Until this week, the highest-grossing R-rated movie in the U.S. was “The Passion of the Christ.” In a poignant indication of where the culture has gone in the two decades since Mel Gibson’s magnum opus debuted, the new record-holder is the latest and greatest attempt at intellectual property exploitation known as “Deadpool & Wolverine,” a film panned and lambasted for its shamelessly tongue-in-cheek fan service that relies almost entirely on corny, childish humor.
For these reasons, most critics (from the traditional right to the intersectional left) are rushing to morally condemn the film, but they are vastly outnumbered by the paying audience, and increasingly protected by an anti-establishment media sphere of Logan-esque rightists and disaffected liberals, who will likely refrain from attacking it any time soon, at least not against a Hollywood dud that avoids wokeness.
But cultural bankruptcy “Deadpool & Wolverine” cannot be reduced to ethics or ideology. There are lessons in the film’s success that anyone seriously interested in enhancing the aesthetic and artistic vitality of America should understand.
That sense of heroism once inspired even morally compromised Hollywood executives to make bold decisions — and often reap huge profits. Unfortunately, the spiritual messages in many of our once-great movies have been too warmed up as New Age trips to withstand the pressures the digital revolution has placed upon us.
The first is surprisingly simple: marketing isn’t just effective, it’s mission critical. The reason such an annoyingly empty movie was so surprisingly successful is because the lead actor and studio insisted on getting it in front of their target audience. Today, much of our media culture is caught up in an obsession with organic virality, driven by FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Companies, brands, and news organizations resist big marketing spend or simply don’t know how to market their products effectively, pinning their hopes on the belief that throwing content against the wall and “exploding” is a viable business model. Too bad.
Meanwhile, advertising agencies have consolidated their power into a handful of cartelized organizations, and are using their market power to impose their hyper-conscious principles of content news “safety” standards across the Internet. Good content, which millions of people ostensibly crave, cannot make a dent in a culture dominated by the propaganda cartel unless that content is effectively marketed. It feels awful to be in a position where we have to talk about having the courage to market, but that’s the reality.
And that’s not the only lesson bad superheroes have to teach us. Vince Vaughn recently raged about why R-rated comedies are drawing big audiences because they’re IP rehashes like “Deadpool,” rather than the kind of work he’s made famous for: original stories about timeless, relatable human predicaments and conditions. It’s a risk-averse double bind: consolidated media companies want to extract every last drop of value from the assets they already own, but they also want to avoid making expensive bets on unprofitable talent.
There is an important exception to this rule: technology companies in the entertainment industry. Amazon has invested billions in “Lord of the Rings” projects, with varying degrees of success, and viewed their success as an important first step in continuing to leverage its market advantage to discover or unearth new, profitable talent that can provide fresher, more meaningful entertainment. Other big technology companies in the content industry, Netflix and Apple, have the financial muscle to make similar bets.
But by and large, media executives know they can easily be replaced if the projects they’re in charge of don’t work out. That leads to a weird content bottleneck. Cautious executives focus on mediocre yet “safely” woke projects — ideally woke enough to attract all the stripes of the woke flag, but not so woke that regular people are scared.
The result is that arts and entertainment culture has become so dominated by corporate content, so ideological and formulaic, that it can no longer fulfill the primary purpose of American film and television: to help people, individually and societally, make mental and psychological sense of the world we live in. This is a strange cultural bankruptcy, masked by an equally sinister cultural inflation: a devaluation of our cultural currency, creating a bubble that is bound to burst — hopefully before a total collapse of our ability to make sense of the world we share in this moment..
But there’s another harsh lesson to be learned from the dysfunctional Marvel duo about our aesthetic and artistic poverty: The most fundamental reason Hollywood doesn’t make the kind of humane, R-rated comedies that Vaughn and so many others fondly remember is that it needs writers and directors to make them, and that requires a deep understanding of the present, not the past or the future.
Today, our present place and time is a scandal in the old sense: an obstacle that causes even the cleverest and most creative people to escape into another time where they don’t have to deal with our present reality, a place where our individual and common spiritual destinies are busily being decided.
The only way our culture can escape artistic and aesthetic bankruptcy is to reallocate significant funds to discover, nurture, support, and reward the very few writers and filmmakers who are spiritually strong and in tune with the realities of our current place and time. These precious artists will meet us with love and suffering, in the midst of our misery and our hopes, and project soulful visions onto the screen that allow a wide audience to share in the joys and sufferings of their creators through images that parallel our real lives.
That sense of heroic mission once inspired even morally compromised Hollywood executives to make bold decisions — and often reap huge profits. Unfortunately, the spiritual messages of many of our once-great films are too warmed-over New Age travelogues to withstand the pressures the digital revolution has placed upon us. Now is the time for artistic visionaries who understand the truth of our mental state, and the companies and individuals with the financial wherewithal to realize their vision, to muster new courage and get to work.
