Rushfield Babylon

I missed out on the Singing in the Rain 60th Anniversary Blu-Ray Release/Gene Kelly Centennial hoopla of last week.  So forgive me for commenting on a 60 year old subject not precisely on cue, but if there’s even a belated chance to talk about Singing in the Rain, I am going to.

If you can call any film perfect, it is Singing in the Rain.  It’s one of those films where just every cylinder is firing towards a common goal - the acting, the music, the script, the direction, the design, the dancing - every single part is flawless and in sync with the whole, while seeming completely effortless and effervescent.  When people talk about the magic of Hollywood in the Golden Age, this is as close to a demonstration of that as you can get.  It’s funny, it’s beautiful, it’s tragic, it’s poignant, it’s totally uplifting without every being patronizing.  When you read about how hard Gene Kelly worked the dancers on this film,  you see just what craftsmanship there was at all levels in Hollywood of the era.

Singing in the Rain is also a very good test to see if you are a victim of the modern age.  If you are not totally engrossed by this film, not any moment bored or restless, not even slightly tempted to check your emails and come out of the film as uplifted and believing there is greatness in mankind, then you have survived to this point in the technological age with your soul essentially in tact.  

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Polls tell that Mitt Romney enters his convention with a huge likeablity gap between himself and President Obama, and it is supposedly the job of his convention to fix that with testimonials to his likeability such as his wife gave tonight.  The only problem, seeing the election through the prism of The Backlash Era is that “likeablity” no longer seems to be a trait that has any meaning in our culture.

For most of the past three decades, likeablity was the highest calling an American could strive towards.  America churned out Aww shucks, cuddly, rough edges shaved away figures like we minted Hershey’s bars.  On the big screen, stars like Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan - slightly shambling, glowing with good intent actors you just wanted to give a big hug to became our national icons.  On the small screen, likeability was the sine qua non of network programming from the Cosby Show to Friends to the institutionalization of likeability with American Idol and the whole reign of the popularity competitions.  In politics, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, we went gaga for a warm smile and an ability to “relate.”  Even at the end of the run, George W Bush largely won his office by being more friendly and remembering more people’s names than the aloof, condescending Gore.

But something happened in the last ten years and suddenly across the culture, we’ve stopped looking for new best friends.

In the movies, the new generation of stars is more known for their brooding intensity than their vivaciousness.  Stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner have their charm but they do not seem like huggers.  Channing Tatum, the one star of their generation who has a sort of goofy boy next door quality projects more of a low wattage likeability than the pure nuclear powered charm of a young Hanks or Roberts.  The most conventionally likeable star of their era, Zak Efron, has yet to score a major hit outside of the High School Musical francise, itself a legacy project from an earlier time.  The most likable of genres, the light romantic comedy has all but imploded at the box office, replaced by hard-edged, nastier comedies like Ted and The Hangover.

On television, the popularity contests are on the wane, their primacy on the cultural stage long since forfeited.  No genre has truly taken their place yet but such as network television is, it too is dominated by harder edged comedies than we would have seen of yore; shows like Modern Family where the cast is delineated by the various neuroses and manipulative tendencies.  The real center stage has been given to the cable dramas however; shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc. where the protagonists tend not only to be unlikable in the conventional, non-threatening sense, they are downright homicidal. 

Look at the real barometer of our culture, the most followed on Twitter list.  You’ll find the exhibitionist (Gaga, Minaj), the aggressively clueless (Kardashians), the angry, the aggressive but you’ll be hard pressed to find a single person who could be termed “likeable” on there.  Except maybe Justin Beiber.  And Oprah.  A tiny minority anyway in a sea of bombast and self-promotion. (Shameless no-talent self-promoters are never likeable; like open wounds, you can feel bad for them but never really enjoy them).

Perhaps politics is the one exception in our land where we want someone just to be a buddy you can get in a big bear hug and scruff their hair when they get down. Perhaps.  Mitt Romeny will spend much of the next two day’s trying to make himself as likeable as President Obama supposedly is.  (Myself: I’d slit my own throat before I tried to survive a lunch with either of them.) We’ll see if it works.  And if it does whether it takes him anyplace he wants to go.  Or will he find that in the Backlash Era, we’re so conditioned to distrust and dislike everyone that people who are openly nasty and deceitful are the only ones we really like?

From Variety, on the upcoming film Promised Land:

Matt Damon and John Krasinski star in the film directed by Gus Van Sant from a screenplay by Krasinski and Damon based on a story by Dave Eggers. 

The director and star of Gerry, team up with the writer of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men/the star of Away We Go and the author of Zeitoun.

Something tells me this isn’t going to be the long awaited Norbit sequel.

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Maybe the conservative critics are right: A whopping 71 percent of the media narrative about Mitt Romney has been negative, a new study says. 

But wait: the same report says 72 percent of the media treatment of President Obama has been negative as well.

Apparently, journalists don’t think much of either guy.

So when do they stop trying and realize the best thing they can do for their campaigns is hide under the table until its all over?

As previously stated, in the Backlash Era, positive Buzz is no longer possible.  Neither is successful spin, positioning or message framing.  This is not because people are no longer capable of creating a message, buzz or framing.  Anyone with a voice and a little bit of glibness can do that at any time.  And it is not to say that no one will buy the spin; the world continues to produce suckers at a rate of 60 per hour.

In defining any Era, we are not saying everything blows a certain way, but that while breezes wander about, the prevailing wind runs in one direction.  In the  early 1980’s, New Wave dominated among the youth, but some continued to be hippies.  Likewise, in the Backlash Era, there will be those who continue to hype. But the important point is that what Hype is created will provoke even greater Backlash from a culture suffering a severe hangover from the Hype of the past decade.  It is a terrible place for a marketeer to be in, where they can only do themselves harm and every step they take only mires them deeper in the quicksand.

The Presidential election poses then an interesting challenge for the The Backlash Era because in the end, both candidates can not lose, as much as the public will probably be wishing that could be the case by November.  Someone must actually win and voters can not just vote against one candidate, they have to vote for the other. 

Well, yes and no.

Studying how this will go, we at Rushfield Babylon offer one simple prediction that we guarantee will determine the outcome of the election: Whichever candidate the public is thinking about the most when they vote will lose.  The candidate on their mind the least will win.  The perfect candidate right now would be a glass of water at room temperature.

We will be monitoring this election with this rule in mind, to watch how it plays out through the prism of the Backlash Era.  To kick-off our campaign watch, we noticed a quote that seemed particularly not to grasp how much the worm has turned and how the conversation has moved beyond the control of political candidates.  For the past couple weeks, Mitt Romney has been in the center of the news and President Obama has kept a relatively low profile, as low as sitting Presidents campaigning for re-election can keep.  As a result, most polls show he has drifted up a point or a few during this period.  

However, the normally astute 538 blog is suspicious of this drift, and gives the following, entirely reason:

Might Mr. Obama have gained half a point, or a point, based on whatever residual factors that voters are thinking about? Sure, and Mr. Romney would rather that movement be in his direction instead. But has Mr. Obama gained three points, at a time when most ordinary Americans are watching the Olympics? Probably not.

The post suggests that it would be difficult for the President to move up so far at a time when Americans are not paying attention to him.  But in the Backlash Era, that is precisely when candidates will gain traction, when people can for a few moments manage to forget they exist.   

Ahead for Mitt Romney: an enormous burst of publicity with the naming of a running mate and the Republican National Convention.  We’ll check back in and see how the laws of Backlash play out under the heat of this public focus. 

Hipster bashing is nothing new.  Hipsterism is the only major youth movement of the past 100  - 1000 years to have no defenders, not even its adherents.  It’s very name is a pejorative, but unlike punk, it was never embraced by its members just grudgingly accepted and denied by a people who could never be bothered to define what they were about beyond nice stuff and cool stuff and trying to…get involved…So mocking the movement is as old as the movement itself. Or older! 

But the presence of the Hipster Backlash on the front page of the NY Times’ Style section shows the gathering power of the Backlash Era.  Arbiter of the conventional wisdom of media world trends that it is, the piece officially marks the moment when Backlash, in and of itself, became the predominant wind blowing through the fashion world, as it has swept through the rest of the culture.  Yesterday's jubilant mindless enthusiasm for “artisanal tattoos; a bespoke, frontiersman beard; and, yes, a fedora perched atop the head just so” is now today’s call to grab your pitchforks.  

In the Backlash Era, as we have noted, there can be no good publicity, there is no such thing as “buzz.”  The nation feels so poisoned by the promises of hope, by the “best new shows ever”  and the frontiersman beards of yore, that anything that smacks of enthusiasm, or seeks attention for itself is drawing a big target on its chest, like the poor unloved hipsters of Montauk. 

This has nothing to do with American Idol or how the Avengers is dangerously overrated, but I wrote a piece for the LA Weekly about the crazy situation whereby the incoming President of Cal State Northridge had her salary raised from $290,000 to $320,000 while students at the school, due to massive cuts, wait years to get enough credits to graduate.

I thought the piece would be an easy, do it blindfolded finger-pointy piece, but too my dismay, the salary increase was actually just a tiny part of a very complicated picture of the state of public school funding.  The answer was much less finger pointy, but actually much more ominous for the future than I had anticipated.  If such things are your cup of tea, you may read my investigations here. 

But in the end, really, what is not about American Idol or how the Avengers is dangerously overrated?  Given another 300 words, I’m sure I could have brought it all together. 

An inspiring post today on Vulture by Gavin Palone, beautifully echoing all that we lonely Javerts on the Nikki beat have been saying for ages.    He writes:

Part of the reason that Nikki has continued to act in such an uncivil and threatening manner is that her conduct is reinforced by those in Hollywood who, terrified, choose a path of appeasement rather than confront or ignore her. In 2009, she wrote probably the ugliest and most vindictive business article I’ve ever read, when former Universal Pictures chairman Marc Shmuger was fired. In this article, she said such things as, “I hate Shmuger, really detest the putz,” and “Shmuger’s biggest problem was that he thinks he plays well with others when, in fact, he treats people badly and is blind to the fact they hate his guts.” (Ignore the irony.) And how did Shmuger react to this insult-laden screed? In May 2011, he gave the exclusive press release on the formation of his new company to Deadline Hollywood. 

The most fascinating element of the Nikki story is that people in this industry fear her and invest power in her. She has no real power: She can’t fire anyone at the studios, and she can’t influence the audience of films or TV. She isn’t a reviewer and most people in the country don’t even know who the hell she is. Deadline doesn’t have a monopoly on entertainment business news, and it isn’t even the most widely read: According to comScore, Deadline’s June audience of 1,376,000 unique visitors topped The Wrap’s 879,000 and Variety’s 354,000, but The Hollywood Reporter had 4,969,000. (Note: Measurement services like comScore typically report stats that are around 35–40 percent of internal numbers, but the proportional differences between these sites would likely be around the same. And, according to comScore, Vulture’s June audience was 1,092,000.) And when Deadline scoops the other trade news sites on a story, they aggregate it within five minutes, anyway. If she has some reason to think that her threats should be taken seriously, I can’t see it … but since so many people in my industry act like they have a reason to cower from this woman, it makes me wonder if I could be wrong.

It has been said that the Problem of Evil is the central philosophical dilemma of modern life. W.G. Sebald said that in the 20th Century, no serious person thinks of anything other than Stalin and Hitler.

On a more personal level, the problem that keeps any decent person awake at night is wondering how you would stand up if confronted with the face of evil?  Would you hide your neighbors from the Nazis or turn them in?  Use your body to shield your loved ones from a bullet?  Stand up to bullies taunting a weak child? Tell the lady at the next desk that it was you who ate her tandori chicken wrap out of the office refrigerator and not the guy she’s fuming at?

There are many perks to working in Hollywood - getting to pretend movie stars are your actual friends, free popcorn at movie premieres - but at the top of the list is you never have to worry about any of the dilemmas above!  You know the answer, so you can move on and find what sleep there is to be found for the spineless and sniveling. 

When confronted with the threat of a senile shut in blogger who might, if you defended your people to her, possibly make fun of you, you said:  My assistants are yours to abuse!  My underlings are under orders to do your bidding!  You, Miss Crazy Spittle-Spewing Shut In, will be the Boswell of my journey through the arts, and none but you will I allow to tell my tale.

But now there are two people working in Hollywood who have the right to look themselves in the mirror again.  Let us speak their names: Bret Ellis and Gavin Palone.  It is a small army, but a month ago it was merely we sad lonely bloggers laboring against the darkness.   And as Mr. Palone points out, once impotence is proven, fearsomeness can crumble very fast.

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