Is Hollywood Dead?
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Collapse, as a historical phenomenon, is generally more gradual than spectacular. Whatever we’ve learned from old blockbusters, great empires do not implode so much as erode—one borderland province after another falls away, just as faith in core institutions rots from within. This process of decay is as old as civilizations themselves. As sophisticated we imagine ourselves to be, none of us lives outside the relentless march of history.
When it comes to Hollywood’s future, metaphors of imperial decline spring forth a little too easily. One tries to resist them, because they both ridiculously obvious and acutely painful. Show business is not a philosophical abstraction, but a challenged industry that tenuously employs thousands of mostly good people. It can be cruel, hypocritical, and unhealthy, yet it still beguiles. Hollywood types, like human beings everywhere, are sentimental and resistant to change. This is why a crucial American industry engages in acts of denial, propping up edifices seemingly determined to crumble.
Who can fault anybody for trying? Hollywood, beloved and cursed, is a civilizational project, erected over a century, mostly by society’s outsiders, which both articulates ordinary aspirations and projects exalted values around the world. In the popular mind, the entertainment industry is either a trivial distraction or a tawdry enterprise—a blather of scandals and deals. That’s a crude simplification. Like pillars in finance, technology and the academy, Hollywood is an important and contested American institution, with power to both enforce the status quo and challenge it. Generations of culture warriors, right and left, have correctly apprehended it as territory worth fighting over. Recently, those skirmishes have obscured the bigger picture, which is one of inexorable depreciation. That grand falling away matters, not merely to ideologues, but everyone.
A few days ago, at the 94th Academy Awards, a beloved and powerful star, a shoo-in for the Best Actor Oscar, slapped a famous comedian. That maximally unpleasant “viral moment,” has been endlessly hashed over. Inside the charmless Dolby Theater, the assault was greeted by stunned silence. On Twitter, there were expected expressions of horror, justification, and conspiracy. Unsurprisingly, discussion immediately veered into themes of power, gender and identity, because this is the American national dance. One very rich man (not too hyperbolically, a Hollywood prince) attacking another very rich man, in front of millions, is ripe for sociopolitical questions. Combatants in those wars may vehemently disagree, but it is also not the main event. Choose your narratives to suit your beliefs, but the slap is emblematic of our sour era, one more troubling sign of collapse.
Reinventing Hollywood may be necessary business, but it’s increasingly an ugly one. This year's red carpet season — a winter of discontent if ever there was — was marked by characteristic bickering about just what and who the Oscars are for. Most of those arguments are decades old. We all know that few civilians saw most of the nominated movies. We understand that good cinema is not necessarily popular, though there was a time, not so long ago, when movies were routinely both. We grasp that the impulse to revamp the Oscars can both disrespect gifted craftspeople and be a well-meaning attempt to rescue a ritual from oblivion (the results of such tweaks were not revolutionary). We do get that high-minded sentiments about inclusion are easily weaponized in grubby power struggles. A hidebound elite shuffles these deck chairs as the entire enterprise floats by a point of no return, towards the cataract.
None of this happened overnight. The entertainment business grew and thrived alongside other instruments of Western dominance. It asserted itself through 20th century tools of mass communication, and was undergirded by mythologies about meritocracy and the everyman. American movies and television are not merely qualitatively superior, they have been aided by triumphal capitalism, and rooted in a shared confidence in a way of life. These cultural products have been wildly appealing everywhere, which is why our global rivals tend to despise them. Progress in Hollywood has been quixotic, but at clinch moments, it has been a powerful tool for change. The movie star—Hollywood’s greatest invention—is an evocation of the power of individuals to shape to shape their destinies and change the world.
Big Entertainment, by definition, commanded the attention of vast numbers of people. Hollywood sustained itself by gathering those diverse millions together, and transporting them, however briefly, into elaborate fantasy realms. Movies are a popular art form, and they serve multifarious creative and political agendas, but they cannot exist without the mass audience. For some time now, that audience has been slipping away, abetted by revolutionary technologies that not only tailor diversion to individual whim, but upend the very idea of what entertainment is. Hollywood itself is already a satrapy of tech, and the most successful companies of the streaming era will not necessarily be those that showcase make-believe as the core business proposition.
We may speak in gauzy generalities about the enduring, universal appeal of great storytelling, but we also must grapple with dollars, cents, and bitcoin. Hollywood, along with the rest of so-called legacy media, is profoundly disrupted: It still requires enormous capital, human and otherwise, to produce elaborate distraction. It struggles to attract gigantic but fickle audiences, and it is ever more reliant on a tiny handful of crowd-pleasing franchise tentpoles to play the rent. The modern content ecosystem hoovers up its output and disperses it for next to nothing. Streaming has not yet recreated the mass audience paradigm. Stardom, of the sort borne by Will Smith since he was 21, is a vanishing commodity.
Pete Peterson, the late investment banker and former U.S. commerce secretary, had a saying: When something’s unsustainable, it tends to stop. At midcentury, powerful studios, run by larger-than-life tyrants, dominated Hollywood (a point recently elided is that they were grounded in the Jewish diaspora, and their paradoxical condition as both outsiders and insiders informs Hollywood discourse to this day). They gave way to a rebellious generation of auteurs but more importantly, to multinational conglomerates. When I began working in entertainment, globalized celebrity, as manufactured and exported by these concerns, was the coin of the realm.
It is not coincidental that Peak Celebrity coincided with the unipolar moment of American influence. It has faded in the age of uncertainty that followed. Every element of Hollywood’s power structure — its powerful agencies, its storied studios, and its remarkable well of human talent—has been challenged by these transformations.
Alongside that Great Splintering, distrust of institutions, Hollywood among them, spiked. Social media has a way of cartooning dispute, turning an organically fearful climate (sacrificing free expression for employment is a very old show business tradition) into an especially chaotic and vicious one. The internet makes the point of formal black lists moot, because names are taken down every day. When every moment becomes a gotcha moment, when every joke is an opportunity to rush the stage, when there is ceaseless acrimony and little joy, when Hollywood’s innate tendency to sacrifice creative risk to conformity becomes especially suffocating…the whole production is no longer so very entertaining. For all of its failings, Hollywood was designed to manufacture dreams, not gin up outrage.
That has put it at cross purposes with the algorithms that drive engagement and revenue digitally. Polarization serves digital platforms handsomely, but it is anathema to an industry designed to serve a broad public. Relentless exposure of celebrity has stripped it of all value (we surely don’t need to watch the Oscars to glimpse the famous). By intention, social media disperses audiences into every-narrowing constituencies, rendering points of commonality increasingly rare. Everyone drowns in an individualized ocean of choice, and far too many people have simply chosen to eschew Hollywood and its petty beefs altogether.
Perhaps the slap will be forgotten in the next flurry of digital-driven outrages, and Hollywood’s cycle of decline will continue. But just maybe, it is also a crux point, a moment when we are shocked into thinking about all that may be lost in that process. It’s a cliché to characterize Hollywood as a mirror, reflecting not just a society’s ugliness but also its greatest hopes. It happens to be true. If we don’t like the way we see ourselves, it may not be too late to change it.
Entertainment remains necessary infrastructure. It will persist, in varying forms, as long as our species does. But it does not follow that it will remain focused on Hollywood, one of the most coveted assets of the English-speaking world. Civilizations inevitably rise and fall. They disappear not only because they are challenged by dynamic forces well beyond their control, but because those who sustained them lose interest, humor, and heart. After all the monuments crash to earth, we may glimpse in the rubble remnants of what gave millions so much joy.
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