Claude Favard
Occasionally, I post a take that results in bad faith and incredulous dms from people who follow me on Instagram. Such is life online, as we all know too well. The latest onslaught of mild outrage happened a week ago when posting about what I wrote in #70 and #52. You know, how maybe we need to recognize that entertainment and media have come to take up way too much room and significance in our lives. How perhaps slapping bandaids onto a rotten, corrupt, impossible-to-fix system such as Hollywood isn’t the solution, how maybe we need to start over from scratch.
I was asked, by more than one person, what are artists supposed to do, then? What are poor, poor artists supposed to do without mainstream media? How are they ever going to become rich? How is anyone ever going to know Their Name?
I hate this question. Is it even a question, or just whataboutism; the entitlement I wrote about in #4? Artists will always create. Artists do not need Hollywood and aren’t dependent on streaming services to do so. In fact, these things kill the artist, kill the writer, kill the joy, kill the process. There will always be film; there will always be poetry; there will always be beautiful things to watch, to read, to witness. We make those things ourselves, in collaborations and alone, and we will never stop doing so; such is our nature.
Yet capitalism, which works overtime to denaturalize us, has indeed rendered the concept of DIY unappealing, even corny, while stoking the fires of careerist aspiration. People’s motivations are now largely self-serving and fame diseased. What are we truly saying when we surrender to the idea that there is only one way, one avenue, to respectability, to safety? What the fuck are we saying when we give up this way, give ourselves no credit.
Contrary to popular belief, the devil is not the only employer. He’s just the one with the most perks.
We seem reluctant even to try to imagine, just for a second, what a post-Hollywood world might look like. Le confort et l'indifférence; change is scawwy and we, tender things, won’t survive without another fucking season of SNL, right? And where, oh where, will the children of nepotism and wealth go if we blow up their stage?
It’s about swatting the carrot away from one’s face in order to see clearly what is available to us. It’s about not disarming ourselves, still keeping some part of us alive.
What would happen to us without Hollywood?
We would fucking thrive.
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