by Don Hall

"The diet is so corrupted and has been for so long. It's like if you eat shit all your life, you want shit. If you eat processed food, you crave it. And you wouldn't if you hadn't been fed it all your life. That's what the movie machine does and I find it really offensive. It makes me angry." — Charlie Kaufman

After a recent viewing of Heart of Stone, a Netflix action pic starring Gal Gadot, I was on the phone with a friend and he asked me what it was about. It hit me as I was describing the adequately made film that it was nearly identical to everything from Amazon’s Citadel. In fact, it was only barely indistinguishable from at least seven spy movies I’d seen in as many months. Granted, I’m not throwing rocks here—I’m an avid fan of the first three phases of the MCU and those films are a lot of the same with only the specific powers that mark the difference in some cases (tell me that Tony Stark and Stephen Strange are radically different in their origin stories and I’ll nut-tap you).

The next evening, I watched Swingers to prep for the I Like to Watch podcast and the eerie similarity of that film to countless other Young Dudes Dealing with Love and Hanging Out a Lot Making Banter movies was striking. Every shark attack movie is basically every other shark attack movie. Without googling it, can you tell me the name of this film?

A broken hearted person, locked into his/her dull routine, meets an enigmatic free soul who unlocks the needed spontaneity and joy for living, thus giving him/her a new lease on life.

If you said The Accidental Tourist, Something Wild, The Yes Man, Stranger Than Fiction, Silver Linings Playbook, Serendipity, or Gone Girl you'd be right.

This is not to say that these films are not great movies with great performances, writing, and direction. It is to say that they are all pretty much the exact same story like an apartment in a complex that is the same footprint but has the individual decoration of each tenant.

In the Robert Altman film The Player one of the returning jokes is the game of combining existing blockbusters to create the pitch. "It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman." What do you think AI is doing when it culls through the millions of words written in scripts and synthesizes a result? Arguably, AI is rarely different from the least imaginative screenwriters making a living so what's the problem?

Does that, as Kaufman says in his interview, make it shit? Does it make it easier for AI to mimic it? Certainly. Tropes are tropes—after all, according to Georges Polti in 1895, there are only thirty-six story frameworks that exist in the first place. Given the millions of plays, television shows, and films already in the can, repetition is inevitable and repetition is very bedrock of artificial intelligence.

Further, given that these repeats with slight variations are incredibly popular with the moviegoing public, whose fault is it if it is shit? I've said it before, I'll say it again—Hollywood as an industry is not motivated by artistic achievement but by cold, hard cash. If the public drops their dime on derivative movies that are simpler to understand and easier to digest, aren't they just as much to blame for the quality of the blockbuster? We, on the Left, are quick to blame the MAGA crowd for voting for Trump in equal measure with the man himself so how is it different for Hollywood?

Diving a bit more into Kaufman's comparison to diet, consumer habits trend toward what is available and convenient. Unless you’re a moron, you know that fast food, processed food, easy food is not as nutritious as real food but those industries make a shit ton of money selling the most fattening, sugar and salt infused bullshit to billions. Sure, we can blame it on the marketing but, again, most people know it’s not great food. It is, however, convenient and that’s the selling point above all.

Superhero movies (which, for the most part, I love) are the Big Macs of cinema. Sitcoms are the Subway sandwiches of television. Films like I’m Thinking of Ending Things, like all of Kaufman’s creations, are the sushi made fresh in front of you. If you want more people to eat sushi, the answer cannot be to tell the audience “What are you, stupid? All the food you eat is shit. Eat the sushi, dumb fucks.”

Chicago theater seems to be reeling from the “Hey! It’s good for you to hear this!” syndrome as small companies are withering on the vine. It’s a rare form of guilt to pay money to be told what a piece of filth you are so it comes as little surprise that the arts groups dedicated to lecturing the very people who spend their time and money to see theater aren’t clamoring to attend. There are those who will but they align with the rich white women who pay for those struggle sessions over lunch so that two women of color can sit down with them and insult them for two hours.

Recent years have also been a time of great social and cultural change. Demonstrably, audiences have rejected much of the post-pandemic programming, which has focused on ideologically similar plays. Progressive artists see these shows as essential acts of both diversification and political necessity — and fair enough, artists deserve such freedoms. But they often have been stymied by the consumption of theater being a stubbornly voluntary act, and by attendees not being the audience they hoped to reach.

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There have always been artists like Kaufman, willing to bend the rules and to create stuff that is entirely unique and those artists will always piss and moan about how shitty mainstream tastes suck. Likewise, there have always been artists willing to glom onto the mediocre tastes of the masses and make bank feeding them what they crave.

Certainly, if one is to view this as a negative, the creators of dreck are somewhat to blame but the consumers of dreck, with their open jaws and wallets, carry their fair share of fault. What's really fun about art, music, and film is that one man's mouthful of shit is another man's rimjob and to each his own.