a reduced birth-rate, which usually falls below replacement levels. As a result, countries which excessively promote equality of women need to import immigrants to supply the deficit. For this reason we often find feminist propaganda bundled with anti-racist propaganda.
However, the prevalence of feminist propaganda is partially the natural consequence of the habits of men. Men tend to gravitate away from the part of the media which deals with verbal interaction, and totally dominate in the field of sport entertainment and in computer based combat/gaming/fantasy stuff. Equally, men consume very nearly the totality of identified pornographic literature (I have previously argued here that works such as Twilight and Fifty Shades constitute a form of female pornography, though not usually identified as such.) This means that the narrative/human interaction part will end up with a strong female bias.
But at the same time, the didactic meme is also the result of defective education and imagination. Following your perceptive point “they behave like profitable industries do. They copy the most successful products until everyone gets sick to death of them” it seems to me that once a didactic pattern has been established, it will be copied and copied for ever. Given an educational system in which “To Kill a Mocking-bird” is presented to innocent children as the essence of literature, all subsequently produced literature will tend to copy it. In the context of Hollywood, we should assume that somewhere along the line the success of a previous didactic film has caused script-writers and producers to conclude that this is a safe path to follow.
In general, Hollywood imposes a strange series of requirements on its products which tend to a kind of cult of the average, the majority and the familiar. For example, Christopher Robin in the Disney cartoon version of Winnie the Pooh is presented as a bratty American child with a continual demanding whine of the sort American viewers would find familiar and reassuring.
If, when casting a film about the life of Queen Victoria, you have a choice between, on the one side, an actress who looks, sounds and comports herself just like Queen Victoria and on the other side, Will Smith, then you go with Will Smith, because he is a celebrity. If however Will has a prior engagement and the Queen Vic lookalike gets her chance, then in the event of the film being successful she herself will have become a celebrity and will be able to compete with more obviously qualified candidates to play the role of Martin Luther King.
The initial desire of the Hollywood mavens was to place an American child actor, rather than Daniel Radcliffe, in the role of Harry Potter. When the authoress intervened to prevent a potential travesty, Radcliffe was able to carve out a place for himself among the marketable celebrities of acting. However, having landed various parts in American movies, he found they did not require him to play them as an American: they wanted him to retain his Harry Potter accent, however implausible that might be in the context of the plot. So what these people are doing is not promoting acting, artistic integrity or historical accuracy, it is selling celebrities.
There is a precedent for productions in which women are implausibly brave and strong. The Bionic Woman started in 1976, which places it as far back as the beginning of the outbreak of feminism. It was highly successful, in the US and UK. Equally successful was the Nutty Professor starring Eddie Murphy (1996), a remake of the Nutty Professor (1963), which itself was an updating of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
So it does appear that it is possible to make films in which women are stronger (due to a Science Fiction implant) than the male population and a random African American can achieve what a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical industry cannot (though admittedly it was classified as a comedy) and still turn a profit.
Thus following the principle of “If something succeeds, copy it” we have not yet seen the end of movies which exaggerate the position of woman and Negroes. Perhaps Ghostbusters is an example of pushing the trend further than the public will tolerate by the inclusion of a lot of ideological bullshit, and the market will correct this.
What is debatable is your characterising of this as a Left Wing aberration.
In England, we have a 3 party system (4 in Wales/Scotland, 5 in Northern Ireland). The role of the Conservative Party is to stand for the selfish interests of the employer and manufacturer and that of the Labour Party for the selfish interests of the worker and consumer.
As nowadays the worker/consumer alliance is insufficient to command a majority of the electorate, usually the Labour Party tries to make up the difference by coming to an understanding with various Particularist interest groups: Feminists, Gay, Disabled, etc. Sometimes this involves incorporating these people within the movement: in other cases, their cause is championed by the Centre: the environment by the Green Party, and some of the others by the Liberal Party.
As the nrx hashtag brigade do not function in the world of consensus politics, some might say in the world of consensual reality at all, they do not need to come to terms with any of these Particularist or Centrist pressure groups and can dismiss them as “Left Wing”.
The Conservative Party are not so fortunate: as they are more #politician than #loony or #wanker, they too have to satisfy the Particularists to some extent.
Mrs May (Maidenhead, Conservative) has pledged that new legislation will be brought to outlaw ‘upskirting’: a word of which I was unaware till yesterday. Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative), the person responsible for killing the previous bill, may have a point. Existing legislation probably adequately covers behaviour of this sort, the reason for the police saying they are powerless to act is that they find the incident trivial in the extreme compared with the murders, rapes and knifings they already have to deal with in the Central London region. But other sources allege that the real reason for his attack was to free up time for a Private Members Bill which privatised parts of the NHS in the interest of certain business associates of his.
So we have real politics, which is about preserving or attacking the NHS, the focus of the Left and Right, respectively, and diversionary matters, regulating the minutiae of interaction between male and female, white and black etc.
You’ve certainly zeroed in accurately on the difference between your view of the world and mine. As far as I can see, if the practice of medicine in Britain were banned tomorrow, all hospitals closed and all doctors drafted into other occupations, it would have less effect on the lives of ordinary people and on the long-term prospects of our society than has been caused by the changes in the relations between male and female that have been applied within the last few decades, which themselves are small compared to those of the last century.
Given that the elimination of health services is highly unlikely, and all that is being discussed are changes to the way they are organised and funded — something which I could not hope to have an intelligent opinion on, given both the complexity of the questions and the unreliability of any information available to me relating to them — well, you can keep your “real politics”. I have no strong view of who is more “left” or more “right” among Mr Corbyn, Mrs May or Mr Blair.
What you call “Particularist interest groups” are the expression of the dominant political force. Championing of the urban proletariat was just a prelude, a step on the path to what we have now — what Spandrell has called Biological Leninism.
Your mistake is very similar to the one I made — you are now sticking to the slogans of the gone-and-forgotten proletarian revolutionaries of the mid twentieth century, but twenty years ago I was sticking to the slogans of the even-more-gone free trade liberals of the late nineteenth. Either or both of our positions could be right, but those old battles have no more usefulness to those who have to cement a ruling alliance.
I read Spandrell’s rant with amusement, but object to his self-indulgent statement: Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. Obviously this is false. The most that these categories of person can hope is that they enjoy the same status as white, Christian, heterosexual non-transsexual males, but that they enjoy a higher status than them simply is not true.
The conspiracy of evil fat black disabled women and transsexual Muslim paedophiles running our society strikes me as no more of a clear and present danger than the march of bodybuilding male nudists. Here in Merseyside we have not yet learnt to treat these classes of people as our rulers, but rather continue to isolate, pillory and demean them, as this video shows:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIHg5RyU6Mw
The transsexual in question works in a charity shop, not yet having assumed executive power. I was approached by the evil ugly fat black woman yesterday, she asked me for spare change, which I did not give to her. I don’t think she enjoys a particularly high status in our society either.
You see, I am a bit of a Particularist myself. In Ceredigion we had an MP who was half Green and half Welsh Nationalist. My dream team includes people like this. Nor do I see myself as in thrall to the “slogans of the gone-and-forgotten proletarian revolutionaries”.
It would be indiscrete to name the Fire Brigade I worked for, but the Station Officer assured me he had been present when the visiting Margaret Thatcher (Finchley, Con) drank from a cup of tea around which every man in the Station had previously wiped his penis. From this we divine that there was quite a gulf between the ruling Conservative Party and the staff of this useful and necessary public service, but they were not exactly proletarian revolutionaries: one member was quite an enthusiast for the Liberal Democrats, I imagine the rest were satisfied with Labour. Their programme was quite mild and did not include Permanent Cultural Revolutions or liquidation of kulaks: it merely involved banalities such as the continuation of Emergency Services, the imposition of Fire Retardant Cladding, and permanent, pensionable full-hours contracts for Public Service workers.
This was well into the days of enforced diversity, Equal Opportunities and the like. As I recall, in a force of hundreds, we had on our books but three women, one who got pregnant and exited the force, one who, disabled from active service, was permanently on light duties and one who had taken and passed every single examination in Fire Fighting Tech and so passed seamlessly into administration.
Fire-fighting is a not only a male orientated activity, but one which attracts the less cerebral, more physical sort of male. Diversity meant there were White firemen, West Indian, Sikh and Muslim firemen but no Jews, Chinese or Hindus that I noticed.
There was one incident when a cleaning lady walked into a toilet and encountered a Station Officer sodomising one of the firemen. Curiously, instead of being promoted to encourage diversity, they were fired for outraging public decency. It seems to be the wrong kind of homosexuality, an opportunistic indulgence of dirty boys looking for fast, strings-free relief (encouraged perhaps by the intimacies of preparing cups of tea for visiting Home Secretaries), (the choice of the Fire Station for the activity indicating that they both led more conventional lives elsewhere), rather than the life long commitment with right-on demands for equality that constitutes political gayness.
Feminism I don’t see as that much of a threat because it is essentially bipolar and content free. On the one hand we have shrinking violets afraid of men photographing under their skirts, and on the other bull dykes who think they can run the S.A.S. They sort of cancel each other out. I was particularly impressed by a television programme on the unpromising topic of the interviewees for the position of Lighting Engineer at Royal Albert Hall. There were 350 of them, all male. To me this shows that ordinary men’s work—boring and unglamorous—continues to be done by men: it is only when it comes with high prestige and earning capacity that women start clamouring for equality.
If women succeed in taking over half the posts in the cabinet, then that means that the true seat of control lies elsewhere, business or the mafia perhaps. Certain roles, the models for Britannia or Hibernia for example, were always traditionally performed by women. This just means that the cabinet have changed their role to that of national mascots.
But the intrusion of women into the workplace is an ongoing, experimental process: initial enthusiasm often gives way to disillusionment. Either women can do men’s jobs, in which case we have to ask whether we were right to exclude them in the first place, or they cannot, in which case their candidacy will eventually be barred. A good example of this happened in Fulton Co, GA, which appointed as Sheriff’s Deputy a fat black 5́ 2 woman of 51 years and left her in sole charge of 6́ Brian Nichols (also black and extremely ornery) aged 33. He overpowered her, took her gun, and shot the judge and 3 others. One imagines that the appointments committee took notice and altered their practice. Allegations of sexism, sizeism and ageism should not be allowed to sway the appointment of Sheriff’s Deputies, though those of racism can still be investigated.
By contrast however we must consider the case of Det Con Hazel Savage, who obdurately and in the face of opposition from male colleagues insisted on digging up the property of Fred West, who had corrupted the male members of the force by giving them free rides of his missus.
So as I see it there should be an auxiliary female police force: I am prepared to believe that women can make better administrators (less likely to bend the rules) and better interrogators (I have some experience of male police interrogation, as perhaps do you). As the number of female police officers increases, the incidence of rape in the community declines, as does the incidence of workplace flatulence. But it is only in fictional police procedurals with science fiction bionic implants that they are better fighters than men, not because of a Cathedral conspiracy but because these things are written by women. So I still see them as auxiliaries and believe they should be paid less because they are not contributing muscle to maintaining law and order to the same extent.
It has taken considerable discrimination and a formidable colour-bar to maintain the existence of the Black population in the US. In Argentina, which once had slaves on the same scale as the US, only 149,493 (0.3%) out of a total population of 40,117,096 identified themselves as Afro-Argentine in 2010. At one time they were a third of the population in Buenos Aires. African DNA has disappeared into the general population through intermarriage, in the same way that Native American DNA has in the US. In Britain also, Windrush era immigration is in many cases no longer discernable in the current generation. So I would say that Spandrell’s objection to any persons of ebony hue enjoying the status they have earned when they are long standing citizens of the same country as him is an example of unacceptable reactionary bile. He does supply a good example of an undeserving case, but we cannot base a conclusion on a sample of one.
This is bigger and more important than the minor point about Hollywood that it is attached to. With your permission, I’d like to publish your last comment as a post on its own (“A sceptic comments on Bioleninism”) and take the discussion from there.
OK