Sex and Drugs and Human Nature

AT THE RISK OF BEING TOO ONLINE, it sure seems like a lot of Gen-Z/Zoomers dislike sex scenes in movies, apparently questioning the need for them to exist at all. As far as I can tell, there are three reasons for this: A) They are still watching movies with their parents because they are children, B) they grew up in a content monoculture dominated by the sexless Marvel Cinematic Universe, and C) they have spent their lives so saturated with online porn that any notion of filming human sexuality seems exploitative and debased.

A LONG OVERDUE ‘THREE CHEERS’ FOR “DANK” BRANDON, WHO LAST YEAR GAVE MASS PARDONS FOR NON-VIOLENT FEDERAL CANNABIS POSSESION CONVICTIONS! Legalizing or at least decriminalizing this demon herb is absolutely a step in the right direction, even if Biden’s ruling only affects the small number of people who are being held for federal marijuana possession charges, while each state is free to continue its own draconian edicts. However, I think we all know that legalization of marijuana is kind of beyond the point now.

The Wire, brainchild of the cantankerous David Simon, was over 20 years ago, but we’ve moved far beyond the show’s thesis of drug decriminalization as a universal balm for the problems of modern policing. Sure, weed should be legal. And, frankly most drugs should be treated as a public health issue. But has American police brutality or hyper-militarization decreased as drug laws have gotten more lax? It certainly doesn’t seem that way. The BLM protests weren’t about unjust drug laws, they were protesting the ongoing, growing trend of police killing citizens and getting away with it.

‘What the fuck did I do?’

These trends have been building over time. In the 1989 case DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that the state’s failure to prevent child abuse by a guardian does not violate said child’s right to liberty under the 14th Amendment. This was followed up with the 2005 case The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, where our friend Antonin Scalia wrote the SCOTUS majority opinion that a police department could not be sued for its failure to enforce a restraining order, even in the case when their neglect resulted in the kidnapping-murder of three children.
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The aggregate effect of these rulings, and several others like them, is that it is the sole discretion of individual police departments as whether or not to protect you from harm. Ergo, cops have no specific obligation to protect you. Plus, “Qualified Immunity” means that no police officer can be sued for actions taken On The Job unless they violate the Constitution, which of course is determined by a prosecutorial system that works hand-in-glove with the police they are regulating. So, for example, you wouldn’t be able to sue Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his guys for setting your house on fire and then forcing your dog back into the flames and laughing at you as you sob hysterically, even after it turns out that yours was the wrong house in the first place.

THEN AGAIN, WE MIGHT WANT TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT DOING THE RIGHT THING. It turns out that an LAPD officer named Houston Tipping who was savagely beaten to death by several of his fellow officers in a training exercise last Summer was actually investigating some LAPF officers for a gang rape at the time of his demise. Coincidentally, one of the men who was included in the exercise, the man who shattered Tipping’s spine and caused the cardiac arrest that resulted in the man’s death, was a subject of said investigation. No charges were ever filed. We most always Back The Blue, including(?) when they are killing one of their own.

SAG/AFTRA IS NOW ON STRIKE, ALONG WITH THE WGA. This is not exclusively a showbiz blog, dear readers, so I don’t want to devote space to this issue every time, but it seems that there are larger lessons to be drawn here about what Late Capitalism has in store for each and everyone one of us who is not a Billionaire Owner or one of their courtiers.

We already know that Hollywood does really not want auteurs making interesting, personal or daring work. It never did, but a few managed to slip through the cracks along the way. Now they are being stamped out by the market. Next up is the removal of the movie star itself. Why? Because…

MOVIE STARS CAN BE DIFFICULT TO CONTROL. It has been commented by some that “Hollywood cannot make movie stars anymore”, and while I’m not entirely sure that this is the case, it seems increasingly obvious to me that Hollywood probably does not WANT to make stars anymore. They are, quite frankly, more trouble than they are worth.

Big stars can get a movie financed and promoted, but they can also command obscene salaries and have undue control over what gets made and how it gets made. In the zero sum game of showbiz, studio bosses hate this sort of thing, especially if some ‘artsy’ filmmaker with a Criterion Collection subscription starts whispering in their ears about making some sort of award-season bait bullshit when they COULD be making another MCU film.

It was a lean time in the Maserati dealership frequented by ScarJo’s agent, after she spent two months filming ‘Asteroid City’ for a salary of $36,000.

If you want a vision of what the future may look like, look to Ryan Reynolds. I have nothing against him personally. He’s a smart businessman, a family man, etc. But he’s no auteur. What he is, is a blandly charming actor who is ostensibly ‘edgy’ by virtue of his puerile snarkiness. His work challenges nothing, he plays nice with the studios, and his principle interest in film is apparently to grow his own capital reserves to the point that he can expand into broader business interests beyond Hollywood. He’s allegedly one of the biggest ‘movie stars’ in the world, but I challenge you to name five Ryan Reynolds movies without saying “Deadpool.”

I don’t fault him for this. Much as I have said about the various talented filmmakers who agreed to work in the IP Mines, Ryan Reynolds is not the Carbon Monoxide, he’s the dead canary.

The proverbial “Canadian Girlfriend” of modern cinema, Netflix reports that “Red Notice” is a a deeply popular film that has been viewed by the entirely of the human race, living and dead, but not by you or anyone that you know.

CULTURE CORNER!

FILMMAKERS WHOSE WORK SUGGESTS AN ABIDING OPTIMISM ABOUT HUMAN NATURE, DESPITE OUR MANY FLAWS AND COMPLEXITIES:
- Hal Ashby
- Wes Anderson
- James Cameron
- Guillermo del Toro
- Federico Fellini
- Greta Gerwig
- Peter Jackson
- Akira Kurosawa
- David Lynch
- David Milch
- Steven Spielberg
- Paul Verhoeven
- The Wachowskis
- Edgar Wright
- Robert Zemeckis

FILMMAKERS WHOSE WORK SUGGESTS A GENERAL PESSIMISM ABOUT HUMAN NATURE, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED:
- Paul Thomas Anderson
- Larry Charles
- David Chase
- Francis Ford Coppola
- The Coen Brothers
- William Friedkin
- Michael Henneke
- Alfred Hitchcock
- “Beat” Takeshi Kitano
- Stanley Kubrick
- Roman Polanski
- Lynne Ramsay
- Ridley Scott
- Lars von Trier
- Orson Welles

FILMMAKERS WHOSE WORK DEMONSTRATES AN ABIDING OPTIMISM ABOUT HUMAN NATURE, BUT A GENERAL PESSIMISM ABOUT THEIR SON, GORO:
- Hayao Miyazaki

Catbus will never arrive for Goro.

FILMMAKERS WHO ARE LARGELY INDIFFERENT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE:
- George Lucas
- Michael Bay

FILMMAKERS WHO HATE FILMMAKING:
- The Russo Brothers

These assessments are controversial, but canon.