Price Point 035: Love, TV, the Future, and the Supreme Soviet
A prolegomena toward a modern manifesto
I have to say, I love Graydon Carter’s AirMail. Their recent South of France issue, tied to the Cannes film festival and featuring great pieces on Francis Ford Coppola, the mega disaster of Caligula, and a shopping list from Jean Pigozzi, who does indeed, in his own words, have the “most fun pool in the South of France,” is just chef’s kiss.
Usually I do Hollywood business pieces, and sometimes culture. Today is culture. I think culture is under-served as a topic because if your culture goes astray, your technology will not save you. If you think I should have a whole separate stack just for culture pieces, let me know. But this is the culture business after all.
Many of my friends have been saying that there should be a new studio or a new streamer. I agree, essentially, but to earn the right to do that one must have a fundamental point of view that justifies a new platform or a new voice. Some thoughts toward such a perspective.
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As horses cavort on the meadow, they accept that some will buck from time to time and there may be a bruise here or there. It is inevitable. But it’s all part of being a horse, a wild mustang even, and bruises heal. Horses would only punish each other when one showed an extensive pattern of being violent or if one conspired to murder.
Flowers by contrast cannot live by similar regulations. They heal poorly if at all. If they are trampled, they die. In flower world, all incursions must be punished severely. If all incursions are punished severely, then everyone becomes more robotic and similar, but that’s the only way to get a bed of roses. Flowers must minimize risk and encourage order.
But we aren’t roses. We are more like horses. And the wildness and dissimilarity within us, the uniqueness, should be encouraged, not oppressed, because our wildness is essential to our greatness. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot have the spaceships, the hilarious comedies, the massive ventures without the other.
Perhaps the average daisy does not want greatness. It wants only normalcy and a lack of danger. But we are not daisies either.
Or at least, we must decide whether to be flowers or horses.
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In Tablet, William Deresiewicz recently wrote:
Robert Hughes spoke of the shock of the new, his phrase for modernism in the arts. Now there’s nothing that is shocking, and nothing that is new: irresponsible, dangerous; singular, original; the child of one weird, interesting brain. Decent we have, sometimes even good: well-made, professional, passing the time. But wild, indelible, commanding us without appeal to change our lives? I don’t think we even remember what that feels like.
Indeed. In the 50s, Lionel Trilling smoked cigarettes, was a middle aged man; he had strong opinions about Matthew Arnold; he had subtle opinions that he expressed in a refined manner; important people cared about it, and he was on the cover of magazines. James Joyce was on the cover of magazines. So was Eugene O’Neill.
Hunter S. Thompson could sell magazines with his gonzo take on happenings. Tom Wolfe could wear all white suits and write Radical Chic & Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers. When Frank O’Hara worked with Larry Rivers he was in a totally different subculture than anything Lionel Trilling, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ed Ruscha, or William F. Buckley were involved with or crossing into. Franny and Zooey, a reprint of two stories from The New Yorker, was the best selling novel in the United States for 27 weeks running in 1961-1962.
No one sounds like William F. Buckley, John F. Kennedy, Truman Capote, or Howard Cosell anymore because American accents have all evened out. Accents don’t matter in themselves perhaps, but I believe that this goes hand in hand with a spreading sameness and dullness.
In mainstream media today, — in our world today — I am arguing that there are fewer unique personalities with a unique culture with a unique aesthetic who come from a specific place who say unpredictable and unbridled things. There is no, say, P.J. O’Rourke writing How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink. There is no Hunter S. Thompson or Joan Didion or Truman Capote whom you have to read and who have distinctive features and sharp edges, who are a little unpredictable and come from a specific cultural place. One can hardly recognize Carl Sandburg’s Chicago:
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
That feels like something from the past. Perhaps, in this way, the passing of Logan Roy, even though he is a fictional character, is symbolic.
When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute-jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you’re half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you’re going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You’d have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you’ll die of pure sensory overload, I’m here to tell you.
- P.J. O’Rourke
My read of this is that personality and the specificity of culture has been eroded, by consequence of a specific set of beliefs, and I am here to argue that this is not for the best.
People today are too often reductively categorized — typically, they are “right wing” or “left wing,” or categorized by race, or both, as if that’s all you need to know. I think by oversimplifying people, we have lost something important. Namely, our personality — but we can recover it.
Culture has surrendered some of its ability to imagine; that is, there has been a decline in faith, not only in practice but even in the capacity for faith. Regarding a writer as being great or venerable, a Lionel Trilling, an Arthur Miller, a J.D. Salinger, requires a certain lack of cynicism, some of William James’s Will to Believe. It requires a belief that literature matters, ideas matter, and culture matters, that the dialogue we are having in essays and in the arts all matters, and by implication that each of us has a unique and diverse intellectual furniture in our intellectual houses, the composition of which matters. This sort of openness to belief is of a piece with being able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy a musical like Sound of Music, which we now don’t do, or even believing in God, which now fewer of us do. Perhaps it is not a decline in faith, exactly, but it should be broadened: what we are seeing is a postmodern decline in belief in general.
With such a decline we would expect to see a decline in interest in the humanities, because by implication they would not be important. We have indeed seen this. Indeed, Andreessen Horowitz’s Kathleen Boyle, whose work I admire, on observing the recent rapid decline of the English Major, recently tweeted
People don’t talk about novels like they did. They don’t celebrate novelists (particularly not literary novelists, as Colleen Hoover and “booktok” eat up the book world). There was an era when the best novels were often the most popular novels, and that era is over. If ideas and the cultural building blocks that make up your intellectual furniture cannot add up to a distinctive personality because you are really defined merely as right wing or left wing, — and, in a postmodern world, you are not approaching truth in any case, — then why is the curation of your culture or our culture collectively, important?
Hollywood has of late decided to embrace a new tone: more broadcast, avoiding too artsy, too funny, too smart, or too 1%. After many years of a golden or platinum age of television, where we saw The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other shows (even Succession was greenlit in 2017) that broke ground and brought the medium to new heights, there has been an effort to pull back and to follow the path of books to more “accessible,” less ambitious, material.
Culture has been bureaucratized, politicized, and diluted in this hyper-consolidated one party state of culture.
I am not writing in the spirit of nostalgia. So far this has been a problem statement for a solvable problem. There are 4 things at work:
Intersectionalism and the accompanying politicization of culture
Postmodernism, which seeks to sap everything of meaning
Year Zero History (anti-regionalism + anti-historicity)
Safetyism, or, flower ethics aka fear
You might be able to boil the first three into one — a postmodern and Marx-tinged approach to culture — but I will present these for now as 4 phenomena.
Politicization of Culture
Culture and art have been politicized; that is, the politics are as important as the art. Every review of anything today will mention the race of the creator, his or her politics, and usually what kind of person they like to have sex with. Because if you truly appreciate art, you know that that’s the most important thing. This NYT review of The Little Mermaid is typical. It’s all about politics. People who discuss art in this way do not care very much about art.
Meanwhile, all Left political movements and subcultures have been subsumed into one overarching intersectional ideological holding company such that one can no longer be quite specific or just not that political to begin with (was Frank O’Hara political? Not that I am aware) but instead one must always be fully invested in all of an evolving list of changing policies called intersectionalism. (Because intersectionalism is a faux-scientific and unfun word I call the whole movement associated with it The Supreme Soviet.) Andrew Sullivan can speak to this issue with more insight than me but in any case I am primarily interested in the effect it has of making everyone less distinguishable.
It has come to the point where in the public perception you are either 1 or 0. You are either a crypto Marxist postmodern Marcusean Alinskyite nonbinary cuck or you must be a right wing, trad, Ralph Lauren-wearing, cottagecore, alt right, bodybuilding, white supremacist, Christian nationalist cryptoboy chad. And as readers, we already know what you are going to say, politically, based on that identity, which is regarded as the most important element of what you are saying as an artist. Therefore, there is no one you have to know because there are only two positions and we are already familiar with them.
This is of course all reductive and boring and fails to appreciate that most people, most of life, and most stories, are just not that political.
Year Zero History
Anti regionalism goes hand in hand with anti historicity, which is all part of a Year Zero mindset that seeks to write a new story on the palimpsest of American history, indeed in the subconscious of all Americans. To do so, existing American history must be erased. The removal of statues began with confederate generals but of course culminated with removing Teddy Roosevelt from the Museum of Natural History. That was not required by any due respect for historical indignities, it has to do with starting a new story. Someone has an ink pot and is eager to write a new story without the specifics of the true story. True national and regional stories, organic regional cultural artifacts such as accents, have rough edges. They are specific and unique. They create a diversity of people within the nation with their own cultural tendencies and allegiances and with a set of local values, a furniture of the mind. This can be inconvenient for ambitious revolutionaries who want to promulgate a new national story with themselves and their values at the center.
Historical stories operate like fictions. Both help form the people. Stalin was not wrong when he said that writers are “the engineers of the human soul.” For forty years we have been teaching at universities that our stories should be deconstructed and dismantled to reveal their inherent ambiguity and lack of meaning, their inability to communicate, and then overlaying that with a Foucault-ian analysis that covers all stories with a single story — the story of who is oppressed and who isn’t. Through forty years of effacing the meaning and essence of our art, we come to the point where all art tells one very simple story, which is a simple intellectual game played on a large scale that I would argue has impoverished the souls of Americans in a calamitous way.
As we are walking down the street we see ourselves in a story where we are walking down a street. The context and assumptions of this character we play in this story that we are imagining are formed by the many stories that have been meaningful to us before. From this story framework, we may gain a heightened sense of mission, purpose, or importance, or opportunity. but if we lose our faith in story, in myth, in national myth, in all stories, — if we give up our capacity to imagine — we become less, our world becomes smaller as we allow one simple, repeated tale to subsume the rich and specific inheritance of our cultural tradition as well as the daily visions and additions of contemporary art. This impoverishment of culture was the prelude to the hiding of history; they are two parts of one thing. And they bring on an existential moment.
You might expect in this scenario to see weakening societal morale in the form of a decline in marriage and rising suicides and drug addiction. In fact, that is exactly what we see.
Antifun
Modern far left culture of late has become very much like old right wing culture insofar as it is prudish, anti-funny, and anti-sexy, selectively embracing and enforcing an exquisite politeness in film, literature and life. We live in a childish and Victorian time.
By “far left” by the way I don’t mean Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein and Jimmy Carter. I mean more extreme people who think that political conformity is much more important than art. But “extreme” and “far” make it sound fringe and small. It isn’t fringe. I would say that it is the default view in journalism and probably in Hollywood.
Strong female protagonists today, like Captain Marvel, Galadriel, and Rey, have no romantic lives. And it’s getting to the point where any acknowledgement in fiction of the occasional sexual electricity between men and women at any time, even at 2 AM on the beach at Ibiza, is offensive, complicated and problematic.
Once the modern Left arrives, the party is over — all thoughts of humor and anything sexy must go. If you don’t believe me, believe Chris Rock, Goldie Hawn, and Damian Glover. And, on stories with an erotic tinge, here’s a recent Wrap story.
Ostensibly the rationale for this is to cater to the most sensitive person in the room. Firstly, we should not be catering to the most sensitive person in the room. They can f*** right off. Secondly, I do not believe that protecting some hypersensitive oddball is ever the real reason for the new outrage. The real motive is power.
This is of course totally unconnected with the old left which at 2AM on the beach on Ibiza would have written a song for you, played it, signed a record deal, married you, and had two kids with you by morning. The old left, the Jimmy Carter left, had good parties in Laurel Canyon.
I’m with Joe Orton: “The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.”
What if This is All a Mistake, or a Ploy?
Obviously something has been lost. But what if this was all given up for nothing? All our, if you will, individual personality?
Or, to flip the Foucaultian power dynamics analysis the other way, what if this is all just a bunch of rhetoric designed to shift power from people and artists to the rhetoricians?
What if we gave up all the Dionysian creativity, the trysts and jokes and ripostes and late night grunion runs of the intellect and the idea that stories have meanings and that sometimes those meanings aren’t about societal power structures just … for nothing? What if you gave up the idea that you have a unique personality and unique opinions … as part of some power play?
I mean, what is the upside of all this again?
You may occasionally fear that you’ve been completely fooled and forced to quell or suppress your interest in love, life, ambiguity, flirtation, irony, your unique culture, champagne, poetry, humanism, and a free and interesting artistic and intellectual life — and in yourself as a unique individual, not as part of a movement or a member of a large category. Everything you may have thought was cool about Post War America has been rejected. Has the trade been worth it? Is there something about the reasoning of postmodernism that ineluctably and inescapably forces us to embrace this paradigm?
That fear would be understandable. Because essentially if you make politics your first thing and you adopt flower culture, there are certain things you will not write and you will see yourself differently — as an example of a category, as less individual. You’ve sacrificed all of this, all of the interestingness and personal uniqueness, to an invisible god in the hope that one day this god will come down to Earth with great gifts.
If you have adopted flower culture could you write this?
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
- James Joyce, Ulysses
If you embrace flower culture could you write this?
i was an infinitely hot and dense dot so begins the autobiography of a feral child who was raised by huge and lurid puppets an autobiography written wearing wrist weights it ends with these words: a car drives through a puddle of sperm, sweat, and contraceptive jelly splattering the great chopsocky vigilante from hong kong inside, two acephalic sardines in mustard sauce arc asleep in the rank darkness of their tin container suddenly, the swinging doors burst open and a mesomorphic cyborg walks in and whips out a 35 Ib. phallus made of corrosion-resistant nickel-base alloy and he begins to stroke it sullenly, his eyes half shut it’s got a metal-dioxide membrane for absolute submicron filtration of petrochemical fluids it can ejaculatc herbicides, sulphuric acid, tar glue, you name it at the end of the bar, a woman whose album-length poem about temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ) had won a grammy for best spoken word recording is gently slowly ritually rubbing copper hexafluoroacetylacetone into her clitoris as she watches the hunk with the non-euclidian features shoot a glob of dehydrogenated ethylbenzene 3,900 miles towards the arctic archipelago eventually raining down upon a fiord on baffin bay outside, a basketball plunges from the sky, killing a dog at a country fair, a huge and hairy man in mud-caked blue overalls, surrounded by a crowd of retarded teenagers, swings a sledgehammer above his head with brawny keloidal arms and then brings it down with all his brute force…
- Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Could you direct this?
How did Virgin Records make a mark? What about SST Records? Def Jam?
Not by being safe.
We have bureaucratized our culture, dumbed it down and made it safe, controllable, and limited. I mean, we created Hollywood, the Super Bowl, and rock n’ roll. We went to the moon.
Why become less interesting now?
My point of view is that this has all been a bad tradeoff built on a false and non-mandatory foundation. Bad for art, bad for us as individuals who want to be individuals with our own stories, and bad for the country.
We can live as robots controlled by some master ideology. Or we can reject it all and live free and individualistic lives embracing spontaneity, yourself, the variety of humanity and rejecting mass group dialectics. That is, we can embrace an art and human-friendly ideology.
Those are your two options.
The New Comedy
Menander introduced the New Comedy in Greece in the 4th Century BC. The new Comedy was more colloquial, more every day, more relatable. The manifesto of Futurism was published in 1909 in the Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna.
When is it not a good time for a good manifesto? This is not it, but I encourage it. The first thing one has to do is commit to the importance of quality art, to aesthetics, as a primary value, over ideology. As Roger Scruton said, “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.” We have to set priorities as if art and aesthetics are critical. We have to choose aesthetics, freedom, fun and the new over the primacy of politics, over safety, over politeness, and over tight control.
As part of our healing process it will be important to reorganize our bookshelves a bit. Konstantin Leontiev rallied for danger, strong passions, prejudices, superstitions, fanaticism …, in a word everything to which the nineteenth century is opposed. His aesthetic theory of life, a hard commitment to aesthetics, is incompatible with the reductive tendencies of ahistoricity or deconstructionism. So Leontiev is rehabilitated in the new pantheon.
Walter Pater, with his advocacy of living life intensely with a sensitivity to art and aesthetics, should be rediscovered as we move Foucault up to the box in the attic. Pater of course inspired Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Douglas Murray just put up a fabulous piece on Byron in theFP. Murray talks about how Byron “had that desire—described in the film Dead Poets Society—to suck out all the marrow of life. He did everything: he pursued sex, whored, fought, gambled, swam, sought to break every barrier and capture life in full, and then scorch it onto the page.” And “If Keats was the martyr of the Romantic movement, and Shelley a sort of saint, then Byron was the devil.” Murray quotes this letter from Byron which speaks to what I am getting at:
As to ‘Don Juan’ – confess – confess – you dog and be candid that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing – it may be bawdy – but is it not good English? It may be profligate – but is it not life, is it not the thing? – Could any man have written it –who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? – on a table? – and under it?
“In a vis a vis.” Solid gold.
Creating great things, taking chances, and living fully, are connected.
When we think within political constraints on the other hand, nothing good ever comes out of it. Goebbels, Stalin and Kim Jung-Il were all very frustrated movie studio heads. They knew enough about film to know that their excessively political systems weren’t making anything good.
Charles Peirce wrote in 1897 in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” that we should know things by their effects, detectable by our sense and not by abstract reasoning. (Shades of Wallace Stevens: Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.) We should judge political philosophies by their effects. The effects of having a heavily politicized art scene are never good, for art or for people. This makes it unnecessary to engage further with these arguments.
Having decolonized our bookshelves (did you forget to do that? that’s okay), we need to add a few people back to our pantheon of heroes.
We need perhaps to be more like Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Angel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, the Marquis de Portago. “Fon,” an Olympic bobsledder, once took a bet that he could fly a plane under London Bridge (which he won); he was a jockey, a jai alai expert, and he raced cars for Ferrari. In 1957 he died violently in a race. Yes, he died. But that’s not what matters. He lived fully and with passion and without safety, so he did great things.
Gorman Thomas looked like a roadie for Lynyrd Skynyrd, smoked Marlboros, drank in the parking lot with fans, led the American League in home runs in 1979 and 1982 and was an All Star. Gorman doesn’t have time for Foucault.
Obviously all of this harkens back to Achilles decision in The Iliad between living a short life of glory or a long and unexceptional life.
Before we deserve to start something new, before we start filling out spreadsheets and powerpoints, we must have a point of view that is different and that matters. Some of us are going to reject the rejection of disputation, of the diversity of thought, of the uniqueness of people, and of risk. The modern world that we have been evolving towards is indeed Foucault’s panopticon, where we are observed 24/7 by the authorities. It is safe, in a way, but also very unsafe.
One imagines the modern reader, the modern viewer, the evaluator, in a room, masked, protected, in flower culture, a safetyist, reading true crime, in a carapace of shibboleths, reading about the dangers, reading bien pensant authors, reading from an approved list, not reading anyone who has ever believed anything that is not on the current list of beliefs. Being labeled. Being watched. Clicking “Like.”
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Sartre embraced the power of defining ourselves amidst life's chaos. We can seize this existential moment by rejecting limited culture and embracing vibrant storytelling. Myth triumphs over politics, and art should remain untainted by propaganda. History has shown that art thrives when liberated from political control.
Victory is inevitable, because safetyist culture cannot create. We will create all of the software. We will create the AI. We will create the cars. We will create the airplanes … and all the stories that matter. While the safetyists click like.
Back to Deresiewicz, he concluded that
A great audience, Fran Lebowitz once remarked, is more important for the creation of great art than even great artists are. She was thinking, in fact, of the postwar audience, specifically in New York, the one that nurtured Balanchine, Rauschenberg, Miles Davis, and so many others. Great audiences create great artists, she explained, by giving people the freedom to take chances: to be irresponsible, dangerous, difficult, strange. When people compete to be sophisticated, artists win. Then we all win.
That is right. But I would extend it also to the way we live, to the way we form a pantheon of heroes, and to how we create, since many of us are creators as well.
We must venture intensely forward. Become a modernist — or a Paterist, or the Byron, or Fon de Portago of film— not a postmodernist. Be unique.
We cannot turn away from culture.
Dive into culture.
Drink from the skull goblet of safetyism.
Become the danger itself.
Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.
I’ll never take flowers for granted again. I sense this is why my bride loves them so much…. I’d love to see the old left back as well! They made Hollywood great. It’s now batshit boring and in decline.
“Everything you may have thought was cool about Post War America has been rejected.“ Wow. Reading this I couldn’t help but remember seeing the photo of Tarantino, Leo and Brad in a 60s convertible on the cover of Esquire. I had a terrible sinking feeling that cool was no longer a thing, it no longer had cultural teeth. This piece was very good but I’m not sure who you plan to shake out of their torpor - it’s the digitial world that has done this to us, and it ain’t going anywhere. Sometimes I think about the coming fascism and think, well, at least some good art will come of it. Cheers.