The Creative Class is Being Decimated. Why?

America is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?

America has lost more than 200k jobs in “creative” industries over the last four years, with roughly 50k lost within the last year alone. That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history, with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008. Yet there’s no generalized recession today—instead, this period of job loss coincides with the rise of AI systems that can compose wholesale novels, photorealistic images, soundalike music, and practically every other form of digital art, en masse and at extremely low costs. Is this the fall of the Creative Class?

Proving the exact amount of AI-driven job loss in the arts is extremely difficult. Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights. The effects of AI are also hard to disentangle from other factors currently affecting arts businesses, like consolidation in Hollywood, offshoring of content production, or the continued displacement of traditional media providers in favor of social media creators. Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of AI’s influence is just that all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace.

Some of those digital job losses are just a continuation of prior trends, like in the publishing industry where technological change has been continually grinding away newspaper and magazine jobs for decades. Yet for sectors like live broadcasting, streaming, or graphic design, recent experience is an unusual downturn compared to the tranquility of years prior. Then there’s the worst-hit sector, movie & sound recording, which has been bleeding jobs at a nearly unprecedented pace over the last three years.

Hollywood has never seen a stretch as bad as the last four years, with the movie & TV industry losing more than 100k jobs, nearly one-third of the sector’s total. At the depths touched this summer, total employment was lower than at any point since the 2008 recession and approaching the lowest point in 30 years. The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.

Overall, nearly half the media job losses of the last four years have been concentrated in the movie & sound recording sector that includes Hollywood. Written publishing has been the next-largest source of job loss, with employment down by more than 70k over the same time frame. Yet the job losses have by no means been contained to any particular part of media; instead they’ve hit nearly every subsector at some point. Nor do they show any sign of abating, with losses consistently hovering at around 50k per year and even accelerating in recent months. Will further AI development continue displacing workers in creative industries?

Can the Arts Business Model Survive?

To understand what could happen to the business of art amidst the rise of AI, it’s important to understand what did happen to it during the first digital transition, the rise of the internet.

It was the turn of the millennium, and Metallica had a problem. Demos of their upcoming, unreleased tracks were bouncing around radio and the internet, originally leaked onto a new internet file-sharing website called Napster. There they found thousands of files shared amongst hundreds of thousands of users, many of which were direct rips of albums that sold for $15 being offered for free. The most anticipated albums were often leaked online even before they were on store shelves. Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement, and they were soon joined by separate suits from other prominent artists and eventually the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Much of the general public was understandably unsympathetic to Metallica, perceived as a bunch of already-successful millionaires trying to bilk even more money from listeners, and were even less sympathetic towards the RIAA, perceived as scurrilous middlemen who take from artists and fans alike. But the two of them easily won their lawsuit, forcing Napster into bankruptcy. Yet Metallica may have been right on the law but were on the wrong side of technology; the RIAA had won the battle but was losing the war.

The modern internet made file-sharing extremely easy, and no matter how much whac-a-mole companies played, they could not possibly catch every illegal upload. The perennial threat of piracy undermined their copyright and limited their ability to charge for music. Eventually, the value of individual songs fell to the point that companies like Spotify and Apple Music could swoop in to acquire massive catalogues, consolidate them, and charge a comparatively trivial fee for access. For what a single Metallica album would have cost in 2000, you can now get a month’s worth of unlimited access to nearly all human-made music.

The music industry has never returned to the heyday paydays of the peak CD era—even without adjusting for inflation, streaming revenue pales in comparison to ‘90s physical media sales. This was a massive boon to consumers, but it was also a squeeze on musicians that forced them to fundamentally change their business model over time. Instead of just selling records to earn money directly, music itself increasingly became a loss-leading advertisement for the live concerts (and merch) that provided a growing share of artists’ income. Tours got longer, venues got bigger, ticket prices skyrocketed, and musicians frequently took on roles closer to public influencers than isolated artistes. Were it not for rising concert sales, the business model of music would have completely collapsed, and the income going to musicians would have cratered.

Of course, there were still significant downsides to the transition into the streaming era. Bands (especially smaller ones) complain about the unending pressure to always be on tour. Musicians whose content was suited to home listening lost out to those more suited to giant festivals. Even accounting for concert revenues, musicians made less money than before. Yet musicians fared better than many areas of entertainment subsectors because there was a live component to fall back on—for many media industries, the digital era left no such comfort. [Chart]

Over time, the business of video has moved in the opposite direction of music—out of the theatre and into the home. Hollywood formerly made most of its money enticing customers to visit sold-out movie theatres, but these were gradually supplanted by broadcast TV, cable, and physical media. Yet because each successful technological leap increased total video watch time, the industry was still able to thrive amidst technological upheaval. That is, until the modern streaming era.

Today, the plethora of video options and the rise of social media have sent video producers into a vicious competition for limited attention. Even before adjusting for inflation, movie ticket sales ended last year down 25% from their 2019 peak, cable revenue is down 18% from its peak, and streaming revenue has not been able to compensate for the drop. The mountain of free user-generated content on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or social media was already presenting harsh competition for traditional video companies in the years before ChatGPT’s launch, and now streaming services are also competing with a flood of AI-generated content. The business model of video media is fundamentally getting squeezed, and unlike in the music industry, there’s basically no equivalent to live concerts that Hollywood can be used to ease the pain.

The actual worst-case scenario for creative workers amidst the AI revolution is something similar to what happened to the publishing industry after the advent of the internet—that is, near-total collapse of their fundamental business model. Newspapers used to employ roughly half a million people in the US, more than the entire oil industry, and now their payrolls are down nearly 85% and still dropping. Magazine publishers likewise have let 66% of their staff go since the 90s, while book publishers have lost 40%.

The routine informational updates that previously formed newspapers’ bread-and-butter were all de-bundled—box scores moved to sports websites, stock movements went to financial websites, forecasts went to weather websites—each loss compounding on itself to undermine consumers’ need to buy the paper. Search engines became the first place people looked to for information, and newspapers’ advertising revenue rapidly started flowing to companies like Google instead. The collective of social media users became faster at breaking any news story than a daily paper could ever hope to be. When papers eventually did start aggressively paywalling content, the internet made it trivially easy for people to just copy the articles’ content and share it beyond the paywall. The entire business model had collapsed, to the point that now only a select few major newspapers can even survive.

That scale of copyright dilution and forced unbundling is the worst-case scenario for media businesses in the age of AI. It’s possible arts jobs could survive via consumers’ deep-seated aversion to explicitly AI-generated content, but AI is increasingly being used throughout media in ways invisible to the average end consumer. Roughly 32% of workers in the overall arts, entertainment, and recreation sector use Generative AI to some extent, which is less than the 62% average across all industries, but still enough that virtually every major media project could have some AI within its workflow.

Indeed, AI is likely seeping into media production processes in ways large companies themselves would struggle to prevent even when they desire to—how can a TV studio be sure nobody in their writers’ room is consulting ChatGPT for jokes or any storyboard artist is generating concept art? And even if professional TV and movie studios do effectively hold out against temptation and prevent internal AI use, how long can they compete with the large mass of wannabe independent creators with much fewer scruples? Plenty of media businesses tried to hold out against the algorithmic content waves of the 2010s and were buried as a result.

by Joseph Politano, Apricitas Economics |  Read more:

Images: Joseph Politano

Not Ready For Prime Time

[ed. Interview with Piers Morgan, Tom Conti and Tilly Norwood (the AI generated actor). Also, Impact Theory co-founder Tom Bilyeu and game theorist Professor Jiang Xueqin. Some crazy glitches, but you can see where this is going.

See also: An “Interview” With Tilly Norwood Proves Absurd and Underwhelming (HR); and,
Tilly Norwood’s press tour is going about as well as you’d expect for an AI (TechCrunch).]

AI Goes Hollywood

via: (more at the link, podcasts, interviews, etc.)

“The Making of JAWS” (1975)
via:

[ed. Floss and visit your dentist regularly.]

Studio Ghibli’s Deepest Secret Is What Comes Next

On a Friday morning in April, at Studio Ghibli’s headquarters on the outskirts of Tokyo, Goro Miyazaki faces an excruciating test. After roughly a year of toil, it’s time to screen his animated short for his famously demanding father, Hayao Miyazaki — one of the most celebrated directors on the planet — and then listen to his unvarnished feedback.

The Miyazakis have often clashed over the years. “Constant arguing, constant fighting,” Goro recalls of one of their early collaborations. But perhaps this project will be different — the passage of time occasionally being a mellowing influence. Hayao is 85; Goro, 59.

For a long time, the creative dynamic inside Ghibli has largely revolved around the older filmmaker’s eye. Over the previous four decades, the studio has forged a distinctive style of richly layered, hand-drawn animation in more than 20 feature-length films. The movies, which appeal to both children and adults, often star young heroes saving war-torn environments from nefarious forces amid phantasmagoric phenomena. Collectively, the films have generated over $2 billion in ticket sales, won two Academy Awards and helped trigger a global boom in anime — a market now worth in excess of $25 billion annually, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. It’s been, by many accounts, the greatest run in animation since the heyday of Walt Disney.

Now, with Hayao in his professional twilight, things are inevitably changing — although into what exactly is still unclear. After starting his career as a landscape architect, Goro joined Ghibli in the late 1990s and went on to direct three major films. When Ghibliologists speculate about potential creative heirs, his name is inevitably front and center. But so far Goro has brushed aside such chatter, and his dad has offered nothing close to an endorsement — at least, not yet.  [...]

Studio Ghibli’s headquarters are on a serene, suburban block dotted with single-family homes. The outside of the main building is covered in dense, creeping vines, creating a green exoskeleton that gives the place a puckish, larval aura, like a shaggy caterpillar on the cusp of molting. Goro is joined in the conference room by Kenichi Yoda, an up-and-coming executive.

Three years ago, Ghibli announced it was selling a 42.3% stake in the business for an undisclosed sum to Nippon Television Holdings Inc., a major Japanese media conglomerate that had long invested in the studio’s films. Yoda, then a producer at Nippon TV, joined Ghibli’s board of directors and has since served as the primary liaison between the two camps. Whatever happens next, Yoda, 51, will be a driving force. (In May the companies announced that he’d been promoted to become Ghibli’s president and chief executive officer, starting on June 22.)

For the next two hours, the younger Miyazaki and Yoda hold forth on Ghibli’s future, from their inchoate plans for the next feature film, to their stance on artificial intelligence, to the importance of extending the brand beyond the screen. Yoda declines to say anything about Ghibli’s financial situation, or Nippon TV’s assessment of it. According to public records, as of March 31, 2025, Ghibli had ¥44 billion ($279 million) in assets and brought in ¥6 billion in net profit over the past year. “Ghibli is not a company focused primarily on profit,” Yoda says.

At a time of great flux in the entertainment industry, many incoming CEOs like to position themselves as agents of change, guiding anxious flocks into a brave new world of technologically optimized content creation. Not Yoda. If anything, he describes himself as Ghibli’s protector of the old ways. “Ghibli is not a place that works hard to maintain a company — I think it is a place to make art,” Yoda says. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.”

Despite its small staff — and the many years, often three to five, it takes to produce a feature-length animated film — Ghibli has managed to grind out a new movie roughly every two years. No sequels. But recently, the studio’s cadence has gotten off track.

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.

The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”

Meanwhile, the global demand for anime that Ghibli helped ignite decades ago has since attracted competitors from beyond Japan. The top film in the world last year was Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure from China that built off the huge reception for Ne Zha in 2019. The sequel grossed more than $2 billion globally, topping the best offerings of Hollywood and Japan.

Moviemaking, Miyazaki says, has become more industrialized: “It’s very hard to just create a feature film and put that into theaters and then make financial sense from that. A lot of the animation you see out there now is based on a manga, and then it becomes a TV series. And then you have the partnership with the music company to have a big theme song attached to it. And so there’s this wholesale business scheme — there’s, like, a template, almost, to make sure that it’s a profitable business in creating an animation film. We, as a studio, have never done that.”

Ghibli’s competitors have no such qualms. Major US animation studios continue to pump out sequels to prior hits. This year alone will see Toy Story 5, The Angry Birds Movie 3 and new installments in the Minions, Super Mario Bros. and Paw Patrol franchises.

Once, years earlier, Hayao considered making a sequel to his 2008 fantasy-adventure film Ponyo, but the idea was eventually scrapped in favor of another original, The Wind Rises. Sequelization just isn’t appealing to them, the Ghibli executives say; they aren’t considering My Neighbor Totoro 2 or anything similar. “When you make a film, it’s not like a fun, happy, exciting process,” Goro says. “It’s very laborious, it’s very tedious.”

If anything, the process of creating any animation has grown even more laborious. In part that’s because Ghibli’s gaggle of animators is older and less suited for round-the-clock binge working than they used to be and, in part, because of labor laws enacted to curb such workplace excesses. “So even when the engine gets going, we have to stop,” Yoda says. “That is extremely frustrating.”

Miyazaki says he’s not planning to pitch any movies to his dad anytime soon. Were the executives considering ideas from aspirational filmmakers outside their ranks? Yoda replies: “If there’s someone willing to do the film, yes, we would love to.” But doing so, Miyazaki points out, wouldn’t be easy under the current circumstances. “As long as … Hayao is around,” he says, “it’d be absolutely impossible.” Yoda nods and chuckles: “Any sane animation director would not come close to this castle.”

To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery. [...]

As in many creative fields, the pressure on the animation industry is mounting. AI software is already capable of rendering elaborate animated sequences from brief prompts. What that means for the profession is still unclear. But recently there’s been a collective embrace of Ghibli as a standard-bearer for the growing AI resistance.

In March 2025, when OpenAI released a new version of its text-to-video AI model, users started refining their Ghibli-style knockoffs. Before long, people were inundating the internet with Ghiblified selfies, family photos and famous movie scenes. Mike Tyson posted a Ghibli-like rendering of himself. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, updated his X profile pic in Ghibli style.

Not everyone was amused by the spectacle of a rich American tech company offering the capability to appropriate the style of revered Japanese artists without compensation or consent. Amid the ensuing backlash, a particular clip from Never-Ending Man about Ghibli began recirculating on social media. In the documentary, a brazen Japanese tech executive tells Hayao that soon deep-learning AI will let computers paint like humans. Inside the Ghibli headquarters, he plays a demonstration. Together, they watch an AI clip of a misshapen, unclothed humanoid clumsily squirming across the ground. In response to the creepy video, Hayao tells a story about the sensation of greeting a physically disabled friend. Whoever made this video, Hayao says, gave no thought to human suffering. “It’s an awful insult to life,” he says. The clip snowballed into a global cri de coeur against AI slop.

In Japan, the Ghibli executives watched the OpenAI saga play out, unbothered. There has long been a tradition, Goro says, of fans making amateur art derived from their favorite manga, anime or video game characters. So the Ghiblification craze didn’t seem like a big deal. For amusement, one of the company’s executives even dabbled in the trend himself. “We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro says. “If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem.” 

Anyone positioning Ghibli in the vanguard of the AI backlash, Goro says, was twisting events for their own purposes; the studio itself was essentially AI agnostic.  [...]

One of the central themes in Hayao’s films is whether humankind will harness technology for the protection and enrichment of the natural world — or, alternatively, for its destruction. Susan Napier, a professor at Tufts University, says the roots of this fascination likely can be traced back to the nuclear horrors endured by Japan during and after World War II. But at a time when much of the planet is grappling, once again, with existential questions about a powerful new technology and its impact, she says, Hayao’s work is more relevant than ever. Hayao’s films teem with robots and other forms of sentient technology, some good, some evil. His films’ perspective on the topic, she says, is always complex. “What are the pleasures technology can bring,” she asks, “along with the perils?”

by Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Images: Kentaro Takahashi

The Social Reckoning

When Aaron Sorkin made 2010’s “The Social Network,” he had heard of Facebook, he said at the time, “the way I’ve heard of a carburetor.” Sixteen years later, he has a much deeper idea of what Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has become.

“Back then, Facebook was a way to keep in touch with people you went to high school with. It’s something much different now,” Sorkin says. “‘The Social Network’ was about the invention of Facebook. ‘Social Reckoning’ is about what it’s become and, in particular, Facebook’s role in the rise of extremism and divisiveness.”

“The Social Reckoning,” which Sony Pictures will release Oct. 9, is one of the most timely movies arriving in theaters this fall. Last week, Sony debuted the film’s trailer the same day that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, agreed to pay up to $18 billion in penalties over claims its platform endangered children.

“The Social Reckoning” is poised to further scrutinize the social media behemoth at a time when Zuckerberg is under greater pressure than ever over the role Facebook plays in contemporary life and politics. [...]

“To tell you the truth, I was hesitant,” Sorkin said. “I recognize the shadow that ‘The Social Network’ casts. But I think what’s going to happen is, 10 minutes into the movie, you’ll have forgotten about that and be invested in this.”

For the 65-year-old Sorkin, “The Social Reckoning” isn’t a sequel. It’s centered on the same figure, Zuckerberg, but captures him and his company at a dramatically different stage. [...]

“I said at the beginning I didn’t want to write ‘Jaws 2.’ I didn’t want to return and fail,” says Sorkin. “Then I met Frances Haugen and I met Jeff Horwitz and I started thinking more about it. I realized there was a terrific story and the only reason not to do it is being scared. And that’s just not a good enough reason.” [...]

Sorkin initially reached out to Eisenberg about reprising the role of Zuckerberg. Before telling Eisenberg, or anyone else, of his plans, Sorkin spent two years researching and writing the screenplay.

“I didn’t know that Jesse simply did not want to play Mark Zuckerberg ever again,” Sorkin explains. “I talked to him a lot over a three-day weekend. He was clear that he loves ‘The Social Network,’ he loves how it launched his career, and he just doesn’t like being conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. I was just really lucky that Jeremy Strong had said, ‘Hey, listen, if for some reason Jesse doesn’t want to do it.’”

“It’s replacing Joe DiMaggio with Mickey Mantle,” he adds.

by Jake Coyle, AP/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures via AP

A Chinese Podcaster Interviewed Christopher Nolan. Here’s Why it Made Two Internets Freak Out.

The curious thing is that this passionate way of teaching Western culture is thriving right now—but outside of the West. In the US, the insiders who speak candidly will tell you that the humanities is in crisis. You can measure it in many ways—declining enrollment, shrinking departments, poor test results, increased cheating, resistance to reading, etc. All the metrics are bad.

But that’s not what’s happening in China. The study of western culture is in the ascendancy there. You could even say it’s hot and trendy.

People got a taste of this recently when director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Yiyang Zhuge, who is a trained classicist perhaps best known for translating Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese (and Hannah Arendt, too).

Nolan was probably expecting another pop culture discussion of his film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But what he got was something very different.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

***

Whichever side of the sinophone media sphere you’re on, you’ve likely already seen it: The interview about The Odyssey, a conversation between Chinese podcaster Zhuge Yiyang (who goes by Zhong Shu) and Christopher Nolan. In the interview, Zhong seems intent on getting beneath the film’s surface, pressing Nolan on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his adaptation and connecting his directorial choices to the anxieties of “an age that demands apology from greatness.” She asks whether Nolan has “Christianized” the story by introducing concepts like atonement.

The interview quickly went viral on X, where English-speaking viewers praised it as one of the most thoughtful Nolan interviews they’d seen in years, while not quite hiding their surprise that it came from China. But as the Chinese and American internets started reacting to one another, things got weird.

Internet sleuths on X and Xiaohongshu traced Zhong’s ties to American conservative and libertarian intellectual networks. Zhong dropped a podcast episode bashing her newfound critics, after Western audiences and media struggled to interpret her. Chinese commentators went after her for misrepresenting philosophical ideas. Meanwhile, she landed on the cover of Esquire China alongside a handful of other podcaster-influencers. More recently, Chinese internet users have begun claiming (and unearthing evidence) that many of her episodes directly lift arguments and passages without attribution from English-language sources, including the podcast Old School, and from The Atlantic, and The New Yorker magazines.

As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time on both internets, it has been surreal to watch how Zhong Shu has been interpreted and received so differently by intellectuals inside and outside of China.  [...]

But to understand why this interview happened in the first place, it helps to understand the media ecosystem that produced someone like Zhong Shu. For Western readers, it’s easy to mistake the depth of this interview as evidence that China has an especially vibrant cultural media. In some ways, the opposite is true.

Zhong Shu is not the only independent creator Nolan spoke to on his China media tour for The Odyssey; Universal Pictures apparently sought out independent creators rather than traditional entertainment reporters, a strategy increasingly common for publicity organizers for Western celebrities visiting China, from Tim Cook to Maye Musk. As traditional media has lost much of its cultural credibility and become more constrained, influence has shifted toward specialized online communities anchored by creators with their own audiences. The PR strategy is an acknowledgment that the supposedly mainstream cultural press once mediating these conversations is now practically nonexistent.

by Caiwei Chen, Hǎi 海 | Read more:
Image: YouTube

There’s Something Dangerous About Sam Rockwell

Ever since that monologue—you know the one—everyone knows who the legendary scene-stealer is. Still, his appetite for taking risks means he’ll never stop surprising us.

Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red Bull.”

We had been talking about the tyranny of social media.

“I’ve never had an energy drink ever,” I tell him, unnecessarily proud of myself, while I try to figure out why he’s asked. I’m distracted. The reason I’m distracted is that I don’t want to be here. I don’t mean with Sam Rockwell—Sam Rockwell is delightful. I mean in this room. It’s the greenroom outside a midtown Manhattan video studio. It sucks.

“This is a nice room, actually,” Rockwell said when we first walked in. He cut himself off—he was in the midst of warning me that he might need to stretch because he’d boxed that morning—just to make the observation. He does that a lot: cuts himself off, trails unpredictably from one topic to the next. “Carlito’s Way meets, you know, some sort of industrial workspace.”

He does that a lot too. He has a movie reference for everything, even this L-shaped hall-end space with a couple mini fridges; a table with some trail mix, chips, and granola bars; and, at the other end of the L, a couch and armchairs under the lone window, outside which a tree is swaying and it’s trying to rain. We’ll talk for 145 minutes and he’ll manage to mention thirty-two movies and fifty-three actors.

Forty-five minutes into our conversation, he gets up to take a leak. Upon returning from the bathroom, he sees the tree out the window metronoming back and forth. “Is it raining?” He walks over to the window and peers down at the street, where tiny creatures have sprouted umbrellas. He’s been inside virtually all day, shooting photos and videos in closed-off rooms. He furrows his eyebrows slightly, mouth half open, that look of coy appraisal we’ve all seen a million times now.

It’s hard to believe because of the boyish face and irrepressible energy, but Rockwell’s career stretches back nearly forty years. His first film was a low-budget 1989 slasher called Clownhouse, but by 1992 he was in Light Sleeper, directed by Paul Schrader, our foremost poet of male alienation and the writer of one of Rockwell’s favorite movies, Taxi Driver. That’s his career. He’s been in a Marvel film; he’s been in a Clint Eastwood film. He’s played the Big Bad Wolf and George W. Bush and the most influential choreographer of the twentieth century. He’s natural in everything. Last year, a monologue about wanting to be an Asian woman getting railed by white men, from season 3 of The White Lotus, which starred his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, tipped him from an actor beloved among people like him—cinephiles—to someone everybody knows.

His new film, Wild Horse Nine, comes out in November. Rockwell plays Lee, a CIA agent who, along with his partner, Chris, played by John Malkovich (one of Rockwell’s idols), is part of a CIA misadventure in Chile in the early 1970s. Lee and Chris take a weekend trip to Easter Island, where Lee seems to be keeping tabs on Chris, watching him from the window of his hotel room or out the windshield of an ancient red stick-shift sedan.

Wild Horse Nine is the fourth collaboration between Rockwell and writer/director Martin McDonagh, after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which Rockwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; 2012’s Seven Psychopaths; and a 2010 play with the macabre title A Behanding in Spokane. I asked McDonagh why he keeps casting Rockwell. “His danger, his truthfulness, his sense of fun, his sex appeal,” he said. “I think especially the first one—there’s always something a little dangerous about Sam in everything he does.”

There is something dangerous about Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine, but he’s playing against Malkovich, who is not known for timidity. The two of them and McDonagh rehearsed for a few weeks at the Public Theater, a legendary institution in New York City. Rockwell, who has been rather relaxed, reclining slightly with boxing shoes flat on the floor, leans in to tell me about it. “We were doing this thing where he goes off on me,” Rockwell says. After a run-through, McDonagh asked Malkovich to “turn up the anger a little bit.” “He just says [lilting], Oh yeah, sure, no problem,” Rockwell says. “He talks kind of gently. And then, just like, WHAM! Out of the gate like a monster.”

Rockwell ate it up. “I was like, I got a front-row ticket to this? I get Malkovich to yell at me?”

I point out that some people might find this intimidating. “I worked with Gene Hackman once,” he says. “And I had to yell at him, and he loved it. He loved it. Because actors are so intimidated by him. If you’re a really good tennis player, you want a good tennis player opposite you.”

Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—

“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.

by Kevin Dupzyk, Esquire | Read more:

Image: Florence Sullivan

[ed. See also: Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe (Esquire).]

Resort to Boulder

Sundance means big business for Park City. Last year, the festival’s 85,000 visitors brought almost $200 million into the town’s economy, and major sponsors like Chase, Acura, United Airlines, and Adobe took over entire restaurants and event spaces up and down Main Street. In March 2025, however, the Sundance Institute — the nonprofit that operates the festival — announced that Sundance would be moving to Boulder. Sundance officials had spoken for years about the possibility of moving the festival out of Park City. In 2022, the institute lost millions of dollars after being forced to shut down in-person screenings in response to that winter’s omicron outbreak. Now Colorado was offering more than $34 million in state tax credits to incentivize the move. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival would be the last to take place in its original home, as well as the first not overseen by Sundance’s talismanic founder, Robert Redford, who died at 89 in September 2025. [...]

Park City, it should be said, is neither a park nor a city. As a location for a festival it is, and always has been, a giant pain in the ass. Getting to Park City is pricey, and driving and parking are impossible. There are only a handful of hotels in town, and all of them jack up their usual prices by criminal orders of magnitude. Most people end up sharing cramped rooms in condos that still cost thousands of dollars. Eating and drinking are equally outrageous. Utah state law requires restaurant patrons to buy food to order a drink, and liquor-based drinks may contain only 1.5 ounces of any primary spirit, measured through a calibrated dispensing device called the Berg. This is a serious problem for bored, overworked critics who must sit through dozens of the nation’s least ambitious films every year.

Then there are the lines. Lines to corporate-sponsored events that snake up Main Street; lines to parties that take hours even when your name is on the list; lines to press screenings longer than the film’s runtime. In 2026, a single ticket to one of these films cost $35; a package of ten tickets, with the ability to reserve screenings in advance, was $920. For filmmakers it’s even worse. Sundance sometimes provides a small stipend to productions to help offset the costs of participating in the festival. This year, the payment was around $1,000, hardly enough money to fly in a director, let alone a cast and crew, to spend several days posing for photos in front of step and repeats, participating in interviews, and attending Q&As — standard but punishing procedures for selling a film at Sundance. Add in the price of hiring a publicist and throwing a party for the film’s premiere — as well as meals, hotels, and transportation — and launching a low-budget film at Sundance can quickly run up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.

Robert Redford was an unlikely champion of independent film. As the face of polished 1970s studio filmmaking and the decade’s biggest box office star, he was the ultimate Hollywood insider. His name was listed in dictionaries under words like glamour and idol, and he was too good-looking to be anything but a leading man — a point the actor famously learned early in his career after auditioning for the lead in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols later told Vanity Fair. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’”

But Redford was always ambivalent about his success. He disliked the trappings and never-ending demands of celebrity, and mistrusted the studio executives and yes-men around him. By the early 1980s, the major Hollywood studios had shut out most of the successful creative filmmakers of the previous decade and pivoted to family-friendly, cash-fueled spectacles like Star Wars, Superman, and E.T. Redford saw Sundance as the solution. The next generation of pathbreaking auteurs would come to the actor’s compound, which included a ski resort near Mount Timpanogos, to receive artistic guidance and mentorship far from the corrupting influence of the Barry Dillers and Jerry Bruckheimers of the world.

by Will Travlin, N+1 |  Read more:
Image: Chason Matthams, Untitled (Technica 3D rig, yellow). 2024

‘Harry Potter’ Fans Succeed in Moving Construction Project to Avoid Dobby’s Grave

Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to; fans have been asked not to lay stones by the National Trust, who own the site, due to the beach being an ecologically sensitive site.

It has now been revealed that the cable has now been rerouted after a BBC interview alerted fans, according to project manager Simon Ludlam.

“We did the shot, we finished I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later,” he told the Energy Revolution podcast. “And we got hundreds of calls, I mean hundreds of calls.”

He further recalled: “I said, ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby? I don’t know Dobby?’ I said: ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’ [The colleague] said: ‘No it’s very, very serious’.”

They then discussed “exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn’t go anywhere close to Dobby’s grave” and that now, “a lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby’s happy”.

However, they ended up going “quite close” to real Bronze Age remains, though and “avoided Dobby’s grave”.

by Sam Warner, NME |  Read more:

Image: Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock

[ed. Hardly a day goes by that I don't read something that seems straight out of The Onion.]

Is Netflix Washed Now?

Today’s headline poses a question you’ve probably never thought to ask, so I’ll start with my answer: yes, Netflix is washed now. The content on the platform has never been great, but it’s never been worse. I open the app these days and I’m amazed. What used to be a source of fun, buzzy, compulsively watchable, and occasionally excellent TV and movies is now an endless river of reheated IP, true crime documentaries, and filler dressed as prestige. Millions of people watch this stuff, and everyone instantly forgets it.

I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed to some version of Netflix, and churn rates are still low, then any concern is relative. Going forward: cable is still dying, and even if the biggest premium distribution platform in the world can’t make great content of its own, it can still license movies, TV and sports rights. Netflix can then spread those costs across hundreds of millions of subscribers and a steadily growing ads business, seeing more engagement in a week than Apple TV sees in a year.

So no, the company’s not doomed today or destined for collapse tomorrow. Instead, I think what’s interesting to consider is that Netflix has almost certainly peaked. As a cultural force, as a business success story, and as an entertainment death star destined to swallow Hollywood whole, the arrows are all pointing the wrong direction.

Here was Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg two weeks ago, writing about one of several problems the company has encountered over the past 12 months:

Netflix is struggling to get viewers to stick with its shows for more than a season.

One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix.

Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.

That report went viral, prompting a week of commentary on Netflix’s binge model and elongated release schedules, with lots of Twitter users observing that viewers consume eight episodes across a few days and then often have to wait as long as two or three years for the next season. By that point, memories of plot or characters are faint at best. The emotional connection to the story doesn’t exist. No one should be surprised that the audience for a show like One Piece is cut in half in 2026, three years after the first season aired.

While that explanation certainly feels true, Shaw followed up this week to note that data is mixed as to whether extended breaks between seasons do in fact correlate to audience drop-off. Severance, on Apple, gained a ton of new audience after its nearly three-year break. Stranger Things and Bridgerton have been multi-season powerhouses at Netflix despite their long breaks between seasons. Conversely, Tina Fey’s Four Seasons debuted on Netflix in May last year, was met with pretty good reviews, and returned 13 months later with half its audience.

I think the Netflix problem is more fundamental than production schedules. What if these shows just aren’t very good or differentiated? Consider the original productions Netflix has surfaced in the past few months:

• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
• Running Point
• Lord of the Flies
• Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
• Unchosen
• XO, Kitty
• Big Mistakes
• Beef
• Man on Fire
• Little House on the Prairie
• His & Hers
• Nemesis
• The Boroughs

That list is culled from a post by the Entertainment Strategy Guy charting Netflix originals that have under-performed in the second quarter of 2026, and one common thread between those titles is that I haven’t heard of almost any of them. Netflix is the one streaming service everyone subscribes to and is theoretically well positioned to be setting the cultural agenda, but that hasn’t happened for quite some time. Did you know that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a thing? Apparently that show lost 60% of its season one audience when its second season aired in late June.

Content and the Year of Discontent

I mentioned the anxiety surrounding Netflix these days, so let me take a step back here. Amazingly, it’s only been eight months since Netflix won the bidding war to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and looked poised to become an entire generation’s one-stop shop for high-end entertainment. The implications of that news produced lots of anxiety, including one of my first articles on this website—Netflix and the Flattening of Everything—and a memorably ominous Variety cover that captured Hollywood’s mood at the time:

The Warner Brothers deal was abandoned at the end of February, when Netflix walked away from the table in the face of regulatory pressure from Washington and an increased bid from Paramount. Even so, the market hated the initial play, as investors wondered en masse why the world’s most (only?) successful streaming platform was suddenly ready to take on a mountain of new debt to acquire a company that had already been the subject of several expensive, failed acquisitions over the past 25 years.

Now, even as the deal is off, the questions remain. Are we sure a Netflix world takeover is a forgone conclusion? Is Netflix sure? The stock is down 18% this year and over 40% across the past 12 months. Investors who did a double take last December seem to have noticed that YouTube has twice the overall engagement that Netflix does, and more time watched on televisions, while free, ad-supported TV services like Tubi and the Roku Channel are becoming meaningful engagement competitors themselves.

Meanwhile, alongside all the original programming that’s failed to launch (or re-launch?), Netflix is adding videos from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst and Penske Media (as Shaw notes: “Get ready for lots of Bon Appétit cooking videos on Netflix.”) Last fall the platform also added a variety of high-end podcasts in a bid for relatively cheap, recurring content that may be seeing underwhelming results. Then again, they continue to buy more, so who knows? Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix executives have “recently discussed adding live channels that would continuously stream certain programs, or shows and films from a certain genre.” Can Netflix become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? Can Netflix become Tubi before Tubi destroys Netflix’s long-term pricing power?

All of those moves might have once been seen as the savvy power plays of a world-conquering behemoth intent on taking the next step to expand its footprint. Today, in the shadow of a Warner Brothers bid that accidentally punctured the company’s air of inevitability, this year’s moves look more like spaghetti being thrown at a wall by a company that’s searching for something—anything!—that might hold people’s attention and scale more effectively than an expensive library of content that’s consumed, discarded, and then effectively worthless.

Looking back at the deal to acquire Warner Brothers, HBO and all that IP, I think it’s clear Ben Thompson was right when he wrote that concerns over competition from YouTube specifically and the internet generally were likely key drivers of Netflix’s decision-making. Those concerns seem to be animating all the other options the company is considering, and understandably so. The same way that the rise of social media has throttled the growth of the gaming market, it stands to reason it could do the same to demand for scripted content. With respect to the specific Netflix logic for buying WBD, that context is important: the biggest companies, with the deepest, most diverse libraries, will have the best chance at defending themselves in this new environment. [...]

I like to leave all Aggregator analysis to Ben, but I don’t think investors are crazy to have some questions about where this leads and what the upside looks like. For all the advantages its massive customer base affords (leverage over costs, advertising upside), an obvious difference between Netflix and businesses like Meta, YouTube, or Google—the other demand aggregators—is that Netflix has to spend far more money to deliver on its value proposition to customers and has fewer network effects to defend its long-term centrality to people’s lives.

by Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp, Sharp Text |  Read more:

Images: Al Bello/Getty Images for Netflix; Variety

[ed. See also: Predictions on the Future of Netflix (and Other Huge Platforms) (Honest Broker).]

Catching Up With Keanu

Keanu Reeves' First Original Action Movie Since 'John Wick' Is 'Groundhog Day' With Sharks

I'm sure that’s one of the reasons you guys are doing press today, to raise awareness. Before I run out of time, Keanu, I'm a big fan of Tim Miller. And I know you're getting ready to film something with him in the Dominican Republic.

REEVES: Yeah.

What can you tease about this project, and what made you say, “I need to do this?”

REEVES: Sharks. Time machine. Groundhog Day.

Everything you just said sounds fucking amazing.

REEVES: Yeah, man!

Does that mean you're spending a lot of time in the water? Is that something that you're looking forward to?

REEVES: Yes. And getting eaten by sharks.

by Tamera Jones & Steven Weintraub, Collider |  Read more:

Image: Lionsgate

[ed. All in. Maybe they're Russian sharks and he'll be blasting them left and right for eating his groundhog.]

All Good Sex Is Body Horror

Regenerations as radical as the ones Cronenberg envisions involve what the philosopher L. A. Paul has termed “transformative experiences,” ruptures that change “your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience.” Not only do we lack access to information that we can acquire only by plunging into the scalding water of a new life, but we cannot foresee how such a jolt will overhaul the very predilections and values that define who we are. [...]

It is a commonplace in the literature of romance that love wreaks legible changes on the body, a development that is typically painted in a positive light. As the poet Octavio Paz so tenderly puts it, “My hands / Invent another body for your body.” He is echoed by E. E. Cummings in a similar poem, which opens, “i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. / Muscles better and nerves more.” Cummings is not the only one to undergo a shift during the act of love, and the full extent of his metamorphosis is explicable only in terms of his partner’s reciprocal mutation: his poem begins with the ways in which his lover renews his body and ends with the ways in which his body renews his lover’s body in turn. “i like the thrill / of under me you so quite new,” he concludes. The poet’s body changes in response to his lover’s body, his lover’s body changes in response to the changes in his body, his changed body changes in response to the changes in his lover’s body, and so on and on, twining into an ouroboros of mutual reconstruction. [...]

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes. As the narrator of Norman Rush’s novel “Mating” sagely observes, “Sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties,” accompanied by the exchange of careful courtesies: “after you, no, after you, mais non.” No one has transformative sex all the time, and there is nothing wrong with sex that is merely pleasant. Indeed, a polite volley of pleasantries is probably the best thing that unecstatic sex can be.

Of course, many mediocre sexual encounters are rote in a more pernicious way. Heterosexual sex that follows the standard scripts, with its spankings and its schoolgirls, is not always devastating or traumatic, but its tiresomeness is nonetheless not innocuous. Women are the most obvious losers when the scenarios faithfully reënacted in the bedroom so consistently favor male predilections, but men who inherit their desires from the prevailing sexual culture—or, worse, men who feel they must satisfy a virile masculine ideal whether it appeals or not—lack the opportunity or the means to develop sexual agency. For both parties, the resultant comedy of errors is not satisfying. What nefariously underwhelming sex has in common with respectfully underwhelming sex is that neither brand is especially surprising or especially erotic.

To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her. Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.

Eroticism does not arise every time there is sexual activity, no matter how plodding, but it is also not the exclusive concomitant of love, marriage, or conventional commitment. Most sexual pairings are no more dishevelling than a game of tennis, but it is constitutive of sex that it has the potential to thrust us into metamorphosis that may be sweet, may be sinister, and may be both concurrently. When at last we grow wings, who can say exactly where we will want to fly?

Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing?

Surely she cannot consent in the normal way. To consent in the normal way is not merely to grant permission but to grant permission on a particular basis—perhaps a reasonable expectation of pleasure, security, or safety. In any case, there is some positive inner state to which the outward utterance of license is supposed to correspond. A woman, almost always the presumed consenter in a heterosexual exchange, is exhorted to have sex with someone only when she has good reason to believe that she will have a generally happy time with him. Over and over, she is told: you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do; you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Because she is assumed to know exactly what makes her comfortable, and because comfort is assumed to be a necessary condition of good sex, the procedure the consenter is instructed to follow is not unlike the operation favored by decision theorists. First, she is to imagine what sex with the partner under consideration will be like; second, she is to assign a value to the experience that she has conjured; third, she is to assign a probability of accuracy to her prediction. Having done all this, she finds herself in a position to make a rational decision, consenting if and only if she foresees that an exchange will turn out to be unimpeachably agreeable. Should she prove wrong in her predictions, should she ever feel the slightest scintilla of unease, she should withdraw her consent and beat a hasty retreat.

Three faulty assumptions are baked into this model. The first is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict, if roughly, what a prospective partner will be like during sex; the second is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict what they will be like during sex with a prospective partner; the third is that sex can and should be comfortable.

In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be. We can have no more success when it comes to divining how we will change our partners than we can have when it comes to divining how they will change us—or, following Cummings, how their changes will change us, and how our changes will change them, iteratively and indefinitely. Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies. All we can say with certainty is that sometimes, when it is working, sex carves out new bodies for our bodies, and these bodies can be both better and more brutal than the ones we could invent alone.

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

Writing of the conservative fear of sexual deviance, the feminist cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin notes that we are bent on drawing a line between “sexual order and chaos.” The line in question “expresses the fear that if anything is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across.” Conservatives are right. If the gender binary melts away, if heterosexuality is no longer the default assumption, if parasites enter the building and dismantle the tenants, something unspeakable will skitter across—and that is the point of any erotic effusion worth pursuing.

by Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: SillDA

[ed. On the movies of David Cronenberg; body horror and eroticism.]

RunPee

RunPee: know when to run and pee during a movie.

Image: RunPee

[ed. You tell your folks you're a tech entrepreneur, developing exciting new apps that'll make you incredibly rich. Details: vague.]

Gene Kelly & Donald O'Connor

From Turner Classic Movies: 

"For many critics and fans, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (’52) is simply the finest musical ever made. And they may be right. Everyone was at the top of their game on this film from the choreographers to the co-directors to the actors to the songwriters. The film epitomizes everything that made the musical genre such an exciting form of entertainment during the heyday of the studio era. The film tells the story of Don Lockwood, a silent-screen swashbuckler who finds love while trying to adjust to the coming of sound. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN drew as much from past popular culture as it did from contemporary references and attitudes. Most of the songs were drawn from past musicals except for "Moses Supposes," which was an original composition written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green."

[ed. Yeah... it's a dumb song. All the more amazing that they could make something this great out of it. See also: Critically acclaimed art is also popular (Thing of Things).]

Don't Feed the Ducks

Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)

How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.

via:

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy

Mary Tyler Moore

There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?

He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.

Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.

Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.

When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.

Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.

Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)

People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?

So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.

She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.

When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.

Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Philippe Halsman

[ed. From the series The Lives They Lived. See also: Delia Graff Fara.]