“Studies on inequality tend to focus, with good reason, on income and wealth. But marketing, advertising, mass culture, retail trends, and other aspects of society that dominate our day-to-day lives outside work are driven by consumption — the money actually spent on goods and services, not put into investment, savings, taxes or debt repayment — which is reflected only indirectly by income or wealth.”
“Unsurprisingly, inequality in consumption has also increased steadily across the past few decades, though this has happened at a necessarily less dramatic pace than income inequality — sustaining consumer demand is how capitalists recoup the wages they pay out.”
“Indeed, “consumerism” — understood as a society in which consumption growth is the prime motivating factor for companies and individuals alike — is finally being superseded historically.”
“There is only the upscale market now, and this being reflected in both cineplexes and how the films they show get made. The difference between indie arthouse cinema and Hollywood used to be, simply, whether the movie was made by a major Hollywood studio. But Hollywood studios have fundamentally decentralized, and, like most other capitalist firms today, they are now almost exclusively in the businesses of branding, marketing, and management, while production and distribution themselves are largely franchised, contracted, and outsourced: Today’s studios link money to production houses, talent, special effects units, and distribution deals more than they “make movies” in the traditional sense.”
“As part of this decentralization, the majors all have a number of small, “independent” arms that produce much of the indie cinema that gets national distribution, while a handful of millionaire and billionaire producers, whose business cards just have their own names on them rather than 20th Century Fox, make the rest.”
“Handwringing over the aesthetic consequences of the supposed demise of indie filmmaking is overblown — as Richard Brody argues persuasively, this trend hasn’t been “bad for movies.” But as something that reflects transformations in class composition and ideological subject production, it’s quite significant.”
“When Brody compares the phenomenon of “independent” wealthy film producers to the way that opera and classical music are funded, he touches on exactly the point — the increasingly aristocratic nature of pop-cultural production.”
“Turning from a more chaotic, arbitrary, and of-the-moment mass market-driven production method, we’ve entered an era where one side of the market, namely, Hollywood, is driven by five-year plans and endless franchise sequels, while the other relies on the whims of benevolent aristocrats.”
“This is hardly a death sentence for art: Much of the history of Western art is merely the reflection of the whims of benevolent aristocrats.”
“Hollywood has increasingly countered falling North American ticket sales with better showings in global markets, in particular China, and major films are now made explicitly with those markets in mind. As part of this process, they are stripped of whatever cultural, contextual, or historical specificities that might make that sale harder. The universalist, apocalyptic superhero drama, with narratives contained entirely within their own internal universes, is the perfect genre for such a market.”
“American “mass” culture is not driven nor produced by appeals to the broadest mass of American consumers. Instead, it is produced by a slow-moving corporate system that makes films culturally nonspecific enough to sell just as well in Shenzhen as in St. Louis.”