We are in the age of visual muzak.
The writer/director Justine Bateman, who was a consultant on the use of artificial intelligence for SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee, explained on The Hollywood Reporter’s TV podcast:
I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that “This isn’t second screen enough.” Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a “visual muzak.” When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No. And when these companies control the entire pipeline from beginning to end, then you wind up doing what they ask.
This is how media companies are operating. We have more or less known this, but it’s always useful to hear direct stories about executives saying it out loud. Media has long become content, and is expressly created to be the equivalent of background music, adding environmental ambience to your living room or bedroom but otherwise barely registering to the viewer at all. In an age when streaming companies in particular value time-spent-on-platform, this is all that matters.
This weekend, Barbenheimer has arrived, and both movies, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, will make many millions of dollars, primarily for Warner Bros. Pictures and Universal Pictures, respectively. The breathless discourse around both films, separate and together, is exhausting, but also speaks to the current moment for Hollywood and for media in general. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has become the primary punching bag for those on strike precisely because he speaks with such plain disdain for artists and what they make (and he stifles criticism). Nevertheless, Barbie’s assured massive success is a feather in Zaslav’s cap. I don’t know if this actually happened here in my city, but it illustrates things either way:
If nothing else, Barbie certainly is not visual muzak — it has a clearly distinct visual style that stands out from everything else Hollywood has released in recent years, which is surely part of the reason behind hiring Gerwig to begin with. Still, Barbenheimer feels particularly momentous because it’s not just a meme, it’s a recognition of projects that seek to be something beyond mere content.
As Keith Phipps points out for The Ringer, what’s happening right now is related to the pandemic and how everyone in Hollywood scrambled to streaming like never before, Warner Bros. chief among them as they announced, in an extremely controversial move, that their entire 2021 slate of films would premiere on HBO Max on the same day they hit theatres (if they did at all). As Nolan said at the time: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”
This mattered because Nolan had worked with Warner since 2002, but suddenly moved to Universal for Oppenheimer, as a direct result of Warner’s decision. Zaslav’s decisions since becoming CEO last year exemplify the streaming era’s focus on visual muzak content, from canceling a finished film for the tax breaks to removing films and TV series from HBO Max to save money. Not that Nolan needs to be vindicated, but nevertheless it is clear that Zaslav is a worthy ambassador of the streaming model’s anti-art attitude and, moreover, its business failures (that Barbie is about to make his company obscene amounts of money from theatrical distribution is a noted irony).
Let’s not be silly or ahistorical — cinema, and Hollywood especially, has always been an uneasy marriage of art and commerce. That tension has resulted in countless wonderful films, and plenty of awful ones, too. What’s happening now is different. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes reveal not only that the studios and streaming companies only care about their bottom line, because of course they do, but also that they are at unprecedented levels of industrial cynicism.
For example, I am so tired of hearing that audiences aren’t coming back to theatres in the same way that they were before the pandemic. First of all, even if that was true, it would be because of decisions like Warner’s in 2021, a strategy of lowering audience expectations of what film and television can be through streaming. Even more important, though, is that people by and large aren’t going to the movie theatre as much because it’s full of bullshit.
Barbenheimer stands out because it feels like a real event, even beyond the Tom Cruise machine of practical spectacle putting butts in seats. Certainly it has been buoyed by social media fervor, but people fundamentally want to see these movies, and that is an uncommon feeling in recent years. Hollywood has been underperforming again and again this year, from Fast X to The Little Mermaid to Indiana Jones to The Flash. The studios prefer to tell us that this is because viewing habits have changed, and then it becomes easy enough for them to tell the WGA and SAG-AFTRA that they can’t possibly afford to give them what they want because the industry has changed.
Well, yes it has, but not in the way they mean. The streaming model has infected the entire industry to the degree that every new film or series is only understood as another piece of content, something essentially ephemeral and undefined, abstract and without meaning. It is visual muzak, not just something on in the background while you scroll through TikTok or Tinder but a larger intent to shift how we think about media. Again, to lower expectations. It’s no secret that being really into movies has become a niche interest, which no doubt played a significant role in another Zaslav move, to put Turner Classic Movies (TCM) out to pasture.
While this is probably true if we mean that film is no longer the mass medium it once was, it certainly does not mean that millions of people don’t want to go to the movie theatre anymore, or that no one cares about the quality of what they watch. This is the misguided overcorrection that execs like Zaslav have made in response to the streaming economy, which is obviously reaching its growth limit. Make no mistake, then: these Hollywood strikes are about many things, and one of them is that the studios and the streaming companies intend to pay labour as little as possible as they continue to train audiences to expect the bare minimum. The writers and actors, and I think most of us, refuse to accept this training, and they will only continue the fight at their own economic peril.
Ephemera
Ed Zitron at Insider on how the introduction of artificial intelligence will harm young workers the most, as first it comes for entry-level jobs and will almost certainly stunt their economic growth: “Young people will find themselves cleaning up the deluge of errors these faceless AI tools will spit out, knowing they'll receive less credit because the ‘work’ came from a machine. This has the potential to create a career crisis for young people: If even the faintest amount of freedom is wiped from their work lives, they'll have fewer ways to prove themselves capable of taking on more meaningful work.”
This is fun, fascinating, and also disconcerting: Peter Gietl on UFO disclosures and a world out of whack. “You can see our long national obsession with conspiracy as the human mind attempting to make sense of an increasingly complex world. When religion ebbs, the idea of no one in control is disconcerting, so we look for authority: aliens, the New World Order, Masons, etc., something to make sense of a world spiraling out of equilibrium.”
Anne T. Donahue wrote beautifully about watching The Simpsons with her late father.
Brian Merchant on the Hollywood strikes and how the studios were charmed/bamboozled by Silicon Valley: “It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of consumer internet in 2007 — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution.”
Song Recommendation: “Eye on the Bat” — Palehound