For several years I have been analyzing the decline and fall of Hollywood’s creative powers and I’ve been focusing a lot on spiritual warfare because I think it’s usually overlooked. Most people use a secular material lens to view the world and cook up nonsense phrases like “cultural Marxism” to describe what is obviously just plain evil.
But I’m also thinking there is another factor that I have failed to address: stupidity.
Now, like madness, this is usually something of a cop out, a catchall solution that doesn’t really explain anything. If analysis fails, just call them nuts and move on.
However, when watching interviews with various showrunners and writers, it becomes clear that these people are not devious demonic servants but instead connected people with room temperature IQs. Yes, they’re ignorant, but it’s an earned ignorance – they don’t know because they’re too stupid to understand.
This thing raises an important question: how did Hollywood get so stupid so fast?
The answer is that it wasn’t really that fast. There has been a gradual decline over many decades. Even into the Aughts, Hollywood was still capable of making good films, though the ratio of slop to excellence was rising.
The classic cause I have given for this was the increasingly insulated environment from which Hollywood’s talent was recruited. Film schools only emerged in the 1960s, and the first wave of graduates were superb. People like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg and John Milius learned their craft at the feet of masters, while derivative, their work closely followed the techniques of Hollywood’s greatest talents.
However, higher education is not what it once was. Long gone are the days of The Paper Chase where a professor tells incoming freshmen: “Look to your left. Now look to your right. One of you will not be here next year.”
The new mantra is that everyone graduates, and to facilitate that the standards have been watered down to a point where many graduates show zero increase in knowledge upon graduation.
Hollywood has also become obsessed with politics, and overtly endorses demonic beliefs, which further limits the talent pool. Nepotism plays a further role.
But what if it is also true that smart people have moved on to other ways of achieving wealth?
If you think about it, movies and later television were very much like the tech sector in the 1980s and 1990s. It was in fact new technology, and it evolved rapidly from silent film to color television in the space of 40 years. That required a radical change in terms of technique and craft. Silent film sets could be noise, the director could shout at the actors while film was rolling, and of course all of the gestures and movements had to be very exaggerated. Monochrome film also translates images differently than color. Once films had color and sound, the next step was to put them on a small screen, and at first there was a regression to black and white, but when color became the default, there was still the aspect ratio to consider.
People who were able to dig into these evolving technologies could make a fortune, and many did. In terms of story, California was a magnet for ambitious writers and many famous novelists (such as Graham Greene) also tried their hands at writing scripts. These weren’t snot-nosed college kids, but people who has seen the world and done things.
All of which is to say that if you were into rapidly development technology OR storytelling, Hollywood was the place to be.
However, that began to change as the studio system collapsed and other industries emerged. It was not possible in 1980 to start up a film studio and become a movie mogul as happened as late as the 1930s, nor could one enter television on the ground floor in the 40s and 50s. Computers were the emerging thing, and a decade later, the internet was the next big thing.
Console gaming was also a place for the ambitious to make a splash, and it continued to evolve to what we might call a golden age of its own. One of the most telling contrasts was the quality of storytelling in Knights of the Old Republic versus the slop Star Wars had become in the movie theater.
If we use this lens, it becomes clear that the reason so many people working in Hollywood are stupid is because it is stupid to work there. The hours are long, the prospect of a financial or creative breakthrough is minimal, and the place is overrun with sex-obsessed perverts.
We may have reached a point, however, where this is changing because filmmaking has been democratized again. Indie movies have been tearing up the box office, and so it’s possible for the brainy and ambitious – both creatives and financial investors – to make an overnight fortune with a hit. Let’s hope so.
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