Art is Hard

In October of 2022, Will Jordan (aka The Critical Drinker), an action/thriller novelist best known for his profanity laden reviews of woke movies, initiated a kickstarter to fund his own attempt at crafting entertainment. Will already had several popular books that, while not high literature, entertained an audience who wanted a light airport read. Rogue Elements, set in the Ryan Drake universe of his books, was set to be a short cinematic work along the lines of Tom Clancy “Jack Ryan” movies and other such espionage films (Ryan has to be in any elite counter-espionage person’s name). With the fan base of his million plus Youtube channel and his established reader base, he easily procured three hundred thousand Euros to fund his project.

The funding allowed him to hire actors and producers with respectable credentials, many of whom worked on large budget films. Soon the project was off to the races, with the Kickstarter fans getting frequent updates to the film's progress, interviews with the people involved, and optimism that Will would be able to show how to make a REAL non-woke movie with a fraction of the budget. Scenes were produced, edited, and the excitement mounted as release day on October 2nd to the backers.

Their reaction was subdued, at best.

A little over a month later, he released the short, 45 minute film to his YouTube fans. The reaction of his fan base wasn't subdued, but outright hostile.

The movie was bad. Real bad.

Russian Villain in lazy accent: "Not so I have a situation, a problem. And like my father used to always say there are very few problems that can be solved with a good, sturdy, hammer. Now last year one of your CIA Shepherd teams infiltrated a Maximum Security Prison on Russian territory their target was an operative identified by the code name Malice. Now this person is very, very dangerous, guilty of more crimes against the Russian State than almost anyone else alive. All I want to know is the name of the man who led this mission. Give me the name and all this will be over. Otherwise things will get very, well, I'm sure you know how it is."

The issues were too many to count. The script was cliched and trite. The villains might as well have been twirling a mustache, and the heroes were just as empty, with even a generic girlboss he always mocks in the mix. The action scenes made the same glaring mistakes he rolled his eyes on with his reviews, with the enemies rarely even bothering to take cover. With regards to cinematography, the lighting is so oversaturated it's hard to see what's going on. Most importantly, the plot was largely non-existent. Even the biggest supporters of him more or less pretended it didn't happen and Will, seeing the universal panning, seems to want to sweep it all under the rug. The only way the mess can be redeemed is if The Critical Drinker himself lambasts his own effort, or Space Ice runs out of Steven Seagal movies and reviews it.

ROOOOUUUUGE Elements is the Will Jordan, mega-blockbuster hit movie, where he shows the world, how to self-immolate!

Here it would be easy to express how much easier it is to be a critic than an artist or how you shouldn’t criticize something you can't do yourself. I've found his videos over the last few years an amusing divergence, and while I have never read the book series, it has solid reviews. He's had a lot of success. Putting it in another perspective, while it was garbage, it still is less garbage than countless shows that got the green light for far more funding in Hollywood. While a lot of this is due to nepotism in show business and having the right contacts, even highly skilled directors and writers have written some outright clunkers.

This doesn't even get into the financials and other aspects of screenwriting, like how to safely fund such projects when institutional backers won't come anywhere near you for ideological reasons. Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) was swindled by a huckster out of over a million dollars in his movie production attempt. Beale also had success under his belt with a large following and a boutique book and comic publishing company. It wasn't just naivete either, since many more prominent investors were also rolled by the same person. There are countless logistical, financial, and interpersonal aspects of production that can quickly overwhelm and wreck a project before it even gets off the ground.

The Youtuber “Pillar of Garbage” had an interesting take on the “Rogue Elements” debacle. While clearly left-wing with an axe to grind against the space The Drinker occupies, while seemingly oblivious he occupies largely the same space, he nonetheless makes two good points that puts many modern failures into focus. One is the hyper-commodification of art, more or less content for content's sake that demands familiarity before innovation. In the case of the action thriller, it is more interested in the plot taking the expected steps than world-building or creating a unique perspective. The other is the sensation of being "stuck in time", forgetting that every artist is an agent who creates in a distinct time and place, instead insisting cultural movement stop at a pre-conceived ideal. It’s the refusal to engage the creative and space they live in, and how we got there. While he puts this nearly exclusively as a failure of conservative creators, the dirty truth Pillar of Garbage missed is this has engulfed nearly all traditional media also.

The Crisis of Consumption

The massive consolidation of mainstream print into vapid, easy-to-digest genre fiction is well known. Pick a random work, and it’s likely the prose has been simplified to the extent that many books considered young adult just a couple decades ago, like Redwall, read positively Shakespearean. This, along the dramatically restrictive number of acceptable tropes and plotlines, has created an insular, hyper-conformist environment. One can argue this is the result of the number of traditional book companies shrinking to the single-digits, the wokeness of the literary hubs, the takeover of publishing by women, or men leaving the literary sphere, and likely it's a mix of all of them. However, the main culprit is probably hopelessly more mundane. The fact is the book industry is likely not even interested in people actually reading the books, but getting their consumer base to buy them. The ascendance of BookTok has created a cohort of people, largely young women, who want to feel part of this cultural niche. And if you think being part of this group would require, well, reading, you would be wrong.

"I stopped making BookTube videos because the community had become overrun by commercialism. Near the end of the 2010s, many of the major BookTubers had essentially become pawns in the hands of publishing houses. They’d receive boxes upon boxes of books that they’d then “haul” (basically, just show off) and then you’d never see those books mentioned again. The act of reading became replaced by the act of being a reader. Actual reviews became few and far between and many of the smaller, genuine readers on the platform jumped ship. It feels like BookTok has got to the same place, only much faster.

At the end of 2022, the bestselling author Stephanie Danler (Sweetbitter, Stray) wrote about trying to traverse BookTok as an author. Her experience was somewhat fraught. She wrote that TikTok is “not a social media app but an entertainment app. On it, you can’t just show a book by Clarice Lispector. The successful accounts performed being a ‘woman who reads Clarice Lispector.’” Danler also goes on to make the claim that “being visible on these apps is antithetical to the act of writing.” I find it difficult to disagree with Danler’s summation of BookTok. There is an uncanny falseness behind it all, a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia. Who doesn’t want to be seen as literary? Being perceived as having read a lot of books warrants a fair share of cultural capital. If you can fake it, then why not?

When I was in a bookshop recently I noticed it had a whole bay dedicated to these BookTok books. Trying to explain what this meant to the person I was with, I told them that it was basically a subgenre of easily-bingeable novels that all sort of have the same cover."

In the shallow world of BookTok, being ‘a reader’ is more important than actually reading

Books have become a means to show social capital, to have an identity. Young women that permeate BookTok are both the safest people politically to cater to as well as being most susceptible to this sort of social-proof marketing. The first thing going through a literary agent's head when reading a book is, "could this be a Booktok sensation?" Do you think a publisher is going to look at a story about an Incel, a right-wing sex-craved edgelord, or neo-puritan post-apocalyptic hellscape and think, "yeah, the Booktok girls are going to love this?" It’s no wonder why popular books have progressively become smuttier and senselessly violent, with even books marketed as high-brow having a whiff of fakeness about them, like they're playing a role for an audience rather than focused on telling a story. All they have to do is get an influencer on board who may or may not read it, and her followers will buy the book and likely not read it themselves. This isn't anything new in history, but the influx of the digital realm has put into overdrive the simulacra of reading over actual reading. The books are designed to be easy for those who want a quick read to talk about, and trendy for the majority of buyers who just want it on their bookshelf.

In the same way, the mass of sequels, reboots, and other commodities are less about expanding a world as about catering to a contingent of product-focused adults. The most obvious example of this, the Disney Adult, has completely revolutionized how Disney handles their multi-billion dollar franchises.

Why does Disney want to make adults happy? Disney adults themselves aren’t naive about the wish the company’s heart makes. Fan Rachul sometimes worries that “the golden age of storytelling is giving way to consumerism”, while survey respondents wrote in that the company “[promotes] consumerism and overconsumption”, “prioritise[s] profits over anything” and has a “capitalist mentality” of “growth and profits over all”. Disney adulthood is inseparable from hyper-consumption – 58 per cent of Disney adults I surveyed spend between $1,000 (£787) and $10,000 (£7,876) with the Walt Disney Company annually, while only 2.8 per cent spend less than $100 (£78).

The Disney Adult Superfan Industrial Complex

There's an easy income stream from adults with expendable money, and it’s far easier to cater to this crowd than the child who needs to ask a third party for their more limited expendable income to buy their products. Again, they decided to sell a lifestyle, an identity that lives around their products, and to no surprise, their products work harder to ensure this lucrative audience is pleased.

The Crisis of Being Stuck

Still, old franchises which would seem to be nostalgic money-making machines are falling into continuously failed projects. The Star Wars franchise has a staggering number of flops to its name, largely because they have failed to recreate the original animating spirit of the trilogy from the late 70’s/early 80’s. The new writers have failed to understand the essence of what made the original movies tick, a mix of wonder and the matinee serial feeling of old shows like Flash Gordon, only with a much larger budget. The only real Star Wars series to succeed, The Mandalorian, succeeded because it clung onto classic Western tropes in a space age setting. They can’t recreate it because they can’t understand the old world-model of gleeful adventure that made it possible.

While every work goes through transformations as time progresses, with even works written by the same author taking a different tone as he moves into old age, good works of art can be in any time and place while having the ability to see outside the characters who make up the story and grasping a higher, timeless plane. It’s why Frank Herbert’s “Dune” still feels like it could have been written today and has a strong following, while other books like Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” feel dated, a product of the time.

In modern media, there is little mass entertainment that won’t feel obsolete in twenty years. The quippy speech dynamics of summer blockbusters, the fanatical devotion to current issues in many dramas, and unwillingness to offer anything without a contemporary voice for the audience to relate to for movies outside the present age are all a catastrophic choice that only succeeds in dragging the viewer out of the story. Within a few years, they sound strange and out of place, their “modern” pretensions already outdated before they’re even released.

While many alternative creators, with an unfortunate amount of funding that could have gone to better projects, have tried for the stale Family Guy tropes of decades past, vie for the stylistic washed-out effects of action movies of another age, or the comedic tropes of “Old School” and “Van Wilder” in a slightly more wholesome fashion.

Every part of the political spectrum is stuck in a malaise that inhibits new and unique cultural artifacts. One side of the political aisle is stuck on the tropes of a nostalgic, idyllic era of cinema from a generation ago that wasn’t even that good, the other is stuck in the modern day and unable to think outside the trends they read on social media last week. The current hardline purity spiraling in entertainment is an aftereffect of this stuckness. It’s a symptom of weakness, not unquestioned hegemony, however it looks right now.

The Crisis of Confidence

When watching Rogue Elements, the thought I couldn’t shake was “why was this even made?” A man receives a life-changing amount of funding from fans, what film school graduates would kill to get, and he had nothing to say. For those who watch his channel, he’s a clever guy with a masterful skill of delivery and understanding narrative flaws, especially in his “Drinker Fixes” and “Production Hell” series. So why would he write and fund the same generic trash that he gleefully bashes on his channel? What was his vision here? Ten years ago, when he dreamed of having enough money to produce a movie, is this what he had in mind?

The most appalling part of this fiasco wasn’t the failure of the movie in itself, but that it wasn’t even a respectable failure. When the creator has a passionate vision that goes wrong, whether because of lack of skill, too great a scope, or just plain bad luck, even the worst media can have some redeeming value. Rogue Elements failed even this basic requirement.

Well, most of the time.

There’s a self-lobotomization in the creative spirit throughout the cultural landscape. Authors of edgier works, even in the indie space, feel the need to write long, drawn out prefaces stating, in no uncertain terms, that X is bad and is not endorsed. This even permeates older movies, with streaming services giving long disclaimers distancing themselves, like they are scolding you for watching an old movie. This has permeated through all entertainment, with even iterations of Table-Top role playing games feeling the need to throw their founder under the bus for failing to live up to modern standards. In some alternative media, efforts are made to ensure that their works constrain themselves to a specific modern political narrative, regardless of whether it’s necessary to the story being told.

The feeling one must take a political side before even engaging with creative works stifles and flatten the world he wants his audience to engage with. If one does not have a world-model that can exist outside the stern and shifting categories of modern political discourse, his endeavors are going to either be hopelessly derivative or as subtle as a bad church sermon.

Cultural revolutions are contagious, largely contingent on a small, fanatical clique with way too much self-confidence willing to continuously run into brick walls in their attempts to give their art the attention it deserves. Most of these people will still fail, for every hundred people lost to obscurity there will be someone who rises above the fray. He may not be the best, with maybe a knack for marketing or luck that allows him to ascend above the pile of forgotten works. But someone will rise that’s better than what’s trending now.

This arrogance is necessary in building a following, not unlike founding a religious movement, that’s far more difficult than talking about one’s favorite sports team, doling out life advice, or political commentary. The core world-view the true creative is trying to expand in his audience goes far deeper than any of that, which is far more difficult to attain but infinitely rewarding. Just as any literary Substacker trying to build an audience.

I still stand by my earlier statement we are entering a renaissance, regardless of the setbacks. Generating good art is hard, especially in this age. Lucky for us, its rewards still await anyone willing to jump in and truly create in all its glorious uncertainty.

Alternative Art is Hitting its Stride

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