Hollywood product has degraded to the point that hardly a day goes by without someone noticing Cultural Ground Zero.
Valued neopatron, DJ, and fellow ex-movie theater employee Scott Waddell brings up this book, wherein MST3K’s Kevin Murphy notices movie ground zero.
Dial around your radio and you’ll sometimes hear a station’s tagline: “The best music of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and today!” Then it dawns on you that it has been “today” for twenty-four years. You are not crazy and you aren’t in some purgatorial Groundhog Day scenario. You are in purgatory but we call it by another name: Post Pop-Culture Ground Zero 1997.
Related: Ground Zero
So you are not alone in this wasteland. In fact, even a boomer like Kevin Murphy (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame) noticed something was amiss way back in 2002 with his book, A Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey.
For those keeping score at home, 2002 is only five years after Cultural Ground Zero. So Kevin gets points for being an early noticer.
Kevin embarked on a wild experiment for his book. “Beginning tomorrow, January 1, 2001, I, Kevin Murphy, promise to go to a theater and watch a movie every single day, for an entire year.” What follows is a diary of the theaters visited, the movies watched, and plenty of commentary about the experiment and the state of the modern moviegoing experience.
Related: “Hollywood Is in Shambles”
After noting how Kevin kept a month-long movie fast in preparation for his experiment–overt ritual behavior that would be sublimated into the emerging Pop Cult–Scott relates Kevin’s experience watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“From the outset, each and every person in that theater got sucked in, laughing at the jokes, thrilling at the stunts, hissing at the Nazis. No cynicism, no jaded boredom, several eruptions of spontaneous cheering. It was a one-hundred-and-fifteen-minute roller-coaster ride, the most wonderful experience I’d ever had in a movie theater, and I didn’t even have a date.
“Events such as this are not just movies, but genuine adventures; the films themselves when removed from their context amount to nothing. The company, the mood, the venue—they’re as integral to a moviegoing memory as they are to a romantic meal, a thrilling concert, a great ball game…Life amounts to what we experience, not what we consume, but I’m afraid we’ve become a nation of consumers.”
Excuse me while I tap the sign:
But fast forward eighteen years and Kevin starting noticing something. “When the [MST3K] series ended in 1999, and I returned to the theaters, I didn’t like what I was seeing. Multiplexes were erupting around me like massive concrete sores. I began to notice fewer and fewer people happy as they left the theater, including me.”
We’re not supposed to ask questions about our entertainment, but Kevin raises one so crucial as to merit bending the rule: When was the last time you walked out of a movie theater happy? As happy as you were after seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Terminator 2 or even Jurassic Park?
Kevin feels out the contours of the problem in his observations about the first Harry Potter movie:
It looked like a movie and sounded like a movie, and if you bought the theme cup it even tasted like a movie. My theory is that Harry Potter is a groundbreaking achievement for the future: a movie clone. It has all the outward appearances of a piece of entertainment without shouldering the onus of actually entertaining.
That right there is as perfect a summation of Cultural Ground Zero as any: The mass replacement of entertainment with entertainment-like product.
And following on that revelation, Scott delivers his conclusion:
And here we are in 2024 and it’s “today” for another year. A lot has happened since Kevin’s book—Netflix, streaming services, and the last time we felt the smallest pang of nostalgia for any film made post-1997 was perhaps Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. However we can still imitate him by taking our entertainment consumption in our own hands, become “smarter and pickier” when it comes to movies where “money and time are on the line.” This is doubly important given that the rulers of the entertainment industries have made it a mission to actively attack everything you hold dear.
Thanks to Scott for sharing Kevin’s book. His timing is spot on, since we’re in the middle of the latest Pop Cult pushback against moviegoers having dignity.
This time, they’re accusing people with standards of “culture warring” and whining that “Nobody wants to have fun.”
Notice how they’re deflecting attention from the entertainment-like product that normal people are noticing is not fun to the people making those observations. It’s a basic, tired DARVO tactic.
Because normal people want to have fun. Implying otherwiwse is absurd.
It’s the joyless nuPuritans in the Death Cult who lie awake at night, shaking in fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.
Since we’ve already broken the ban, here’s another forbidden question: Who wants you to have fun?
Is it the self-hating scolds in charge of Hollywood, their Pop Cult water carriers, or independent creators who listen to their patrons instead of preaching at them?
Ordinarily, I’d conclude with a link to Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You, but taking a page from Kevin and Scott, here’s some genuine entertainment I made so you can have fun.
The deep lore of Tolkien meets the brutal struggle of Glen Cook in the dark fantasy prelude to the acclaimed Soul Cycle.
And get early looks at my works in progress, the chance to influence my writing, and VIP access to my exclusive Discord.
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Thanks. For the record, I’m not an actual DJ. That tag line came when I heard some lib-Cat accuse the orthosphere of being a bunch of self-appointed Catholic DJs riding the wave of neo-reactionary blah, blah, blah. and I just thought hey! Perfect subtitle for my blog! Thank God for your enemies. 😀
My pleasure. Interesting back story.
The amateur stories that I read for free on Reddit beat the pants off of the vast majority of modern movies, unironically. At least those are made by people who care.
The guys who’d have been making low or no-budget horror films back in the 80s are making analog horror videos today.
Pre-1997: Cheese is Cheese
Post-1997: Velveeta is Cheese
Post 2020: GMO-Rennet Glob is Cheese
Thus fares Entertainment.
MST3K may have been outsiders for dissing Roger Corman, but they were well-read enough in the field to understand the switch when they saw it. Good on the Singing Fireplug Robot for noting it, and Mr Waddell for pointing it out to the audience.
Randy and I used to go the theater pretty regularly started in the late 90s. I can say that it was a good time to go to the movies–if you wanted to waste time or watch something competent. But finding actual gems got harder and harder as the ’00s wore on. For example, the last two movies I saw in theaters were John Wick 2 and 3, and that’s because there was literally nothing else worth paying to see anymore. It’s not even that movies got boring, they were already that by the 2010s, it’s that they got incompetent and beyond lazy where it mattered most.
I actually very much miss the movie theater experience, but there’s just no way to have it anymore. The product is far too terrible to support, and that’s not even mentioning the fact that the people making it hate you.
To answer your question, it was John Wick 2. Before that, it gets tricky. The last comedy that actually had me laughing like a madman and left me satisfied was Tropic Thunder . . . in 2008. The last Pixar movie that really impressed was Up . . . in 2009. The MCU tapered off around the middle of Phase 3 and I never even bothered watching Endgame–it was too formulaic and dull by then.
I’m glad we do Cannon Cruisers now, and we still get to watch and talk about movies, but sometimes I do miss the theater experience. Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly like a thing of the past.
If you were to look at my movie going record the past 5 or so years, you’d see it’s mostly populated with anime movies. Like you, I enjoy and miss the movie going experience but find little reason to go. The only exception I make is for anime films, even for ones I’ve seen or even own on dvd/bluray. For me, it’s just nice to see something I like on the big screen, you know?
The Generation Video guys were discussing the aughts comedy revival (Pineapple Express, Anchorman, The Hangover, etc.). They reached the same conclusion as you that the brief Renaissance ended with Tropic Thunder. What they missed but you caught was the MCU taking off the same year.
Recently saw a friend I hadn’t seen for a while and got dragged to the theater. Not something I like doing but I’m not going to get into an argument with a normie friend about the state of movies unless he wants me to go every week.
Anyway, what surprised me is that the theater was just straight up playing old movies like American Psycho, plus a bunch of Ghibli films. (Sadly, my suggestion to see those got shot down.) This apparently wasn’t a one off thing: they’ve since shown stuff like The Crow, Rear Window, The Goonies, Top Gun and The Shining. (You will notice that outside of the Hitchcock flicks, these are all 80’s and 90’s films). This wasn’t a “throwback” theater; they were showing new films on most screens, but their schedule consistently had classic films as well. I don’t remember anything like that happening in the 90’s outside of specialized theaters or special events like the Star Wars: Special Editions.
It feels like an admission that the current round of slop is no longer enough to fill seats. I wonder if movie theaters will move to smaller venues focused on the experience rather than simply a way of watching new movies. They will probably have the newest blockbuster going just for spectacle, and maybe a new kids movie so that parents can take care of a day with the kids, but the other screens could be a mix of classic movies, independent films, etc. The big change in such a model would that big movie companies would no longer intend for every big movie to show up in theaters; they’d just accept that it’s gotta be streaming now. In exchange, movie theaters would be much less beholden to following the whims of Hollywood. Of course, this would also surely result in movie theaters being a more niche thing, like theaters that show plays. The only real loss there is that movies can no longer be cultural events, but I don’t think there has been any movie that WAS a cultural event since Avengers: Endgame and even that paled in comparison to how the public reacted to things like the Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Matrix.
Man, I haven’t been to a movie theater in years. Aside from there being nothing worth watching and everything is direct to streaming anyway, the theaters in our city are afflicted with bedbugs. You want to bring them home, go spend 2 hours in a movie theater. Nope, nope, nope!
I took my sons to see Detective Pikachu when it was out. I enjoyed it and left feeling happy. The local theater had a matinee of Kung Fu Panda last summer I took them to see and felt happy. Those were the last two times I’ve been to the theater here.
Oh, I watched FIREPROOF in the theater and left happy.
I am very picky about movies in theaters. Rarely have I watched a movie on DVD and thought, “I should have gone to the theater for this!”