In 1964, Joan Didion published an essay named “I can’t get that monster out of my mind” in The American Scholar. She later published it under the same title in her book Slouching Towards Bethelem. I was somewhat confused when I saw this essay being under the book’s section titled “Personals”. The essay is mostly written in the third person, with some occasional plural first person. I knew Didion wrote the script for Play as it Lays, and that she was amidst Hollywood’s foliage, but I have always considered her, first and foremost, an essayist.
When Didion died back in 2021, I read an article in The New York Times that detailed her screenwriting career. Apparently, like many essayists/journalists she hoped that screenwriting could “afford her the freedom to write serious art, not waste her time on endless unpaid draft revisions”.
In her essay, Didion mostly talks about how Hollywood squeezes the originality out of writers, she refers to it as “Hollywood The Destroyer”. Among the things producers pitched to her and John included a disco-era remake of “Rebel Without a Cause”, and a reworking of Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night”. Surely most people would think reboots are a casualty unique to the present and that Hollywood’s exhaustion of ideas is a modern-day predicament. But I wasn’t surprised, I remembered Adorno and Horkheimer’s denunciation of Hollywood as “the culture industry”, as early as the 1950s. They argued that the goal of Hollywood is to entertain the masses 24/7 so as to not give them time to think about irrelevant things (like the economy). The entertainment provided cannot be too stimulating though, it has to have the perfect proportions of hipness and dullness. It MUST NOT provoke the audience to question any of the rules of the unnamed game all industries benefit from.
In my mind, however, Hollywood writers were not victims of the game. Surely, I thought, there must be some exceptions, but overall, I thought they were all very rich people living fanciful lives. Not that I necessarily condemned that, I didn't think the majority of them were billionaires— if you would ask me how I pictured them, I would have answered that they must have all been living the type of life Eve Babitz describes in her books: parties, palm trees, and jacarandas. To say I didn’t envy that would be a complete lie.
The first time I was in Los Angeles, I realized it was less glamorous than they said. When I passed near the center, I saw dozens of unhoused people, and quite a few injecting themselves what I suppose was heroin. Later that day, I went to Hollywood, I drank several canned Coca-Colas and was completely underwhelmed by what seemed to me a plastic city. The palm trees looked odd. I never thought about whether they were native to LA or not, but in that moment the answer seemed obvious. The palm trees looked so huge in comparison to the much more eye-pleasing trees standing behind them. Thinking about it now, it appears that the trees in Hollywood are emblematic of Hollywood’s problem with disparity.
Two weeks ago, the annual Met Gala took place. With the announcement of The Writers Strike, I was vexed (more than usual) at the rich and famous ostentatious display of wealth. I was rather surprised by a few actors like Amanda Seyfried’s comments in favor of the strike. Seeing more famous actors like Jennifer Coolidge and Pete Davidson in favor made me question if I understood how Hollywood worked. Surely, most actors are vapid and out-of-touch people, but they aren’t really the owners of the industry, are they? The New Yorker's article “Why are TV Writers so Miserable”, mentioned that ONE of the problems is indeed the fact that actors demand too much money, but even with the money actors gain, the studios are left with millions that they could be giving their writers.
Recently, I have been telling my friends that I found something rather grim and distasteful in the rise of eat-the-rich media in Hollywood (think The Menu, Knives Out, The White Lotus). I could only think of Mark Fisher’s Capitalism Realism and how anti-capitalism is treated as a commodity, one that deceives us into believing that just because we are consuming “revolutionary” media, we are revolutionary ourselves. I felt like these people were making fun of us, and while this must be true for the executives who allow and promote these movies and shows, I don’t think this assessment is a fair characterization of many of the writers. The Bear (2022), a show about the bloodiness of restaurant life, fits in the eat-the-rich-esque media. The show's commentary on late-stage capitalism can only be a reflection of what the writers must have experienced in the industry. Alex O’Keeffe, one of the writers of the show, was so broke after the show came out, that had to go to the WGA awards with a “negative bank account and was dressed in a bowtie purchased with credit”.
I have heard some buzz about the appalling working conditions of screenwriters for a while now, but I didn’t know how bad it really was. Apparently, lots of writers have to work at service jobs to be able to pay their rent. Surely, it wasn’t THIS bad when Joan Didion was writing, at least not for a great majority of screenwriters (not to say that Didion wasn’t rightfully complaining about being screwed over, my point here is that somehow things have gotten worse). One of the main reasons the strike is taking place is over residual checks. Writer Dani Tolli explains that “residuals are payments that are made quarterly by the companies to the writers for the content that they create”. That money was usually generated through ad sales so that whenever an episode was re-aired, the writer would get some revenue. But the very economic pillars upon which the industry has been built no longer hold any relevancy. With streaming, there is no such thing as reairing. Dani Tolli exemplifies that whereas he would have made 20,000 dollars of residuals in the past, he now receives around $23. This isn’t because streaming companies are making less money than traditional cable networks ( of course, Netflix made revenue of 31.61 billion dollars just last year).
Another problem for striking writers is the rise of “mini-rooms”. Labor is increasingly being cut and profits maximized. Writers’ rooms are significantly smaller than they were before and are demanded to do more than double the work that they used to do. Networks are demanding writers to produce 3 or 4 entire seasons of different television shows before they even decide if they are going to air or not, and of course, they are not compensating them fairly for the amount of labor they are producing. I have no doubt that great shows, which now we are never going to get to see, were produced in those rooms, but we know that streaming companies aren’t necessarily interested in producing content of quality as much as they are interested in stuff that sells. This is why they aren't hesitant to use AI (okay, as a self-described posthumanist, I should make an essay about my opinions on AI, but for now, I will say what I have always said: I think that the problem lies in the fact that we live in a capitalist world that uses that technology to further exploitation, rather than the problem being that we supposedly live in a matrix-esque world where technology is the autocrat and not capital). I am certain, however, that the quality of those scripts is going to be nowhere near as good as what writers of shows like Breaking Bad have been able to produce.
I believe it so ridiculously absurd that companies would rather kill the soul of art by producing AI-generated content, instead of paying their writers a livable wage. I find it so painful to think that this is what art has become in this world. I often hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s voice saying “the profit-motive is often in conflict with the aims of art”. Not so long ago, I wrote an article detailing the incompatibility of art with capitalism. I often blast Mitski's Working for The Knife in my room after a long day of soulless mechanical work. I think of that line E. Alexa Jung wrote about Mitski “writing demands vulnerability, but capitalism dehumanizes her”. I think of that as I drink Coke to power through the weakness I have in my body after a long day of work. I must try to find some time to write. Yet mostly, after consuming mindless content and scrolling for hours, all I can do is stare at a blank wall and think about how maybe I should take SSRIs.
Part of me wishes I could still believe in the shiny meritocracy I used to believe in when I graduated high school. I had a photo of New York taken from the movie Taxi Driver in my room. New York sounded less shallow than L.A., it was the place Patti Smith talked about, the place I associated most great writers with1. New York was also, the emblem of The American Dream. Not that I have ever been so crazy about the U.S. per se, I had anti-imperialist feelings since I was 15 or 16, but I was brainwashed by capitalism and believed that if I put in the hard work I could end up working in The New Yorker, and voila all’s well that ends well. A few years later, I saw Bernie Sanders sharing a clip that detailed why The New Yorker writers were unionizing, and I was shocked to find that they received shit salaries. “But The New Yorker is owned by Condé Nast, a.k.a. owner of Vogue, a.k.a. one of the richest media conglomerates of the world, why the hell aren’t they paying their writers enough?” I thought. Growing up has meant waking up every other day to realize that an industry you thought you could have a decent chance at finding fulfillment in is also, utter crap.
I am now more often found in spaces of idleness where I spend all afternoon watching multiple Sofia Coppola films and occasionally some Godard with the purpose of attempting to improve my French. Sometimes I do wonder if I could ever write a screenplay, but those dreams are usually fleeting. It would be a lie to say that I have gotten rid of my thirst for success. Sometimes I still yearn for so much more, but if you would ask me to choose between all of my wishes, I would answer that there is nothing that I want more than for workers’ rights to happen, but maybe that’s the most unrealistic one of them all.
to say that I don’t love New York’s artistic history anymore would be a lie, but in complete transparency, now whenever I think about NYC, I think of the NYPD and racism.