Art without reality, blockbusters without stars
On everyone's collective breakdown, Beatles & Snow White's 14 dwarfs
The Australian-born production of Dorian Gray starring Sarah Snook has been long lauded for its one-woman interpretation of Wilde for the contemporary age. I saw it just after its arrival on Broadway, and was impressed by Snook’s ability to undertake something so broad and breathless: literally, in terms of her ability to speak the entire play without intermission, finagle tech and props solo, and run circles around the proscenium. But this broadness proved only a distraction to an empty first pass at “updating” Wilde’s thoughts on vanity for an age defined by technological images. The formerly titular portrait here is changing live feeds from a phone in Snook’s hand, projecting her face in changing beauty filters that she manipulates until unrecognizable. Any spatial or thematic effect of this is played through giant screens that move effortlessly from the ceiling and around Snook, projecting life-sized recordings of her for the real Snook to interact with, as often as set pieces and giant portraits of her live face. The effect of this was entirely lost on me, as any artistic effect of its tessellation between spectacle, space, screen, and human body has already been bested in Walt Disney World.
Before I saw ABBA: Voyage, a hologram de-aging ABBA concert in London, my friend Phil wrote this review of it which I think is the best piece of cultural criticism that lives on Substack. He likens it to L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, famously and mythologically setting the stage for our historical and phenomenological understandings of cinema’s uncannily technological disruptions to real life. He said the holograms felt real, and they indicated a potential for human art and innovation that felt scary: when do we stop, if not at de-aging real, living people in realistic, likely AI-assisted CGI?
When I saw ABBA: Voyage, I was expecting to at least have a fraction of this reaction, to be charmed by the freakishness of the illusion. As I wrote about immediately after, however, I was not. While Voyage is secretive about the tech they use to create the holograms, given the production’s ties to Disney patents and their use of rear projection and spatially illusive CGI in theme parks, I can assume the tech used to reanimate ABBA of the 1970s is the same tech used in the Avatar rides in Disney World. Not many of my friends who are interested in movies—even blockbusters—are interested in theme parks in the way I am. I bristle at this, as I believe they are and have always been a breeding ground for audiences’ relationships to spectacle and moving images, and that if you don’t understand what’s going on in them you don’t understand the flow of IP that shapes all contemporary movie making, nor do you understand the ontology of a contemporary film. I texted Phil, “those are just the Avatar screens.” And he was like, “yeah, maybe if I had seen that first I wouldn’t be so freaked out.”
Bear with me: I felt similarly seeing Dorian Gray and Snow White in the same weekend. The former was presented to me as art, guarded by expensive tickets and a “real actor.” But all it was was theme park screens and decade-old ideas about women, vanity, and technology grafted onto a story about the specific intersections between queerness and narcissism; in other words, an attempt at art that was out of touch with its own engagement with corporate spectacle. Snow White was the thing that felt novel: a uniquely discourse-infected, executively miscalculated, narratively and aesthetically illegible nightmare that is being sold only as a box office failure. When I was watching it, I audibly said “wow” many times, as it didn’t even feel like I was watching a movie.
We can laugh at Disney’s efforts to blame the film—reshot to include 14 total dwarfs and casted, rendered, and marketed lazily—on the only person in the film with a soul, but this is all a distraction to what makes the film interesting. How did Disney make these miscalculations so spectacularly? They thought it was a good idea to cast a young person of color and a woman incapable of leading a post-Wonder-Woman success who is famous for being bad at her job and evil, side by side? Why did they succumb to the same kind of false herring of loud minority woke policing that ultimately sent their Star Wars franchising into the toilet? And why is the public letting this happen, continuing on a discursive trend about nothing, and paying no mind to the movie that is crazy to see with your eyes—or that Questlove is slated to direct a “live-action” version of The Aristocats? Is this what happens as art and entertainment continue to collapse? Why is this so hard to parse, even for Disney, and even for me?
For the most part, the things that come up on my TikTok FYP make sense. Disney vloggers and clips from podcasts hosted by drag queens whose names I don’t fully have committed to memory: that’s all stuff I curated by liking and lingering on the posts. Every so often, though, I’ll start to get something fed to me that I don’t have the faculties to understand. Every day for the last month, for instance, I get girls talking about “Role Model.” “He’s really hot” is the gist of what these girls say. I do not know who this is. And, I don’t mean that how I mean “I don’t understand who Alex Cooper is.” I vaguely know the latter person’s job, face, and voice. Until I did thorough research to figure it out, I had absolutely no idea who “Role Model” is, or that he is a white rapper named Tucker Pillsbury who recently pivoted from making music with Kreayshawn’s group to making TikTok ambient pop. All of a sudden, girls I know from college started posting about “Role Model” on their Instagram stories, too: these are people I know from real life. Tucker Pillsbury is someone these people care about. How did they learn about him? Where did he come from?
Speaking of Alex Cooper, something I would expect people to be talking about more this week is Chappell Roan’s flubs on Call Her Daddy. Granted, there are a lot of posts about this spread across X and TikTok, but they by and large have no unanimousness. People aren’t universally outraged or defensive of Roan’s assertion that she doesn’t know anyone with kids who are happy (lol) or her complaint that it’s too difficult to eat and have ideologies at the same time (lol, in a different way). I see videos come up all the time of fans or detractors just simply talking about the very fact that she said stuff, at all. The tone is, “how do we feel about this?” which sparks milquetoast debate for a couple days before burning out. Meanwhile, Gaga, one of the biggest stars in the world, is unveiling prohibitive dynamic Ticketmaster pricing for a seemingly slapdash, last minute tour, priming her fans to unnecessarily spend thousands on bad tickets.1 My FYP has been ablaze with Gaga content for 5 years, and I’ve hardly seen any posts about this, and none with more than a couple hundred likes.
Compare this to the Eras Tour, which was able to dominate FYPs with thousands and millions of likes for two years straight; any throwaway moment, ticket news, costume change. And compare Chappell Roan’s media battles to even Charli’s one-off “kamala IS brat,” widely believed to have derailed the critical and commercial momentum of the end of her album promo. Then consider the way the internet and real world differently receive all kinds of small and huge moments. Kamala IS brat, but she is not President; Alex Garland’s Civil War was offensive and unmemorable because he said dopey stuff on Pod Save America, but it was A24’s second-highest-grossing film; Morgan Wallen walking off SNL meant something beyond Wallen and SNL having a years-long bad relationship and Wallen having a history with substance abuse, but he just became the first artist to have two albums spend 100 weeks in the Billboard 200 Top 10; Sarah Snook in Dorian Gray is propulsive art and Snow White is the utmost corporate trash, but I had far more fun and did far more critical thinking watching one of these things, and it wasn’t the one with no dwarfs, but the one with 14!
Total alienation from a cultural trend always makes people feel it might be time for the urn: that they’ve finally turned a corner and are officially no longer young. Not recognizing Role Model does not make me feel that way. I know exactly who Role Model’s ex-girlfriend, apparently, Emma Chamberlain is. I know even crazier stuff, too, like “Alix Earle is friends with The Kid Laroi” or “Jake Shane was in the controversial new FKA twigs video.” What moments and cultural hiccups like this make me feel is that there are no longer many clear distinctions, at all, between monoculture and niche markets, highbrow and lowbrow, entertainment and art. Chalking up misunderstandings and strange discursive cycles to generational or political differences does not account for the fundamentally strange and illegible ways celebrity, ideology, and cultural products are received in the public sphere.
You could say that Role Model really isn’t that famous, and algorithms just blow his popularity beyond audiences of children out of proportion. But I don’t understand how I can be so familiar with Emma Chamberlain, be so stupid and such a big fan of Harry Styles, and still entirely evade any knowledge of Role Model’s existence. You could also say that Morgan Wallen is really only famous amongst people who aren’t chronically online, indicating a divide between conservative and liberal Americans and what they take up as mainstream. But that doesn’t explain the complete breakdown Wallen’s SNL walk off has caused amongst the most well-trodden areas of the internet. Hasan Piker, who is smart and beloved, posted that Wallen “chose to be on snl” but didn’t “thank the cast and background workers that put the show together for him,” implying Wallen is bucking some conventions of politeness for a popstar and illustrating how stupid conservatives are. But when has an SNL musical guest ever thanked “background workers?” Do we think that maybe Wallen’s label—already in dangerous territory attempting to wrangle a party boy with magic chart powers but an inability to calm down, perhaps invoking rules upon Wallen that are exploitative—forced him to do SNL, and that it wasn’t his choice? Since when is SNL an institution deserving of such reverence? How is Wallen leaving 5 minutes too early any worse than Chappell Roan lamenting on Call Her Daddy that fame has taken the “light [from her] eyes?”
Of course, Wallen’s history of foulness is an easy explanation, but not a comprehensive one. It weirdly reminds me of years ago, when I became fixated on a simple question: why did my friends not care about Devon Lee Carlson? At the time, she—a longtime, major it-girl influencer—had just broken up with her boyfriend—the lead singer of The Neighbourhood—who immediately went on to date Billie Eilish, whose most recent album features songs implying he cheated on Carlson with Billie, even though Carlson and Billie are now friends. Billie Eilish is very famous, and Devon Lee Carlson’s best friends (formerly) included a Hadid and one of Harry Styles’ most renown ex-girlfriends. Now, Carlson is dating Jack Nicholson’s grandson, who was on the cover of Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!. This seems like a perfect confluence of interests for phone-addicted 20-year olds and millennial bloggers, alike, but my beloved geniuses at Who Weekly? always refused my calls about it, and friends would chalk the dissonance up to my age: I was just too tapped into Gen Z micro-obsessions, they said.
I say that something else weird was going on. Why Devon Carlson, one of the most consistently, commercially successful influencers, has never been able to eke herself into Nara Smith levels of influencer fame (sitting front row at Schiaparelli next to Doja and Doechii?) is a mystery to me. But I think the solution is more or less uncomplicated: the culture of celebrity that receives her is increasingly fractured and, literally, impossible to diagnose. People used to lament the inclusion of influencers on fashion show or PR lists, until the public realized that the same invites and packages used to go to editors and micro-celeb models we just don’t have anymore because of apps on phones. That’s not crazy and doesn’t mean anything, face value, for the state of criticism or art industries. It does, though, when I—the most celeb-obsessed, phone-addicted, cusp Gen Z/Millennial American alive—sees a picture of the front row of a major fashion show and is totally unable to evaluate how famous the people sitting there are.
I’ve already written plenty about how monoculture is a mess, and the internet is impossible to understand, but that we have to try. But I think there’s an added, complicated element to all of this when art and entertainment products get involved. Part of my scholarly work is about how the collapse of studio movie making due to greed and cultural, technological incompetencies of the executive class has aligned art and blockbuster cinema far more than intellectuals would like to admit. There are real formal and extratextual parallels, for instance, between Gerwig’s Barbie and, in Richard Brody’s words, Godard’s career as a “leftist who dedicated [Detective (1985)] to Clint Eastwood and made Le Rapport Darty, produced by and about France’s version of Best Buy.”
In other words, refusing to read any radical potential in Barbie, even if you don’t end up finding any, is asinine. What was once subaltern—at least in the West—is now baked into the mainstream, as any form of cinema that is actually seen by people with eyeballs continues to shrink. As studios become entirely dependent on dwindling, product-based IP, and any indie means to production, distribution, or preservation rely on lifelines from entities like A24, all of this starts to collapse on itself. We have to start reading real artistic potential in blockbusters, and real corporatism in art film. Or, we have to at least acknowledge their bleeding into one another, and that stopping it altogether is a fruitless endeavor.
That doesn’t mean we should give something like this any real time of day, but it does mean we should interrogate how Marvel is aping the aesthetics associated with a distribution company (?) to sell a movie. Even 5 years ago, this would have seemed crazy. Now, we laugh at it, and the movie and its existence very quickly evaporate into dust. The Box Office is run by 20-year-old IP (Wolverine), however, and there’s no IP left to mine. If the way audiences are sold and react to these blockbusters is so unwieldy and confusing, how do we ever get out of this? How do movies continue with no monocultural superstars?
One of the things I’ve most acutely changed my mind about is Alex Garland’s Civil War. When I saw the film last spring, I enjoyed its action sequences and boldness to murder a president in a movie by and for dumb people. But a big part of it is about the ethics of war photography and importance of images in remembering or historically codifying human death. In the context of being inundated by images of the ongoing destruction of humanity in Palestine, I found the film’s irreverence about these ideas offensive. Rarely do I take umbrage with a movie’s politics like this, but I read in it a dissonance between the way movies exist today—in Civil War’s case, within a limbo between art and blockbuster trash—and the way people engage with the real world through reproduced images. I still see this in the film, but after talking with friends and revisiting its grotesquerie, I decided that, whether purposeful or accidental, its engagement of those dissonances makes it very interesting.
If you only engaged with Garland’s recent output through the internet, though, you would be forever stuck in the shadow of his comments on Pod Save America, or how his choice to direct the upcoming Iraq war film Warfare supposedly dooms the careers of any actors involved. It’s not novel or particularly smart of me to say, “perhaps a more malleable approach to criticism, art, entertainment, and ideology would make our culture better and richer,” but—as online discourse’s ability to derail Snow White and Star Wars proves—it bears repeating, given its very real impact on the creation of and engagement with movies.
At something called “CinemaCon,” it was recently revealed that Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, and Joseph Quinn are slated to play The Beatles in four, simultaneously released movies from each member’s point of view. Sam Mendes announced this as “the first theatrical bingeable experience,” which people logically think is a ridiculous financial decision. I would agree this is not a “smart” way for Sony to spend money, because Sam Mendes is not very good at making movies; if Barbenheimer proved anything, it’s that movies make more money when they seem and are good. But its intrigue as a cinematic experiment that plays with the culture of streaming and exhibitive capabilities of its context is not to be overlooked. At least this is an inventive way to play with an already and increasingly slippery differentiation between media.
Writing everything—a four-part Beatles movie starring 4 clowns (sounds funny to me!), Morgan Wallen’s disinterest in SNL, or the public’s reactions to those things—merely as signs of an increasingly stupid and frustrating culture, is nothing but regressive and harmful. Disney’s reliance on an “A24” “arthouse” aesthetic to sell the last vestiges of, until recently, its biggest cash cow, is not some unprecedented, ridiculous sign of “the end of empire,” or, however people talk about “the state of things.” It’s interesting and it’s hopeful; no one can get a grasp on the way audiences, exhibition, cinema, or art work, anymore, but that disorientation extends to the marshals of empire. Sure, to try to tape the film industry back together executives are attempting to cut costs on the creative side rather than from their own, useless pockets. But that won’t work: AI movies won’t make money. Attention spans for multi-movie drudgery á la Avengers no longer takes, and studios are running out of IP to farm.
To this day, the newest areas in Disney World are Avatar: The World of Pandora and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. These were the last big things that Disney spent money acquiring, and what else is there to buy? If those theme parks remain—as I believe they will—testing grounds for the technological and spectacular futures of cinema and media encounter, but they stop being tethered to any living culture outside their walls, innovation in art, spectacle, technology, and distribution will bleed even more between these commercial realms and new, real art. I say kudos to Sony for allowing this ridiculous experiment of four expensive movies with four guys who are about as famous as Role Model. Wielding cultural disarray to imagine a new future for art, entertainment, and celebrity is the only way new ideas will emerge and break through a stupid world. Maybe they should make a Beatles theme park world next, and have actors walking around as Ringo.
i didn’t get one :(
I think MORE guys should be walking off SNL
To your point, I really liked Civil War and I did not even know that Alex Garland went on Pod Save America let alone said something controversial to a guy named “Jon”… I guess it makes sense that all I’ve heard about Warfare has been from a not-famous guy named “Ray Mendoza.”