Perhaps there's some divide and conquer going on here. The stats show a high rate of stable marriages among the elite, but then you show "Sexual content, family antagonism, and heavy substance use are especially appealing to affluent viewers." Could it be this is how some of the affluent view the middle and lower classes? Then there's those (of all social classes) who think life is a zero-sum game and by entertainment modeling chaotic families, it will lead to more dysfunction and less competition from below. I had a conversation some years ago with friends, and they talked about watching dysfunctional reality tv. I asked what they liked about it, and they said comparing themselves to the dysfunction made them feel better about themselves.
"Dysfunctional" virtually always means some combination of bad decisions and the environment and luck. My alcoholic, womanizing, occasionally wife beating father (my step-mother) was also often very charming and sexy.
I'm sure many folks in happy marriages had opportunities to make bad decisions - cheat on spouse, too much drink or drug use, anger at spouse - but chose NOT to make the bad decision. Thus, continue with a pretty nice, but certainly not always perfect, marriage. Especially cheating, in a society where "responsible promiscuity" is essentially taught in school.
Recently I've had the idea that promiscuity always leads to a lower trust in the relationship, and a society which accepts that, will have lower trust.
For TV drama, lust & sex is more photogenic than mostly happy commitment.
The swill on the screen continues to roll downhill. We watched a Turkish historical drama that is completely devoid of sex, and the male/female interaction was quite beautiful. I don't want or need to watch a porn show during primetime.
“Elites” don’t make movies. Hollywood is filled with pretty people, not elites. Elites look more like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Balaji Srinivasen (new money) and the Bush family (old money). New money families have more chaotic lives than old money families.
I think there is a more simple explanation. Art imitates life but for most they are not entertained with art imitates THEIR life. Life is messy. Families generally have conflict. The human animal is a tangle of phycological needs that exceed its cerebral evolution to understand them... and related behavior problems abound. Shit happens... divorce, illness, death... financial catastrophe. Even the well-off have these things happen, it is just that they generally have more money in the bank to buy away some of the symptoms. So they don't experience the scope and depth of pain from it.
If you live a more challenging life, your odds of connecting the dots with your own psychology, behavior and outcomes is higher. You own the trauma from it... either continually haunted by it, or resolved to compartmentalize it.
But you don't really like being reminded of it on movies and TV shows.
For people that have transcended these failures or otherwise have succeeded in mitigating their impacts, they are entertained seeing others experience them. For the rest, life imitates art... but they are not as entertained with art imitates life.
My personal favorite TV series over the last several years was Succession... a billionaire family that was significantly dysfunctional. It was like watching a beautiful train wreck of mess that I have no experience with in my life. Quite entertaining for me. I wonder if the Murdoc family liked watching it as it was loosely written about them.
I would only add one caveat, people do like it when the story reflects the reality they face. It’s not pure escapism or avoidance of difficult realities, but a certain lack of respect and disconnect with the issues presented on screen that drive people away.
Most cops hate police shows, but if you ask them about The Wire they will generally praise that show.
Most of those formulas were created in the early days of film-making. In those days creativity was about working around limitations film makers don’t have today - like technology or social standards, for example, which led to studio clearance departments requiring Marilyn Monroe to wear a gown made of stiff upholstery fabric so the audience couldn’t see her provocative movement in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. Working around this limitation, for example, Hollywood discovered how powerful sexual tension could be. Since then the formulas have gone from sexual tension to overt sex, ignoring data, like Rob’s, that shows that reality is much less appealing than imagination.
Also true In food advertising, where the data shows that anticipating the bite is much more appetizing than watching someone chew food. Most commercials I see today are oblivious to this.
I once heard the president of the screenwriters guild say that the industry killed creativity. Before unionization, the studios took all the risk. They paid salaries to a stable of screenwriters, actors et al, who created the original classics. After unionization, the studios stopped paying salaries and only paid based on profits. Imagine, he pointed out, when a writer has a mortgage to pay, kids to put through college, etc - they submit the formula script they know will get produced to have a chance at getting paid.
The points I am trying to make are two: limitations can be creative catalysts and a business model that spreads both the risk and profit of creating original ideas is needed to change the game.
The audience can help. When we expect to get content for cheap, we get a lot of crap thrown against the wall, with something outrageous to tweet about to get publicity. And no one looks at the data, they look at the likes, shares - engagement. Leo Burnett (an advertising giant no one knows anymore) said you can get a lot of attention walking in a room with a sock in your mouth, but no one will remember what you said. That pretty much sums up the state of Hollywood (and maybe other domains we rely on for innovation, too.)
I wonder if this is why Boys in the Boat received mediocre reviews from elite publications (but my 14 year old son and I loved it). It depicts a young couple falling in love, and a kiss, but there are no sex scenes. No salaciousness. (It also features working class kids defying expectations and beating the rich Ivy League crews.)
In a nutshell, I am wondering whether this is a form of sublimation, by which people who adhere to cultural norms that reject our rather dark and natural psychology must find ways to express and experience this darkness elsewhere? If everything in your life is rosy, maybe you need something like dystopian fantasies (of destruction, rape, health and family decline, etc.) to still “feel” that, at least in principle, everything is still “normal”...? In that case, maybe even luxury beliefs are not quite as intentional -- as a tool of keeping the lower classes down -- but more revealing of a hidden desire: “I wish I could live as lawless as I am claiming I support others to live.” The only problem is that if and when others do start living that way, they will be excluded by the ones who supported this lifestyle in the first place. What cruel irony...
Charles Murray covered a lot of the divide between elite and non-elite marriage and family practices in Coming Apart, including the contradiction that the elites say they celebrate such nontraditional arrangements but in fact do not.
Motivations are always tricky - we often do not even know our own very well! And even when we make it a point to force out the self-deceptions we have, we can have blind spots. I think Frank Lee gets a big chunk of it right. People usually don't want to look at their reflections at the movies, they'd like to see something different. In the Depression, it was the era of the lavish Busby Berkeley musicals. Rebels came in in the non-rebellious 50s and 60s. Bond films, war-recovery, and more open sex was the 70s, etc.
Sci-fi/cartoon universe adventure have been big for a long time now. The award nominations have tended to come from moral-ambiguity films. I don't think this is just movies and TV - it's what happens with books as well. Genre fiction goes reliably on but wins no awards.
I worked in psychiatric emergencies and had no desire to pay money to see more. In fact, I stopped going to movies altogether because I could feel them trying to manipulate me and I hated it.
Think you hit the nail on the head with this comment. Definitely appeals to upper classes since they are a lot of times far removed from the subject. It’s a morbid interest.
In Esthetics (the analysis of art), the art it is called co-reality. Many people are living like being in a personal movie. AI is going to add more to the equation than the average people can perceive.
If I were to simplify, is the thesis here that we crave media which is the opposite of what we have? This is an interesting and reasonable hypothesis..
Yes. The question is - are we happy with our life and what we have? It is an escape from the reality that many times it is not pleasant. It is somehow like the abused child who generates a second personality in order to survive the ordeal.
"Attractive people smoking and drinking and having sex with strangers appeals more to the upper classes than the lower classes." i.e. Living vicariously.
Don Draper was an amazing character who was always in conflict with some part of his life, thus making him (and the show) incredibly interesting. The main conflict between him and his past served a deeper meaning and allowed the writers to go off on fantastical tangents that were emotionally charged and also causing viewers to do a bit of introspection.
The upper class in the affluent countries are doing things similar to the nobility in the Middle Ages who were getting dressed in shepherd clothing in theatrical decor. They were creating - The Prince and the Pauper like exchanges because they were actually trapped in their unhappy life confined in castles and unhappy marriages. Many affluent families in fact are not so happy but, they put a facade and they dream of a freedom they actually do not have. To be upper class needs a lot of money to maintain a certain lifestyle. A divorce for them it is costly, while for the lower class is violent. Then, at least, they can fancy themselves on expressing ideas that are "luxury beliefs". Years ago, someone told me what he noticed that - "rich people behave like poor people and the poor people behave like rich people."
Yes and no. I grew up in two-parent, then single-parent, then blended family in a very two-parent community. I may have been looked askance at, but once I got to college no one seemed to even ask. I suppose it would only have to be about 30% of the total holding you at arms length to create enough situations to make you feel less welcome. Could be.
As above, I worked psychiatric emergencies and certainly knew suicidal people from (on paper) "good families." But the numbers are pretty overwhelmingly revealing that the nontraditional backgrounds create lots of vulnerabilities. Rob usually hammers home that it's chaos, not poverty, that is the danger - but chaos creates a lot of poverty.
Perhaps there's some divide and conquer going on here. The stats show a high rate of stable marriages among the elite, but then you show "Sexual content, family antagonism, and heavy substance use are especially appealing to affluent viewers." Could it be this is how some of the affluent view the middle and lower classes? Then there's those (of all social classes) who think life is a zero-sum game and by entertainment modeling chaotic families, it will lead to more dysfunction and less competition from below. I had a conversation some years ago with friends, and they talked about watching dysfunctional reality tv. I asked what they liked about it, and they said comparing themselves to the dysfunction made them feel better about themselves.
"Dysfunctional" virtually always means some combination of bad decisions and the environment and luck. My alcoholic, womanizing, occasionally wife beating father (my step-mother) was also often very charming and sexy.
I'm sure many folks in happy marriages had opportunities to make bad decisions - cheat on spouse, too much drink or drug use, anger at spouse - but chose NOT to make the bad decision. Thus, continue with a pretty nice, but certainly not always perfect, marriage. Especially cheating, in a society where "responsible promiscuity" is essentially taught in school.
Recently I've had the idea that promiscuity always leads to a lower trust in the relationship, and a society which accepts that, will have lower trust.
For TV drama, lust & sex is more photogenic than mostly happy commitment.
The swill on the screen continues to roll downhill. We watched a Turkish historical drama that is completely devoid of sex, and the male/female interaction was quite beautiful. I don't want or need to watch a porn show during primetime.
“Elites” don’t make movies. Hollywood is filled with pretty people, not elites. Elites look more like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Balaji Srinivasen (new money) and the Bush family (old money). New money families have more chaotic lives than old money families.
I think there is a more simple explanation. Art imitates life but for most they are not entertained with art imitates THEIR life. Life is messy. Families generally have conflict. The human animal is a tangle of phycological needs that exceed its cerebral evolution to understand them... and related behavior problems abound. Shit happens... divorce, illness, death... financial catastrophe. Even the well-off have these things happen, it is just that they generally have more money in the bank to buy away some of the symptoms. So they don't experience the scope and depth of pain from it.
If you live a more challenging life, your odds of connecting the dots with your own psychology, behavior and outcomes is higher. You own the trauma from it... either continually haunted by it, or resolved to compartmentalize it.
But you don't really like being reminded of it on movies and TV shows.
For people that have transcended these failures or otherwise have succeeded in mitigating their impacts, they are entertained seeing others experience them. For the rest, life imitates art... but they are not as entertained with art imitates life.
My personal favorite TV series over the last several years was Succession... a billionaire family that was significantly dysfunctional. It was like watching a beautiful train wreck of mess that I have no experience with in my life. Quite entertaining for me. I wonder if the Murdoc family liked watching it as it was loosely written about them.
I would only add one caveat, people do like it when the story reflects the reality they face. It’s not pure escapism or avoidance of difficult realities, but a certain lack of respect and disconnect with the issues presented on screen that drive people away.
Most cops hate police shows, but if you ask them about The Wire they will generally praise that show.
To use this classic quote from Tolstoy: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Hollywood buys scripts that follow formulas.
Most of those formulas were created in the early days of film-making. In those days creativity was about working around limitations film makers don’t have today - like technology or social standards, for example, which led to studio clearance departments requiring Marilyn Monroe to wear a gown made of stiff upholstery fabric so the audience couldn’t see her provocative movement in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. Working around this limitation, for example, Hollywood discovered how powerful sexual tension could be. Since then the formulas have gone from sexual tension to overt sex, ignoring data, like Rob’s, that shows that reality is much less appealing than imagination.
Also true In food advertising, where the data shows that anticipating the bite is much more appetizing than watching someone chew food. Most commercials I see today are oblivious to this.
I once heard the president of the screenwriters guild say that the industry killed creativity. Before unionization, the studios took all the risk. They paid salaries to a stable of screenwriters, actors et al, who created the original classics. After unionization, the studios stopped paying salaries and only paid based on profits. Imagine, he pointed out, when a writer has a mortgage to pay, kids to put through college, etc - they submit the formula script they know will get produced to have a chance at getting paid.
The points I am trying to make are two: limitations can be creative catalysts and a business model that spreads both the risk and profit of creating original ideas is needed to change the game.
The audience can help. When we expect to get content for cheap, we get a lot of crap thrown against the wall, with something outrageous to tweet about to get publicity. And no one looks at the data, they look at the likes, shares - engagement. Leo Burnett (an advertising giant no one knows anymore) said you can get a lot of attention walking in a room with a sock in your mouth, but no one will remember what you said. That pretty much sums up the state of Hollywood (and maybe other domains we rely on for innovation, too.)
I wonder if this is why Boys in the Boat received mediocre reviews from elite publications (but my 14 year old son and I loved it). It depicts a young couple falling in love, and a kiss, but there are no sex scenes. No salaciousness. (It also features working class kids defying expectations and beating the rich Ivy League crews.)
In a nutshell, I am wondering whether this is a form of sublimation, by which people who adhere to cultural norms that reject our rather dark and natural psychology must find ways to express and experience this darkness elsewhere? If everything in your life is rosy, maybe you need something like dystopian fantasies (of destruction, rape, health and family decline, etc.) to still “feel” that, at least in principle, everything is still “normal”...? In that case, maybe even luxury beliefs are not quite as intentional -- as a tool of keeping the lower classes down -- but more revealing of a hidden desire: “I wish I could live as lawless as I am claiming I support others to live.” The only problem is that if and when others do start living that way, they will be excluded by the ones who supported this lifestyle in the first place. What cruel irony...
Is it possible people aspire to live a dystopian life? This suggests “playing the game” isn’t all its cracked up to be
Charles Murray covered a lot of the divide between elite and non-elite marriage and family practices in Coming Apart, including the contradiction that the elites say they celebrate such nontraditional arrangements but in fact do not.
Motivations are always tricky - we often do not even know our own very well! And even when we make it a point to force out the self-deceptions we have, we can have blind spots. I think Frank Lee gets a big chunk of it right. People usually don't want to look at their reflections at the movies, they'd like to see something different. In the Depression, it was the era of the lavish Busby Berkeley musicals. Rebels came in in the non-rebellious 50s and 60s. Bond films, war-recovery, and more open sex was the 70s, etc.
Sci-fi/cartoon universe adventure have been big for a long time now. The award nominations have tended to come from moral-ambiguity films. I don't think this is just movies and TV - it's what happens with books as well. Genre fiction goes reliably on but wins no awards.
I worked in psychiatric emergencies and had no desire to pay money to see more. In fact, I stopped going to movies altogether because I could feel them trying to manipulate me and I hated it.
Each social class is living vicariously through each other , OROS BOROS
Starting my career at Leo Burnett Advertising, the only woman in the room. I couldn’t watch Madmen.
Think you hit the nail on the head with this comment. Definitely appeals to upper classes since they are a lot of times far removed from the subject. It’s a morbid interest.
In Esthetics (the analysis of art), the art it is called co-reality. Many people are living like being in a personal movie. AI is going to add more to the equation than the average people can perceive.
If I were to simplify, is the thesis here that we crave media which is the opposite of what we have? This is an interesting and reasonable hypothesis..
Yes. The question is - are we happy with our life and what we have? It is an escape from the reality that many times it is not pleasant. It is somehow like the abused child who generates a second personality in order to survive the ordeal.
"Attractive people smoking and drinking and having sex with strangers appeals more to the upper classes than the lower classes." i.e. Living vicariously.
Don Draper was an amazing character who was always in conflict with some part of his life, thus making him (and the show) incredibly interesting. The main conflict between him and his past served a deeper meaning and allowed the writers to go off on fantastical tangents that were emotionally charged and also causing viewers to do a bit of introspection.
The upper class in the affluent countries are doing things similar to the nobility in the Middle Ages who were getting dressed in shepherd clothing in theatrical decor. They were creating - The Prince and the Pauper like exchanges because they were actually trapped in their unhappy life confined in castles and unhappy marriages. Many affluent families in fact are not so happy but, they put a facade and they dream of a freedom they actually do not have. To be upper class needs a lot of money to maintain a certain lifestyle. A divorce for them it is costly, while for the lower class is violent. Then, at least, they can fancy themselves on expressing ideas that are "luxury beliefs". Years ago, someone told me what he noticed that - "rich people behave like poor people and the poor people behave like rich people."
Yes and no. I grew up in two-parent, then single-parent, then blended family in a very two-parent community. I may have been looked askance at, but once I got to college no one seemed to even ask. I suppose it would only have to be about 30% of the total holding you at arms length to create enough situations to make you feel less welcome. Could be.
As above, I worked psychiatric emergencies and certainly knew suicidal people from (on paper) "good families." But the numbers are pretty overwhelmingly revealing that the nontraditional backgrounds create lots of vulnerabilities. Rob usually hammers home that it's chaos, not poverty, that is the danger - but chaos creates a lot of poverty.
Brilliant summary!