How far can you bend the superhero genre before it breaks?
ETERNALS reviewed plus RAGING BULL at the Academy, FINCH and more
It’s Friday, November 5, and here’s where we are…
I wish I knew how to manage the hustle better.
There is a real appetite for a whole lot of stuff I can’t even pretend to do anymore. I wish I had it in me to get on-camera for hours every day and just react to every single piece of marketing or casting non-news or terrible clickbait. I did it a version of that for the better part of a decade and it had a numbing effect of me overall. No one gives that much of a shit about this stuff. I get that you have to play that character, and there are people who can do it, but when I watch a lot of this stuff, I find it kind of embarrassing. I’m not talking about people just discussing things they love, but more the idea that people have these extreme emotional reactions to advertising. When I watch people post video after video of themselves weeping over movie trailers or freaking out like a six-year-old who just won a Toys’R’Us shopping spree over a casting announcement for a secondary character in the fifth reboot of the same superhero, it makes me wonder how you can possibly be calibrated to give that much of a shit about these things and how sincere any of it is.
I have plenty of embarrassing online behavior in my past. I’m sure many people would argue that I’ve got plenty of it in my present, too, but one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that there’s a difference between contributing something worth reading or watching and simply churning out content that reacts to what the studios want the conversation to be every day. You can get so lost in the churn that you never really write anything you’re proud of, and you can spend so much time selling future product that you never really consider or digest anything. It’s all one big homogenous blur because everyone wants to be first. Everyone wants the premiere access. Everyone wants to be quoted in the TV commercials. Everyone wants to be on the mailing list for the box full of toys. And in order to feed that beast, you have to be willing to play the part, willing to be permanently engorged about everything all of the time. Every movie looks amazing. Every filmmaker is visionary. You have to be the biggest fan of absolutely everything, an expert on all of it, ready at the drop of a hat to explain the ending of every film to the audience that is clearly too dumb to pick up the 17 shocking easter eggs you’ve just got to see!
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