A LOSS OF CULTURAL INTENT
The 20th century was a golden era for entertainment in the western world. In the USA and Europe, the technological age fused with some of the most vibrant civilizations in history to produce art of shocking global resonance. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published as a book at the tail-end of the 19th century, but a newfangled device called the motion picture camera allowed a film adaptation of the book in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi (simultaneous English and Spanish-language productions). A decade prior in 1922, a German company called Prana Films loosely adapted Bram Stoker’s opus into a silent film called Nosferatu, which promptly drew the legal ire of Stoker’s widow.
German director F.W. Murnau brought expressionism to the masses with the unsanctioned adaptation which would eventually grow beyond cult status—and its affiliation with Dracula—to establish its own cultural footing, eliciting as much attention as Stoker’s fanged blood-drinker. This was a link in a long chain where past cultures had been iterated upon, inspired by the desire to revivify the values that previous works represented, but doing so with slight aesthetic or narrative tweaks. Somewhere along the line, this tenet of cultural preservation was broken, ushering in an age of puerile artistic deconstruction to feed the egos of fragile and substandard talents incapable of escaping the shadows of their predecessors.
When Murnau and Prana Films were developing Nosferatu, there was an unspoken desire to stay true to the beats of Dracula’s story which worked so well. So much so that the subsequent legal entanglements demanded that the physical prints of Nosferatu be destroyed. Thankfully, some prints survived and the film is now widely distributed via home video and digitally. A masterful expression was nearly erased, not by the derision of an audience, but simply by legal mandate. However, in the new age, the past is not only dismissed but openly derided in favor of risible, pretentious agitprop. Culture is not destroyed by fire but through gradual, iterative erosion through means far more insidious than mere legal judgments. The desire for art that unites rather than divides is chided with charged language as “fascistic”, “regressive” and “problematic”. This is modernity’s revenge on beauty and truth.
There is a strange irony that Murnau and his crew risked legal ramifications to make a movie meant to titillate and entertain, even if it challenged legal boundaries. In the modern era, legal control of a property appears to give affiliated and contracted “creatives” the right to stray as far from the source material as possible while still retaining the popular signage and titles; a crass inversion of a once-mighty industry that prided itself on skill, talent and a boundless appreciation for the omnipresent audience. Now, the audience is a pesky hindrance that dependent orbiters in the fake-journalist media are happy to denigrate in order to maintain access in exchange for fealty.
The new era of corporate creatives—having no inclination to create original properties, nor the intellectual or artistic capacity to do so—opt to take that which has been created by their betters and shape them into amorphous mutations that only vaguely resemble the foundational art; entertainment be damned.
DISDAIN FOR THE PLEBS
We now live in an age where art has been so finely commodified that the idea of it existing to represent anything other than economic exchange is confounding in many circles. There was a time, not that long ago, that art existed as a form of self-expression, a humanistic distribution of ideas that are at the core of humanity’s struggles with the external and internal worlds.
Corporate chaff is hired to be the caretakers of intellectual properties they didn’t create and have no authorial responsibility to properly care for. It’s just a job for them. In fact, they have a vociferous disdain for those who consider themselves fans of franchises, and it shows in the work.
Even extremely competent talents aren’t immune to this. Director Denis Villeneuve can adapt Dune, but he can’t truly understand what drove Frank Herbert to write it. He can read the Dune books and even read interviews by Herbert regarding the motivations behind the writings, but in the end he’s just a movie director translating art from one medium to another. Through moving shapes and light, he can offer a visual and aural experience to tantalize the senses that doesn’t necessarily massage the mind. It’s just that: an adaptation. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
At least Villeneuve seems to have some kind of reverence for the source material, unlike many in the mainstream entertainment mill. Villeneuve seems to be among a dying breed closer in association to Murnau and co., in that common sense devotion to entertainment holds primacy, aside from a few niggling modern flourishes in his Dune adaptations that fans online are happy to point a microscope at.
THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND
Western education has not only strayed from its foundational values, it is actively vilifying those whose merits built the civilization. For decades now, we’ve been told about the “problematic” origins of our forefathers. Monuments of great men are being toppled to satiate the fringes of “politically correct” elites who think the past is something to be excoriated and forgotten in lieu of the perfectly equitable future our betters want to force us into.
Many of these ill-informed and socially-engineered dregs have wriggled their way into positions within the arts, specifically commercial art, and they have their hands on the wheel of western culture, one they seem hellbent on driving off of a cliff.
They don’t know what is good; they don’t know what is beautiful. Many have been so ideologically poisoned that simple, common sense ideas like moral and immoral are frustratingly debatable. Moral relativism becomes the guiding principle of the day with all of its contradictions. For fans, excitement from twenty years ago has transitioned to anger, then disappointment and now apathy.
BILLIONS LOST TO EGO AND VANITY
Star Wars, previously a pillar of unparalleled commercial success and cultural relevance has been reduced to a franchise relegated to streaming where it gets middling and sporadic interest. Star Wars toys rot on shelves and end up getting mulched en masse; younger generations have no interest as the original magic is gone.
The desire to subvert human instincts and tendencies has failed. What attracted audiences a century ago is what attracts us now. Gen Z is watching TV shows and movies from the 80s and 90s, rejecting modernity for that which resonates on a deeply human level with the masses and not the politically-deranged fringes.
The Marvel and DC franchises are flagging corpses of once thriving titans while other geek stalwarts like Star Trek, TMNT, Masters of the Universe, GI Joe and others receive confoundingly inconsistent attention in regards to quality offerings. This is a far cry from decades past, when fun and a deep concern for positive audience response reigned supreme.
The rare quality book adaptations like Dune and Project Hail Mary attract film-lovers to theaters in droves, until Hollywood returns to its typical ways and the bursts of enthusiasm settle back into simmering indifference for careless products.
A FUTURE OF DECENTRALIZED ART
In the recent past, the book publishing industry consisted of a handful of mega-giants like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster among a few others. However, in the last few years, the state of book publishing has fractured as tastes and audiences have diverged in ways that the lumbering giants are too slow and cumbersome to address and serve.
New creators, filmmakers, game developers and authors can go straight to the People through a plethora of platforms like Kickstarter. Social media platforms like X are connecting people the world over, diminishing the need for centralized control, and AI is enabling people to do far more with less resources. The customer receives the dividends.
Despite the previous content of this article, I’m actually extremely optimistic about the future of entertainment due to this fracturing of control and distribution. It’s a golden age of fun, whether it be in indie AI-generated movies, tens of thousands of games coming out on Steam every year or the growth of boutique book publishers like mine, Stratum Press. The menu is getting bigger and you—the customer—are eating good.
NEW CREATIVE VOICES
As an author of genre fiction, I feel blessed to be a part of this revolution. My third book, MAD MALITIA, is coming to Kickstarter likely by the end of May. It was originally set for completion/Kickstarter launch much sooner, but the story ballooned and expanded, nearly doubling the page count. The original concept was for it to be a “thrill ride” (short 2-3 hour read) but the story organically demanded to be more, so I happily acquiesced to the process. The final page count is looking to be closer to 400 pages by the final draft.
Mad Malitia is a more nuanced take on the cyberpunk epic about what happens when the human race gets everything they asked for—abundance—but there are still unforeseen circumstances. The Kickstarter project for Mad Malitia will offer the book itself in softcover, hardcover and eBook versions, as well as merch like a 128-page “Design Works” book of conceptual imagery, a physical CD soundtrack (yes, a physical CD of new music made just for the book) as well as a 2x8” bookmark of Malitia’s trusty sidearm, Chimera. There might also be prints.
My previous two works, Hotel Erebus and CLEAVE, are coming to Amazon this week in Hardcover, Softcover, eBook and Audiobook!
SARJ OUT