It's Payback Time, Hollywood!

Remember when somebody took a pickaxe to Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame? Time for another approach (Reed Saxon/AP).

After a bomb goes off, there’s that infernal ringing in the ears to deal with. Then come all smartypants takes. Sensible people shut out hectoring and find happy-making distractions. Still, in Hollywood, some stock-taking is in order. Craven moguls will genuflect to whoever is in power (same as it ever was) but the disposition of the culture industries to the general public ought to be examined.

There are jitters all over town because the town got it wrong (again). That’s hardly new. The community that brought you Marianne Williamson doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of the great mainstream. Presidential candidates Hollywood’s political establishment adores—Kennedy, Clinton, Obama—sometimes get elected. More often, they are rejected. Reagan, the first real showman to get to the White House, was loathed by entertainment liberals. Trump, the second, is much more despised. They are very different cats, but there is at least one consistency among their followers—a loathing of the imagined cultural left. That animus has festered since at least 1968. It resonates with diverse swaths of Americans who are not otherwise political.

Periodically, there are moments when that frustration gets expressed. Anybody who lived through the excesses of 2020 possibly remembers how quickly Trump pivoted to Nixonian talking points. Not only did they work, but they were helped by a deep dissatisfaction about the direction of the country (a disgruntlement felt in all Western democracies). Those fundamentals never shifted. That being the case, Hollywood’s preferred slate probably did better than expected.

But no more post-mortems and picayune demographic analysis. We’re talking about the future of show business. Hollywood’s business model is tied to understanding the mass audience; to succeed it must be in tune with the sentiments of millions of ordinary people. The election is a scalding reminder that it no longer reliably is.

There have been crowd pleasers in the past four years (Top Gun, Barbie). But everybody knows there are far too few of them. In the last two generations, Hollywood has gone from having an engaging conversation with the public to an increasingly dreary one with itself. That’s not entirely the industry’s fault. The splintering of media and the pandemic blew a hole through its model. But industries are also cultures. And show business is insular, hidebound, and losing control of the conversation.

Like the rest of civilization, Hollywood turned inward in recent years. That is a mode it cannot afford. Many of the things that give the business its allure—schmoozy ease and clubbiness, the sense that it’s all a family affair, a blissed-out perpetual adolescence—are now weaknesses. Cowardliness, cronyism, bullying, and a herd mentality go along with it. Herds sometimes steer themselves over cliffs.

In moments of political and cultural crisis, Hollywood rarely leads; it scrambles fearfully to catch up. In response to unsettling disruptions, the industry tried to narrowcast itself to a hodgepodge of constituencies—pleasing none of them. It tried to reduce huge, troubling questions—what kind of civilization are we?—to human resources memos. This wasn’t an idealistic approach, it was a reactionary, corporate one. In the process, it badgered creatives and alienated an authentic diversity of ordinary people. As things shrank, it stopped being fun.

One of the reasons we know this is that many people who work in Hollywood (not just predictable critics in conservative media) have fretted about it for years. Agents, publicists, executives, and even actors know that their industry is losing the plot. This goes beyond politics, however urgent and scary they may be. Hollywood can reflect a fractious culture, but it also must produce grand entertainments that knit it back together. Otherwise, it’s over.

Is that still possible? It begins by reclaiming bigness—ambitious storytelling that makes its pitch not to a dwindling in-crowd but to the cheap seats. It requires a sense that real people—now more than ever—crave deliverance from fear, not lectures. Politics is a fact of life, and fights are unavoidable and even necessary. But Hollywood would do America a profound service if it reclaimed storytelling for us all.

Yours Ever,

Marcello Rubini

Sisterhood Remains Murderous

Bad Sisters Season 2 (Apple TV+). One and done should be the motto of the streaming era—so many shows sag after their first run. The debut season of Apple’s black comedy (a reinvention of the Belgian series The Clan) was as bracing as a dip in Dublin Bay. The second plunge isn’t quite so crisp. Still, the Garvey sisters of Dublin (Sharon Horgan, Eva Birthistle, Sarah Greene, Eve Hewson, and Anne-Marie Duff) are easy company, trading barbs as they cover up a murder. This time out, a grim discovery threatens to expose their crimes. When it comes to the death of Grace’s godawful husband, Detective Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), is like a dog with a bone, and Fiona Shaw imposes on the situation as an overbearing grief counselor. So what if the twists are not quite as ingenious? It’s still good craic.—Baba Brennan

Spice Girls

Dune Prophecy (Max). Oh, to be the screenwriter who jots down things like, The Imperium is a circus of fear and rumor. I’m surrounded by vipers, and If I lose control of Arrakis, the Great Houses will feed me to the worm! These lines are delivered in a rasp by Mr. Intensity Mark Strong, as Emperor Javicco Corrino, who is trying to hold his lavishly produced realm together in a prequel set 10,000 years before Frank Herbert’s sci-fi tomes and their cinematic adaptations. A substantial chunk of the Commonwealth is employed in the origin story of the Bene Gesserit, the spooky sisterhood of the Dune-iverse. And what fun Emily Watson and Olivia Williams are having as the Mother Superior and her sibling, divining omens while wrapped in widows’ weeds. Jodhi May (those eyes!) unites a crabby galaxy as a powerful empress, while Travis Fimmel is a fly in the feminist ointment. Thorny dynastic politics seem to be HBO’s metier. This is Game of Worms or Succession in Space.—Hasimir Fenring

The Fine Art of Surfacing

Silo Season 2 (Apple TV+). Imagine an existence in which we’re sealed into bubbles, isolated and ignorant of larger truths! Oh wait, that is us. The genius of Hugh Howey’s Silo novels is in this nasty dystopian truth. Graham Yost’s meticulous adaptation has given Rebecca Ferguson the role of her career as an engineer who questions the goings-on in a subterranean complex that keeps a human remnant safe from the outside world. When last we met, she’d been forced above ground, where she confirmed Earth is one big ashtray. But also, it turns out there are many other silos, including one reigning in Delightful Steve Zahn. That’s going to be a personnel issue for Bernard (Tim Robbins) the majordomo of Down Below, and the complex’s security chief (Common). Pry open the hatch!—Winston Smith

Have we done all the murders yet? True Crime podcasting sputters along, rehashing every TV movie from the 1980s. Still, the genre occasionally comes through. In Kill List, journo Carl Miller stumbled upon a website offering rub out peoples’ enemies for a hefty fee. The assassination service turned out to be a con that exploited vendettas for cash. Miller dove into the trove of “hit requests,” and followed up with the targets, many of whom were stunned (not an eerily calm Swiss woman, who immediately fingers her ex-husband one alpine village over). It’s not the scam but the psychology of revenge that makes it all riveting—Vince Vega