Amerika

The twenty-first century shows humanity questing for something authentic instead of that which is manipulative, or like advertising and pick-up lines an attempt to control our minds with images inserted in them that pander to our weaknesses. This has damaged the ability of all media to continue their growth, as we see in the cratering of Hollywood:

WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales. On Aug. 2, AMC shares dropped 27% in one day, the WSJ reports. While films like Beauty and the Beast, Wonder Woman, and Get Out fared well at the box office, they were the anomalies in a year full of box office disappointments. Instead of giving moviegoers more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films, Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them.

These movies are not particularly worse than what has come out any previous summer, so something else is at work. This is likely a lack of faith in Hollywood to communicate a “good” message, because an audience has awakened to the onslaught of “social justice” messages and political correctness, and has correctly concluded that these movies are either not for them, or designed to manipulate them. At that point, it makes more sense to just go watch an old 80s favorite on DVD or do something entirely unrelated to media, because the new material is not relevant.

In addition, Hollywood — just like the news media and social media — is finding that its new audience did not catch on. The media discarded its old standby, the Western European upper half of middle class, who could be counted on to reliably show up for genre films and family friendly fare. These people viewed movies as something to do, and did not take them particularly seriously, so once they realized that they were watching propaganda, bailed out; the new audience of SJWs, minorities and Leftists have apparently not taken up the slack.

While seeing some industries get savaged feels like a bad thing, it is important to remember that many of these genres of business were intense saboteurs to the Western Europeans. Shopping malls turned consumption into an activity; Hollywood made emotional manipulation and narcissism seem normal; newspapers created an outrage culture and social media brought us Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). None of these are healthy, just like the NFL was a prophylactic receptacle for spending masculine energy in ineffectual ways for years before Colin Kapernick started his ill-advised “protest.” Those activities were inauthentic, and as our artists from Faulkner to hardcore punk to the indie bands of the 80s were warning us, the only solution is a search for authenticity, which naturally leads away from these manipulative, controlling and masturbatory activities.

We are tired of modern society. Let it burn. Celebrate its failure. We do not need Hollywood, the NFL, social media, The New York Times, Wikipedia, lifestyle magazines, women’s television or televangelists, and we never did. What we need is authentic, real life: a connection to the patterns of nature and the order beyond it, a sense of real culture, faith in ourselves, and activities that reward us through accomplishment and enjoyment of proficiency at a task. When you go to a place with actual culture, what is shocking to people from the modern West is how much everything is in balance. Every action has a place, there is a rhythm of life, and interactions follow familiar patterns. This means that anomalies are easy to spot, and acceptance is easily achieved, leaving more time and energy for the actual pursuit of individuality, which is a hybrid between maturation and creativity. We can become self-actualized in such a situation, where in modern society most people resemble perpetual adolescents.

Tags: authenticity, collapse, hollywood, media