Conservatives Make Shitty Artists Because Conservatism Kills Art

"Hollywood is out of ideas!"

It's the great lament of the era of endless reboots and re-adaptations. There is nothing new in Hollywood, so they've resorted to remaking past efforts shot for shot.

Folks? That's not just a lie; it's an insidious, mean-spirited goddamn lie that serves to undermine artists and all the important work they do, and to shield the people actually responsible for the problem. There's no shortage of amazing ideas in Hollywood; they're just not getting made into movies because the thing we've run out of is obscenely rich people willing to risk a very tiny fraction of their wealth to produce good art.

The average budget for a major studio film runs about $250 million. Backers generally want some assurance that they're going to see that money again, so everything from scripts to casting is built around the question of how much return on investment can be squeezed out of ninety minutes in a dark theatre. As a general rule? The worse the economy is, the worse the movies get because financiers are too scared to do anything people might not pay their carefully budgeted money to see.

You can see this across all decades. The 1920s gave us The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Steamboat Willie, Nosferatu, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and all the other classics your grandparents went to see. Movies that pushed the envelope in terms of storytelling (for the time) and topics to see what they could get away with. Because the public had money to burn, and Hollywood was more than happy to see how many different ways they could make them do so.

Then the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression hit, and we got a little thing called the Motion Picture Production Code, more commonly known as the Hays Code. It wasn't a law, but a set of rules put forth by the industry itself to control the moral content of all films produced from 1930 to 1968. The generally accepted reasoning for the Hays Code was the plethora of raunchy films and equally raunchy Hollywood scandals that lived up to the Roaring 20s moniker. And indeed, the proposals for the Hays Code started as early as 1927.

But the actual adoption of it in 1930? Was all about money. As in, people were too broke after 1929 to have the kind of disposable income needed to attend movies, so Hollywood had to maximize profits by producing as few flops as possible. This meant making sure films were safe enough to not ruffle feathers and put people off going (remember, home video didn't exist; a movie's theatre run was the only money it would ever make). And so, the Hays Code was adopted for almost four decades.

As a result? In the early days of the Code, while filmmaking technology improved, films themselves stagnated as far as being creative and daring. The bad guy always lost, the good guy always won, authority was always respected, gender roles strictly enforced, and nobody the audience was supposed to hate was ever sympathetic. It was, quite literally, like watching the same goddamn movie for almost twenty years.

There were small bright spots that we still regard today as creatively daring, and that's only because of artists like Hitchcock and DeMille who read the Hays Code and went "challenge accepted, motherfucker." They adhered to the Code, but subverted the shit out of it. Films like Notorious (1946) with its two-and-a-half-minute kissing sequence where the actors parted every three seconds to stay within the guidelines. Frankenstein (1931) with its "Now I know what it feels like to be God!" that just skirted the line without stepping over it. The Wizard of Oz (1939) with the eponymous Wizard's moral ambiguity all over the place. And of course, Casablanca (1942) with the famous gambling scene.

Those are the movies we remember, the ones that dared to be risky. Everything else was aggressively forgettable.

And as enforcement of the Code began to weaken after John Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952 officially extended First Amendment protections to film, movies began to more outwardly flout it. The Code was even re-written in 1956 to be a little less stuffy (and slightly less racist), and then abandoned altogether in 1968 when it became evident that both the public and most of Hollywood were frankly getting bored and restless with it, and the more daring films were proving to be far more profitable. And it's no accident that this profitability coincided with the end of the Depression and the beginning of the near-constant-wartime economic boom of the 1940s through the late 1960s. People had more money to drop on movies, and were thus more likely to go out and see stuff that might not be their usual bag.

And like clockwork, the recession of the 1980s brought back the general spinelessness of the 1930s, just without an official Code to adhere to. Execs simply refused to back movies they thought were too avant-garde. And so the early 1980s movie landscape got us the same general lack of creativity. There were, again, a few bright spots that we still celebrate today, and again we do so because they dared to break the mold, take a risk, and live a little crazy. Some examples being Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, The Shining, Poltergeist, Tootsie, and The Neverending Story.

As the economy picked back up? The 1990s gave us more plentiful riskier shit. Terminator 2. Jurassic Park. Schindler's List. The Silence of the Lambs. Seven. Good Will Hunting. Event Horizon. 12 Monkeys. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The Hunt For Red October.

The early 2000s swung back the other way with recession of the Bush 43 years. Shit, I can barely remember movies that came out between 2000 and 2009, other than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, and Kill Bill. Film was that fucking bland.

The economic recovery of the Obama years yielded another crop of Hollywood getting its groove back with Avatar, Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool, The Help, Hidden Figures, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, and the Captain America film series.

And now? Here we are again. Back to playing it safe, because the economy is on the edge of a knife and we're being governed by a madman intent on driving it straight into the ground in order to get what he can out of it while making sure everyone else is fucked. As a result? We've had exactly two memorable, daring films since Trump took the nation's helm, and they were Black Panther and The Greatest Showman.

To give you an idea of how far we've backslid in terms of daring, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) depicted three on-screen homosexual encounters. It's 2018 and Freddie fucking Mercury can't even be the bisexual man he was in his own goddamn biopic. Hollywood is that scared.

It all goes back to movies having that giant quarter-million-dollar price tag that investors may not ever see again because people don't have the disposable income to take a chance on a film they might hate. So they only throw their money at movies they can be reasonably sure will at least break even. And as a result? Only the safe shit gets made, with very few exceptions. Film, like everything else, gets more conservative when the cash flow dries up.

And artists take the fall for not having deep enough pockets to just make movies for the hell of it. Art stagnates. Art dies. Dinosaurs can't breed when they're all one sex. Unless, of course, life finds a way. And it has; on the small screen.

By contrast, a typical one-hour television episode only costs about $5-7 million, and the maximum is about $15 million for series like Game of Thrones. And episodes can be financed in small packs to see how the show performs before committing to larger budgets. Investors are far less worried about money, and ergo far more willing to take risks. Which is why we've seen some stuff from both cable TV and streaming services that would frankly never see the light of day in any other medium. Amazon Prime's Lore and Jack Ryan, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale and 11.22.63, and Netflix's Stranger Things and Orange is the New Black have all dared to push boundaries with regard to content that appeals to more than just straight white men. And the trend doesn't look to be stopping anytime soon.

Conservatism kills creativity because the lifeblood of art is change. Art needs new ideas to live, and risk-takers to thrive. Conservatism -- the fear of change, the rejection of the new, and the preservation of the status quo at all costs -- is inherently anti-art and anti-artist. This is why in authoritarian states, which are always conservative, art and its expression are among the first things to be clamped down on. You take away their will to resist by taking away any source of enjoyment or hope. In the words of Gmork, people without hope are easy to control, and whoever has control has the power.

The small screen is giving the Empress a new name. Long live Fantasia.

Trump's Worst Nightmare Just Came True

I've spent almost 24 hours trying to get my thoughts regarding the 2018 midterms into something that isn't screaming possum memes. I'm not sure how successful I'm about to be, either, but here we go.

Democrats did as well as could be reasonably expected last night. Taking the Senate was always an impossibly tall order. Too many Democrats up for reelection, many in vulnerable red state seats. It was all but assured Republicans would keep control of the chamber, and highly likely they would pick up a seat or two (which they've done).

But it's a pyrrhic victory. The Democrats not only flipped the House, but also 7 governorships and 200+ state legislature seats. Despite gerrymandering and voter suppression.

So what does it mean now that we control the House? Let's break it down:

• Any further attempts to repeal the ACA are dead in the water. That shit will never make it past a blue House.
• Indeed, any shitty, dangerous legislation coming from the GOP Senate will not survive a blue House vote.
• Democrats now control all House committees. Of particular relevance right now? Judiciary, Oversight, and Finance.
• House Democrats now have subpoena power to request whatever documents they need, and the ability to release whatever information they wish to the public as long as it's not classified.

What this means for Trump is that his life is going to be a living fucking Hell for the next 2 years. Everything he's done will be under the microscope, because these will not be partisan shitshow window-dressing investigations, but actual ones. And his criminality will become public record.

For a narcissist like Trump? This is the worst thing that could possibly happen to him. Being held accountable for his shit, and being so publicly.

And he's already starting to panic. Not even half a day after the midterms, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned. And Trump is looking to replace him with someone a lot friendlier. Unfortunately for Trump, this is going to work about as well as it did for Nixon, because now that we have an actual check on his power, you better believe House Democrats are going to investigate the holy fuck out of this. They're already planning to bring in Mueller for public hearings should Trump find an Attorney General willing to fire him.

I don't want to make any predictions for the future of the Trump Administration. But I will say that there is no scenario that bodes well for him. In 2020, there will be twice as many Republican senators up for reelection as Democrats. Considering how close the races were last night even in GOP strongholds, none of those seats are truly safe. And depending on what House committee investigations uncover? They may be even less so. Particularly if Trump's popularity drops below 30% (which is not at all unlikely).

If Trump becomes more of a liability than an asset? Republicans will have no choice but to turn on him, like they did with Nixon. The question is whether Trump will resign, or have to be impeached, convicted, and dragged kicking and screaming across the White House lawn.

For now? Winter is here.