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The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? And Other Essays
Finished: Dec 12, 2022
pp: 290
Author: William Goldman
Other books: The Princess Bride , Adventures in the Screen Trade, Which Lie Did I Tell, and more
Rating: Breezy
Some thoughts:
One of the many unfortunate things about the take economy is how resistant it is to reflection. We’re trash collectors, all of us. And when you’re a trash collector, you don’t get rid of your old trash, it just gets buried further and further down the pile. Something from a few months ago is practically out of reach for all the mental gymnastics you have to go through to get back to the place where those references and jokes made sense. All of our goofs about horse dewormers might as well have been made before men landed on the moon for how far removed we feel from that world.
This book collects the essays William Goldman wrote for The New Yorker throughout the 90s and inadvertently creates an artifact that preserves Goldman’s hot takes about the movie world in amber. It gives you a chance to see him reacting to the changing pop culture landscape in real time and over time. Couple that with the fact that he’s writing this as a pleasantly grumpy, no fucks given, sixty-something, and you get this chatty tour of the film industry changing over the course of a really strange decade from the perspective of one of the most important screenwriters of all time.
There are also some brief forays into actual films and those are undoubtedly the best part of the book. It was one of those deep dives that first got me interested in this book. Specifically, it was the famous review of Saving Private Ryan that opens “The bullshit starts early with this baby.” Just an elite beginning to a hot take. All timer. I imagine staff writers at The Ringer passing this around, touching its hem in supplication. But there aren’t many other pieces that go this deep into any specific movies. That’s not to say that the kvetching about what was and wasn’t nominated for Oscars or who is or isn’t the biggest star in the world is bad, but it just feels so non-essential. So much of what he’s writing about has fallen to the sides of our collective memory, so while his confidence in Emma Thompson’s Oscar win for screenwriting was prescient, I don’t know where to file it in my brain.
That’s not to say that it’s not useful because I think it is. First of all, we should always keep in mind how pointless all of this is and be simultaneously humbled and liberated by it. Secondarily, it’s a reminder of how magnetic the present moment can be for our attention, and how bad we are at situating that moment within the long timeline of our cultural history. One of the most striking things about these essays is how for William Goldman each passing year is worst than the last. Each newly crowned actor who is The Biggest Star in the World is more of a negative indictment than the last. You could chalk some of that up to the general grumpening that happens as you age, but as I sit here toward the tail end of 2022, it’s easy to think that we’ve reached some new nadir. I mean, Black Adam is anchoring the carousel on HBO Max as I write. The Fabelmans, a great film from one of our greatest filmmakers has made only 8 million dollars at the box office, and that number isn’t going to get much higher. But is this year that much worse than any other? Probably not. Accepting that is strange. On one hand, large-scale bummer. On the other, freedom. Maybe that’s the place WG got to. If you wrote All the President’s Men and then saw what Jim Carrey did to the industry you lived over 1994, how could you believe that anything mattered? So on he trudged, a lovable grump.
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Finished: Dec 11, 2022
pp: 224
Author: Haruki Murakami
Other books: A fair few
Rating: Delightful
Some thoughts:
This has to be one of the most pleasant books I’ve read in a while. Murakami presents himself as so genial that I’m half-convinced it’s a bit and that secretly he’s a grump. It’s just such a pleasant read, and the advice presented in it is so practical (almost to the point of being useless) that the book kind of just passes over you.
These essays were originally written in 2015, and have only been translated this year. I’m not sure what motivated the translation. It kind of feels like they maybe didn’t have anything else better to do down at the publishing house. That’s not to say that this is book is non-useful, because I think that it is. There are so many writing books that present writing as some mystical art. Murakami’s presentation of it is decidedly not. It’s workman-like, his process. As a result, the essays are more interesting as a look into the way his mind works rather than being roadmaps to literary success.
The collection is also interesting as a companion to the Goldman essays. Both of these men are incredibly accomplished in their fields and both seem to have a degree of cynicism toward professions they’ve mastered. They both look skeptically at awards and people who take a more pretentious view of their arts. Maybe they’re right? Or maybe they’re a couple of old cranks (albeit genial ones) who see the fields they helped to shape are changing. Witnessing those generational transitions can’t be easy. It’s also easy to forget that what became the dominant cultural movements of the past were birthed reluctantly and against the wishes of the old men of the generation prior. I’m not an old crank yet, at least not fully, but I can feel something like resistance to whatever is coming next. I’m just starting to wrap my head around my own generation for it to subside in the wake of the next one. It’s a weird headspace to be in. That’s especially complicated by the evolution of writing on the internet. My generation, the Oregon Trail generation is pretty firmly in charge of a lot of the most important corners of the internet. What’s going to happen after the flood of people who had the internet for their entire lives comes into power? Will I have to watch Euphoria to understand what’s going on?