I took on a few more sewing projects in the last few weeks, and pulled up some videos and movies to watch, as I finished the hand-stitching; attaching buttons, finishing off racking down facings and waistbands. The movie was The Highwaymen, a retelling of the hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the infamous bank and gas-station robbing duo who died in a hailstorm of lead on a Louisiana back country road in the spring of 1934. The duo signally failed at a life of crime. They did not die rich and of old age in a lavish villa in some country with no extradition treaty to the US but did achieve a degree of tawdry celebrity as a glam pair of 20th century mid-west Robin Hoods. Their violent lives and even more violent deaths made all the headlines back then, and a previous movie which glamorized them out of all recognition. Anyway, I liked The Highwaymen when I first watched it (reviewed here) and even more the second time around. A suspenseful story told through intelligent and insightful scriptwriting, humane and sympathetic main characters combined with expert direction, and without a single shred of obvious computer-generated special effects that I could detect. Finally, a spot-on sense of time and place in location shooting. Yes, this is what Texas looks like, and while I am not old enough to remember the Thirties, I am familiar enough with contemporary photos and films to be certain tha’s what it looked like, back then. It’s purely amazing how well – sometimes – that creators of our entertainment content can do such stories.
Well, even if ninety percent of anything in movies, genre fiction, music and TV is absolute crap, according to Sturgeon’s Revelation – but when it comes to movies lately, it seems like it’s more like 99.9%. Which is rather dispiriting to contemplate: where have all the skilled and experienced creators gone, that our pop entertainment warhorses in this country present such a dismal prospect? I wasn’t the first to observe that of the last round of Oscar awards, not only had I not seen any of the nominated movies, but I also hadn’t even heard of them in the first place. I didn’t want to want to watch any of them, either. Life is just too short and time too limited to take a chance on a lecture with visuals.
But the ability to just tell an interesting, engaging story without climbing up onto a current hobby-horse to bore us all sh*tless with a lecture appears to have left the room.
There was a brief internet-media kerfuffle a couple of months ago, regarding a story in one of the entertainment publications, lamenting how the experienced and talented in the biz were being sidelined as pale, male and stale, in favor of handing over writing, show-running, producing and directing to the hip new BIPOC and relatively inexperienced … because … pale, male, stale. So retro, so ugh, so 20th century! Naturally the subsequent crashing and burning of a substantial number of high-profile entertainment franchises on a pyre of audience disinterest had nothing at all to do with handing them over to inexperienced and marginally talented new kids with a pet hobbyhorse to flog … oh, nothing to do with it! Failure at the box office and viewer ratings was the fault of those unsophisticated, unenlightened bigots in the audience letting their bigotry show …
So, watching The Highwaymen again, and marveling at how very, very good it was – well-worth rewatching, I considered again how the able, talented and experienced are sidelined in the service of recruiting and promoting the less-than-able, etc., who are yet of the favored racial or sexual demographic. It reminded me of the current kerfuffle regarding how the supposedly elite American universities have fallen so drastically in the regard in which they are now held, because of the same process; recruiting and accepting the favored ethnic with lower SAT scores and grades while rejecting those with better scores and grades because they are white or Asian. This has been going on since the 1970s – they called it affirmative action, then – and I began to wonder exactly how much this practice has degraded higher education. Routinely and systematically recruiting and promoting on any other basis other than quantifiable merit, ability, talent … has got to degrade the effectiveness of any activity, after a while; our entertainment, educational establishments, the literary world, civic government, news-reporting functions and the military. I have touched on this matter before, but are we now approaching the point where it all collapses into one big ball of useless incompetence? Even with Trump at the helm and putting out fires as fast as he can?
Consider and discuss, as you wish.