Is it all over?

https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2018/12/its-all-over.html

“The essay touched a nerve, and most of the response to it was positive. One common mistaken interpretation, to which I want to respond, was that it amounts to an expression of “conservatism”. We are at a strange point indeed in our culture when a scoffing and dismissive attitude towards Hollywood entertainments such as action-hero movies, generated by market forces alone, may be seen as conservative. I continue to believe in a culture independent of these forces, and I bemoan the obsession of so many in our present age with monitoring the garbage output of the entertainment industry for signs of this industry’s affirmations of progressive values. I do not care about this industry. I think true progressivism consists in rejecting it, not in proclaiming the latest “iteration of Wonder Woman “good” because it managed to stay on-message relative to some particular conception of feminism, or that some movie with Emma Stone in it is “bad” because the lead role should have gone to a person of color. Who gives a shit? Who has time for this kind of stuff? Woke celebrity-gossip-mongering is still celebrity-gossip-mongering, and no one is going to convince me that it counts as political in any meaningful sense. Let’s make our own culture instead, with bold new visions of what art might be, rather than pushing Hollywood business moguls to do it for us.

I admitted in the essay to a certain fogeyism, so let me pull out a fogey trope and tell you how things were in the old days. In my late teens I used to drive thirty miles each way to go to the nearest art-house video-rental store, in order to take back home VHS tapes of the works of Ousmane Sembène, rightly called the Chekhov of Senegal. I loved his cinematic language, and I felt that through it I was gaining access to a certain true depiction of Africa. This and similar experiences leave me nonplussed and, yes, a bit angry, when, years later, I find myself reading excited young people declaring on Twitter that, with the release of Black Panther in 2018, we are “finally getting to see Africa depicted in film”. But that is not Africa; that is some fantasy bullshit. Africa has already been depicted in film going back several decades, by great African directors such as Sembène, and you are just not working hard enough if you expect movies to be delivered up to you as mass-release big-screen entertainments. I recently gave in and selected Black Panther while on a very long flight. I turned it off after ten minutes or so. It was just too stupid.”