Quicksketch: Symptom on a Symptom

Firstly a few posts ago, I made a prediction that "The Acolyte"'s mystery box would turn out to be Carrie Anne-Moss, having watched nothing of the show. I called it wrong, the reveal was "some guy in a helmet" although the Freakazoid sub-show "Toby Danger" which predated "The Venture Bros." of adult swim was intending to be both brilliant and funny. The moral is, I was wrong. Anyway...

On June 14th 2024, popular youtuber "The Critical Drinker" released a video titled "The Acolyte Episode 3 - I'm Done And So Is Star Wars" in which he suggested that he had reached a threshold in which he wouldn't watch nor presumably review the show anymore.

On June 27th 2024 The Critical Drinker released a review of Episode 5, and a review of Episode 6 on July 4th.

For me, Disney is more a fascinating business case study that has gone through multiple eras and iterations, for example its "Golden Age" when Walt was Alive, then the Disney Renaissance kicked off by "The Little Mermaid" and late 80s Disney Cartoon TV.

Disney isn't the only culprit though, Netflix greenlit "He-Man Revelations" or whatever, and a live action "Cowboy Bebop" and I think a Resident Evil TV series all of which somewhat bombed. Amazon of course made maybe the most expensive TV show ever in "The Rings of Power" and also "The Wheel Of Time" 

But Disney spent big money to acquire nerd properties Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm.

Then right, I think at this point it is overdetermined that Disney among many other media companies got self-conscious about its messaging. 

I for one, think Frozen worked, and both critics and the public seemed to agree. There was stupid shit in it to be sure, but it is good messaging to ridicule Ana falling immediately in love with a stranger, and then having the ending be about sisters working it out.

Disney was making fun of itself in a manner that reminds me of a less fondly remembered Sprite commercial:

Which was featured in some documentary I was shown in my marketing degree, where it was pointed out at the time "ha ha, yeah, but that's what you are doing, so where do you go from there?"

The Critical Drinker probably achieved some degree of prominence by referring to all the overt messaging as a new phenomena in media as "The Message".

The point of this post is to make an analogy of "The Message" to Type-II diabetes and what I shall call Nerd Properties as Obesity.

I guess, this analogy was prompted by learning today that the Nielsan ratings revealed "The Acolyte" was the second least watched Disney Star Wars TV series barely ahead of Andor. As such, the Youtube content now dedicated to "The Acolyte" strikes the same nerve as the coverage of the LA Lakers in NBA press. 

The succinct headline would be "After bad run of bad Star Wars movies and shows, Disney release a show that looked bad, was expected to be bad, turned out to be bad and continues to be bad."

"The message" is real, and it will probably be attempted again and again so long as humans keep producing media. Not necessarily the same message, but some form of social engineering riding on the notion that media effects are powerful and genes are weak.

On the one hand, studios have introduced DEI officers and what not all over the shop whether you are making a $170M film or a local news feature. On the other hand, the reason the message is injected into Timelords, Marvel and DC superheroes, Starships and Jedi orders, Middle Earth, Witcher-Earth and The Wheel of Time is because the IP fanbases make captive audiences of themselves.

They bought the properties because you literally can't stop yourself from checking them out. You are hung up on some clown from the sixties man! 

For some reason two people can go out on a friday night and enjoy the intoxication of alcohol, but where one might enjoy such occasional tipples another one will develop (or already have) real problems controlling their consumption of alcohol, coming to depend on it to structure their lives.

Just so for some reason two people can go out on a Christmas weekend and enjoy Peter Jackson's "The Lord of The Rings" and one sufficiently entertained goes on with the rest of their life, but the other one will develop (or already have) real problems controlling their consumption of LOTR, coming to depend on it to structure their lives.

Or Harry Potter or MCU, DCU or a galaxy far far away.

Fandom The Underlying Symptom

So what's better: The theatrical release LOTR or the DVD extended cuts with additional footage? You really loved LOTR all three of them, didn't notice the 3 hr runtime and are ravenous for more. How about an additional ten minutes? But where? Ten more minutes of spectacle? Ten more minutes of Golem's monologue/dialogue? Tom Bombadil? 

If not ten why not twenty? thirty minutes more? why not an interval and an additional 3 hours? If the Hobbit a concise well paced novel can be padded out into a tedious trilogy of films, why couldn't LOTR be padded out into twelve movies? Each scene a movie? Why not a prestige TV series with budgets over $20M per episode?

Seinfeld probably had the legs to go an additional season, how about two? Three? Four additional seasons of Seinfeld? 

How many Bond movies are good and how many are bad? Did "Quantum of Solace" even need to exist? How many sequels are even "okay" in quality?

I find an analogue in Michael Jordan. The 90s was clearly the peak popularity of the NBA. Basketball has gone on to become a world game, but it appears it is a game played by people all over the world enjoyed by less spectators. From the NBA's perspective Jordan ageing out of the game posed an existential threat. Even Jordan ageing at all, his Washington Wizards seasons were not the draw his Bulls dynasty was. 

Suppose now that Stanley Tucci came forward with super soldier serum to essentially render MJ immortal and indestructable, and he just kept playing at his peak...well the first person to get bored would be MJ. He retired three times already. Inevitably though, with no other intervention the world would have started cheering against MJ. 

Even if he stacked up 12 championships, 12 MVPs and 3 more DPOY as some point it would become meaningless. The scarcity of MJs career is what made it valuable. The fact that there was a last dance.

LOTR where it takes twelve books instead of three for Frodo and Sam to walk to Mount Doom and toss a ring into lava is not superior to doing that in three books.

Telling the story of the Rebellion against the Empire in five acts instead of three is not superior to the first Star Wars trilogy. I'm not sure "Return of the Jedi" even warrants a whole film. We know an entire "Heroes journey" can be told in 90 minutes. Could Star Wars have been improved if there was less of it?

Sequels are notoriously expensive and reliably disappointing. Long running series like Bond or Batman, Saw or Spiderman tend to norm themselves in terms of quality and produce enough that their instalments can be compared to each other. 

They may serve a role in terms of generating profits that can be used to fund riskier studio projects, but it's a fine line as the case of Pixar demonstrates.

The line between healthy appreciation and toxic-fandom probably can be drawn at "trailer breakdowns" when you are picking over the carcass of a two-minute teaser trailer to try and extract more content, you have a problem. 

Okay, the movie is going to come out, and the movie will contain everything it will contain and you can decide on whether you like it or not without an advanced college degree. In practice it is very rare for the audience en masse to be wrong about a film, such as a deep dive and a community made wiki can turn a sack of shit into a string of pearls.

It's okay to get excited about something. It's less okay to be excited about something that is two years away from release. It's a problem when you are shelling out $30 to see a movie where what you really want to see is a 30 second mid credit cutscene that promotes the next film, which by the time it rolls around you will be most excited to see the teaser for the next thing than the film itself.

At this point, you have become obese in the sense of being a big fat target for your predictable consumer behaviour. You are going to generate free press and overspend. 

That's why they are targeting you.

The Overlying Symptom

Not sure that overlying is even cromulent, the overlying symptom is also a disease of compulsion. It seems to come from rejecting all evidence that suggests media-effects are relatively weak. Which is to say, what you see on TV is less predictive of whether a child will become a doctor, lawyer or action movie actor than whether the child's parents are doctors, lawyers or movie producers.

I think the reason is simple, the idea that the way the world is is contingent rather than almost arbitrary is quite frightening and the idea that there are huge levers by which the world can be changed for the better is quite comforting.

At this point in mid 2024, both the fandom rejecting "The Message" and the production companies continuing to promote it should both be ashamed of their pattern recognition skills. Albeit, I have more sympathy for the group pushing "The Message" not because I agree with it, but I understand the emotional investment, the compelling reasons to fall into denial and seek infinite recourse in the hypothesis that failure is down to a lack of commitment.

I'm less sympathetic to Dr. Who and Star Wars fans simply because they should have been tired of the IPs before they went woke. These are people who could be forgiven for thinking someone could do a better job than Lucas could do with the prequals, but should have been done with "The Force Awakens" and like, Dr. Who was played out by the tail end of the Matt Smith era, the scales should have dropped from a fan's eyes that Dr Who was not a formula for infinite content when Moffatt demonstrated he was going to beat his angel statue monsters and Dr River Song like a dead mule rather than show us anything new. By the time Peter Capaldi was attempting to revive interest by having Sonic Sunglasses or whatever, I felt ashamed that I was still watching. "The Message" was injected into a medical cadaver that was colonized by fanatical nerds.

In a sense though, that media-effects theory is overestimated in its strength can belie another failing of "The Message" that I suspect is almost incidental. "The Message" suffers from the streetlight effect. It is targeted at nerds because they are the most dependable audience in the world. In the same way a general limitation of psychology as a social science was that almost all its experimentation historically was carried out on college students particularly in the US, simply because they are the most available test subjects.

Are nerds more likely to be racist or sexist than fans of "Entourage" "Top Gear" or "Ballers"? "Madmen" "The Sopranos" or "The Wire"? Nerds are probably a large working class who reliably fork over disposable income for garbage entertainment.

If you want to change the world by spreading a message that early colonists deprived indigenous people of both property and a way of life that still effects them today, do you target that message to the niche audience that watches a period drama about the state of surgery at the turn of the 20th century like "The Knick" or do you target the vast numbers of people that will watch anything with a dragon or light-saber in it?

PROVE THEM WRONG! They put a lightsaber in a non-sensical show that comes off a run of poor quality nonsense shows and they flock to it as helplessly as the moth creatures that have been criticised. 

This is a tale of comorbidity, just like Covid was not pleasant for anyone, the people that really suffered had pre-existing health problems, including, sadly, being old. Nerds are going to suffer "long wokeness" though, because they keep feeding the disease and that in turn is their disease.

Here's something you can do. What year were you born in? Then punch that year and append "in movies" to the end in a search engine and start watching. If you feel a bit young, pick the years your parents were born in. Pick a genre you've never understood like the Convoy genre, and plug into a search engine "best convoy movies" and start watching. 

Look away from the lightsaber, from the point ears and dragons and just try something else.