(on Barbie and Sound of Freedom)
2023 in review: To paraphrase something Paramount President Stanley Jaffe said back in the late 1960s, every half-assed analyst is going to tell you a story about where the movies are at. I’m going to take a different road and tell you a story about how the movies feel.
(Where the movies are at: The US box office will finish at about $9 billion this year; if it were to get back to 2019 levels it would need to be $13.6 billion with inflation. Worldwide the situation is worse: the box office may not hit $25 billion this year; it was over $40 billion in 2019. The totals will be lower next year as a result of the strikes.)
I wasn’t going to write about Barbie—many others have, at length, and very well—but then I realized I needed to write about going to see Barbie, not simply because it was the biggest movie of the year but because seeing and having seen Barbie is about a particular feeling. For the foreseeable future the crucial problem that confronts Hollywood moviemaking is understanding what kinds of feelings make theatrical audiences pull the trigger.
That marks a change. In what now seems like a bygone era, moviegoing wasn’t about feeling, it was about the kinds of things the stories were about and the ways those stories were told. But by 2023 the MCU—the boldest and most successful serial storytelling experiment in Hollywood history—had fatally lost the balance between continuity and obligation. Narrative expansion became homework, and no matter how different the MCU movies and shows might feel they can’t overcome that narrative burden.
(Industry conventional wisdom about homework holds that part of why Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I underperformed was calling it “Part I.” As a consequence Part II has been pushed back and renamed. By that same logic the bait-and-switch of Dune—where you didn’t know it was Part I until it ended—seems to be preferable. Denis Villeneuve is now out here telling us that Part II is “much better” than Part I; sorry, suckers.)
I went to a morning screening of Barbie opening weekend at an AMC Classic multiplex near Camp Lejeune. The seats are still general admission; it used to be a Carmike’s; the matinee ticket was under $9; when Nicole Kidman explained that heartbreak feels good in a place like this no one joined in. The theater wasn’t empty, and the largest contingent were about a dozen pink-shirted moms and their daughters. The moms gave off military-wives vibes with a mix of sleeve tats and soft-tactical shoulder slings. They looked, as Jason Bourne says, like they could handle themselves. They all seemed to have a great time.
The coastal plain of North Carolina is in the midst of a slowburn struggle for cultural dominance over the landscape. The beaches are fully under the sway of the vacation home industry, with cheek-by-jowl triple-deckers up on stilts. The island roads all say they flood during high water, and that now means they flood all the time. This is a landscape of looming uninsurability, and despite the proliferation of hyperkitsch beach toy shops no ironic inflatable alligator is going to ward off the rising waters and the eventual collapse in real estate values.
All day and much of the night, the skies are filled with helicopters and tiltrotors from Marine Corps Air Station New River. State Highways leading to the islands are pocked by turnoffs for training “LZ”’s. For the Marines at New River and Camp Lejeune the swampiness and sea level rise are more a feature than a bug, although the military is far more worried about climate resilience than the amen-chorus who claim to support them. The amount of money the Department of Defense will pour into hardening port infrastructures along the South Atlantic coast to maintain the US’s force projection capacity is truly boggling.
Big chains haven’t found a way to efficiently monetize this convergence so coastal commerce is still small-proprietor: nutritional supplement purveyors and fitness centers calculated to meet your precise level of intensity; places to refuel that seem to have names like “Violence Coffee.”
I am trying to convey a very specific intercalation of landscape, technology, capital, and culture here because as odd as it may seem it functions; the culture that emerges from all those details serves the purpose not because of its precise configuration, but also not despite it. The big idea here is that the grander system of US hegemony makes use of its diverse affective forms to calibrate our investment and our denial, our guilts and our self-justifications. You don’t have to believe all the time. Sometimes you know what you’re doing is morally bankrupt, sometimes you forget it, sometimes you recognize that you are far more implicated than you thought, and sometimes you think, I’m just going to the movies with my friends and their daughters and that can’t be evil.
The multilayered marketing and distribution competence that project Barbie across the surface of the earth works alongside the multilayered logistical competence that projects the US, its power and its stupidities and its unrelenting demands, across the surface of the earth. These gargantuan institutions cling to the planet like giant sheets of contact paper. And like contact paper, when you try to lay one sheet down on another there will inevitably be imperfections, mismatches, bubbles. In those bubbles are an infinitude of individuals—agents—improvising their way even as they are sandwiched between capital-S Systems.
§§
There is a specific politics to Greta Gerwig’s work. It depends on a strong claim that our ordinary politics is terribly mistaken, a diversion of our attention from the real disconnections we face. Only by clearing out the explicit politics can we reestablish the true grounds of political engagement, and those grounds are feminist.
I think of this as a little like Erving Goffman’s deep gambit in prioritizing the study of micro-social interactions. Not that either of them believes politics aren’t essential, but both seem convinced that we can’t do both politics and society at the same time right now. There will be stunning collisions—Goffman’s essay “Footing” gets at Nixon’s go-to misogynist shivving. But most of the time their work will be misunderstood as de-politicized; I might call it pre-politicized instead.
Late in Barbie, Barbie spends a couple minutes in a void speaking with her “creator,” Ruth Handler. Overall the scene felt off to me, but the montage of memories in it was doing a particular sort of work that I have not seen people highlight. Here is a contrast: at the end of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, our hero Manny Torres (Diego Calva) begs off from family responsibilities to duck into the movies. He then undergoes a transportive experience at a screening of Singin’ in the Rain. This was the “magic of cinema” montage that lots of folks found pretentious.
However good faith it was, however honestly Chazelle came by it, the structure of the experience—the idea of moviegoing in it—required leaving behind the family ties Manny had built in order to find his way back to that flickering moment of transcendence from early in the film—that preposterous and inevitable sunset butterfly—that he lost in the muck of Hollywood depravity.
But when Barbie takes Ruth’s hands she is diverted from the Corporate, from Art, and from Politics toward experiences of connection as such. It is a transcendence accomplished by, as philosopher Stanley Cavell would say, descending through the ordinary. These are the actual things that make life worth it, not the stand-ins that let you leave the compromises of a life behind. Gerwig’s aesthetic is constitutionally defensive, for all sorts of reasons, but it is absolutely rigorous in those commitments. People who liked Barbie liked that it connected them to their connections and their compromises; the word of mouth was superb.
§§
When such descents into feeling are yoked to hegemonic impulses, the results are weepy devastation. The remarkable opening titles for Steven Conrad’s Patriot (Amazon) are affectively adjacent to Gerwig’s montage, only they bring back explicitly political politics because for Conrad, well, it’s about guys being dudes. The configuration of brotherly affection and abusive innocence sets up our hero to be subsumed by the US intelligence community’s deadly apologetics.
Patriot is one of the few real justifications of peak tv. But if you don’t keep gender front and center, similar feelings can get ugly very quickly. A toxically masculine gumbo of sentiment and hegemony gets whipped into a fantasy of righteous vengeance that cloaks violence under violence, spectacularizing bad faith, leaving viewers yearning for permission to forget all the horrors we are doing and that are done to us—you know, crowdfunded fascism.
I am talking about Sound of Freedom, the QAnon–adjacent, child trafficking yuckfest from Angel Studios. Part of the reason I didn’t write about it when it came out is because I don’t want those people to get even a dime of my money or yours. If you skipped it, it begins streaming on Amazon just after Christmas. You can also steal it.
Sound of Freedom is the fictionalized story of the autofictionalizing Tim Ballard. When it opens, Ballard has been working at ICE tracking down pedophiles—hundreds—but has been unable to save the exploited children who are “outside the U.S.” His frustration has built up, but so has the trauma of the job. Like the low-paid content moderators Sarah T. Roberts wrote about in Behind the Screen, Ballard spends hours combing through horrific images; he then needs to render that photo and video evidence in bloodless prose for the legal system. Breaking down, he goes to his boss with a plan to take their efforts beyond the U.S. borders. “This job tears you to pieces and this is my one chance to put those pieces back together.” “We can’t go after Honduran kids in Colombia,” his boss tells him before agreeing to fund the extra-mural operation out of “discretionary.”
The movie is clear that the system of trafficking is robust, flexible, global. In his quest for one little girl Ballard is told she might be in Colombia or “in Moscow, Bangkok, LA.” Eventually his boss gets cold feet and pulls authorization. Ballard pushes ahead and busts up a big trafficking ring, but even then he must make a solo journey deep into the Colombian jungle to rescue the girl from a drug kingpin’s compound. It’s rote, even old-fashioned, this Missing in Action–style regeneration through violence, but it isn’t slapdash.
Ballard built his real-world, freestyle global anti-trafficking organization on this paranoid argument. The trafficked children might be anywhere and so anti-trafficking efforts must be everywhere. Are there kids in your Wayfair boxes? Can you order them via Ebay or Etsy? That may have been too far for Ballard, but for the movie’s star Jim Caviezel and his devoted fans, it’s a different story.
More than 30 years ago Fredric Jameson insisted that beginning in the 1970s Hollywood’s response to the overwhelming complexity of the late capitalist economy took the form of conspiracy thinking. While there are lots of reasons why people have ended up driving freight trains at hospital ships and snarling traffic near Hoover Dam, the opacity of modern logistics keeps turning up among them. Barbie has fun with some rapid prototyping when Ken’s Barbieland coup succeeds; Hollywood was more than happy to award Nomadland best picture for its vision of the human side of the logistics cycle; and in the depths of the pandemic, Christopher Nolan rolled out his most capacious vision of global logistics in Tenet.
Sound of Freedom is about combatting the logistics of illicit human migration with countervailing force. Ballard’s schemes emerge at the intersection of LDS missionary zeal and the leftover logic of the Global War on Terror. In 2007, President Bush told the American Legion “Our strategy is this: we will fight them over there so we don’t have to face them in the United States of America.” A strategy of quagmire; open ended, failing. Part of the reason Sound of Freedom seems like a “dad” movie is that it is plugged into that same logic, a logic dating all the way back to NSC–68, the Paul Nitze–authored memo that, as John Lewis Gaddis has contended, turned containment into global paranoia. We will hunt the children over there so we don’t have to face the evidence here.
It took five years for Sound of Freedom to be released as it bounced from Fox to Disney and then was dropped before getting picked up by Angel Studios. In that time, journalists at Vice and American Crime Journal had uncovered just how mendacious and sleazy Ballard and his former organization, Operation Underground Railroad, are. (Ballard resigned from OUR in disgrace for treating it as a subsidized sexual harassment agency and may soon be facing charges.) This month, Miles Klee at Rolling Stone explained how Angel Studios’ own righteous posturing serves to cover some epic self-dealing. (That self-dealing would seem less nefarious if they rationalized their corporate structure and simply called it “vertical integration.”)
However ethically, financially, and legally questionable the institutions that came together to make Sound of Freedom the surprise hit of the summer might be, they excused their grift by turning the movie’s fantasy of projective revenge into an enlistment in a cultural crusade. To their audiences they said, You may not want to see this but you need to see this. And if things worked—and things definitely worked—their audiences would tell other people the same.
One of the more annoying things about movies from the perspective of classical economics is that they cost the same whether they are good or bad, and you don’t know whether you have over- or underpaid until the movie is done. There are ways of trying to convince people to give you more money when the movies are good—you can sell merch or build theme-park experiences or make sequels, but all of that is, as they say, ancillary. Angel Studios hit on a tremendously efficient way of capturing that “consumer surplus”: when the movie was over they just asked you to give them more money. They said it was to pay for tickets for other people to see the movie, and some of it was used to defray those costs. But the vast majority of it wasn’t. It was just more than $30 million in profit, as Klee has revealed. Paying it forward was a way to put your money where your word of mouth was.
Caviezel made the pitch over the closing credits. There is more dense-pack weirdness in his closing solicitation than in the whole rest of the movie. “I think we can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st century slavery.” We have to stop child sex trafficking, we are told. The way to do that is (thankfully) not for us to go grabbing kids away from the adults who are near them—although there has been plenty of that. Nor, surprisingly, are we supposed to donate to groups that work to stop child sex trafficking or work to provide support and care to victims. This is not a Will Rogers Institute–style appeal.
The way to stop child sex trafficking is to get people to go back to the movies: to get them into the theater. Cinephilia trumps pedophilia. Caviezel is explicit: “When you come to a theater you experience movies differently. There is no pause button, there are no distractions. We all have an experience as we watch the film together as a community. It makes it possible for strong messages like this one to take root.” Caviezel’s pitch for the intensity of the cinematic experience verges on the ontological, so much so that when it comes time for you to get out your phone, take a picture of the QR code on the screen, and fork over some money, he apologizes. “Now, I know it’s weird, because we’re in a theater.”
God’s children are not for sale, but the spectacle of their dramatic rescue certainly is. And you should buy it. The move is to pay it forward to an anonymous moviegoer, who will be asked to do the same. The money goes round and round in the studio’s operations and only very incidentally does it spill over into more direct action. It was a grift before it was a grift.
If people who liked Barbie liked that it connected them to their connections and their compromises, people who liked Sound of Freedom liked that it promised a release from those compromises in the form a global connection, a pay it forward community so total that all the righteous and the innocent might be saved and that all the evil might be justly punished. Barbie attends to the slippage between the self and the system; Sound of Freedom dreams of a perfect harmony between self and system, a dream that is always deferred, always in the future, just one more pay-it-forward ticket away.
§§
If you have not seen it, I am asking you to take the two minutes now to watch the “Paying It Forward” sketch from I Think You Should Leave (Netflix; S3E3, starting 9:34). This season dropped on May 30, in every way the contemporary of Sound of Freedom (July 4) and Barbie (July 21).
The sketch veers in ways that are characteristically Robinsonian: there are the woman’s immediate participation in the scam, the fact that she knows in her bones that the order begins “55 burgers,” the impossible softening of the big guy in the SUV (wrestler Damien Sandow/Aron Stevens, lol), and the solution that is the opposite of a solution when Robinson runs away rather than face any consequences.
It also includes the characteristic Robinsonian surplus. A good I Think You Should Leave sketch is like an automatic drawing done while looking at a diorama of human wreckage. In this case, when Robinson bolts from the car, he is enacting the clichéd moment from an LA police pursuit when the driver has precisely this revelation. “Oh! I can just run!” he thinks, only to find himself pinned in a helicopter’s blazing Nightsun spotlight before getting bodyslammed into a cyclone fence. What shows up in Sound of Freedom as the sadboy’s beatific cleverness is, in I Think You Should Leave, Tim’s desperate screaming to hold the idiot plan together. “Pay It Forward” is how Sound of Freedom feels when you manage to laugh at it.
They shot the “Pay It Forward” sketch at a Nexx Burger location in Downey. I made the pilgrimage for the same reason that I clomped around Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery searching out locations from “Coffin Flop.” (As an LA location, Mountain View is famous; Nexx Burger isn’t.) I like to go to these places not simply to see how they were shot, but to imagine the radical mismatch between the workaday place and the extremity of the result. It really opens up the possibilities.
Like the Piedmont’s Kinetic Nutrition or Semper Fit, Nexx Burger is a family operation with a couple outlets. Unlike coastal Carolina, the LA basin is not a place where global brands have trouble taking root, but it is a place where everyone can dream of bootstrapping their local business into a planetary franchise. From food truck to Downey to Dubai. That hustle may not pay off and may, at some point, turn sour—they did take Bitcoin for a while.
But for now, the thing about Nexx Burger is that every phase of it is better than it has to be. The graphic design is better. The wooden chairs are more comfortable and don’t make a howling sound when you slide them on the floor. They have beer on tap, and they had the Dodger game playing on a big tv.
Sure, they were happy to be featured in Tim Robinson’s sketch, the same way they were happy to get Snoop’s endorsement. They just might get famous. But in the meantime, they do things well. Sitting there, you might wish that other people had a chance to visit the place. As moviegoing becomes more rare, good moviegoing feels more and more like this. The need for the future rises. You begin to sense a system of possibilities, a taxonomy of promises, a montage of connections to be made. The implications come later.
This is the first of two parts. (Sorry, suckers.) In the second I will turn even more explicitly to Hollywood’s—and my—ties to the US military’s technologies of mediated force projection. If you would like advance warning of future installments, sign up here. If you’re an editor (or know an editor) and have reached this far, perhaps some version of City of Industry would be right for your publication. Reach out. Also, since I am now copyediting this myself, let me know if you see any raging typos. Thx.