Even if I hadn’t quit my job this year, I think this summer’s strike actions by the Writer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actor’s Guilt / AFTRA would feel like a central idea in … well, everything. My relationship to my own career, both where I’ve been and where I now want it to go; my relationship to my own (and everyone else’s) post-pandemic emotional recovery, too; and larger thoughts I’ve had for the better part of a decade about what the streaming boom actually was (and, I guess more importantly, was not), and where moviegoing in general was headed, and how those thoughts connected to what was (briefly) a monumental professional accomplishment, re: the digital delivery of films.
But that’s all mostly the me-related stuff. The further out you follow these threads, the more they seem to pull everything toward the centre; “everything” being our frying 21st Century world, the increasingly destructive death-spasms of late capitalism, and kinda sorta, what it means to be alive as a human being right now, vis à vis consuming media, consuming social media, working for a living, making art or whatever other personal expression any of us has, and trying to imagine what the next thirty years will actually be like for oneself, one’s families, one’s children, one’s friends’ children. Throw in my own mid-life crisis, and wow, what a brew of inflection points to arrive (seemingly) all at once, if “all at once” can be reasonably applied to a powderkeg of pressures that have been building since (at least) the 2008 American financial crisis.
Maybe this moment feels the way it does because the seam, the crack at the heart of the world, has finally become too visible to reasonably ignore; the planet is burning (and we caused it); the bosses are killing us (and we’re paying them millions — or even billions — for the privilege); and most importantly, the human animal might genuinely just be too stupid and self-absorbed to withstand it all. I’m a big fan of Great Filter theory — recent reports of aliens / non-human biologics on Earth notwithstanding — and this might be our moment. Humanity might hit the great filter while we’re all here to see it. Judgment Day, not in a biblical sense, but in a far more humdrum, Darwinian one.
Where does one go with all that?
I. The Burning, Crashing Plane
So yeah: I quit my job. Jumped out of the plane without a parachute. The reason for separation listed on my ROE is “mental health.”
When I quit my job, the first thing — actually, the only thing — I wanted to do to start to feel better was to go to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, at Disneyland in California, with my brother. Here are those conditions again, expanded in reverse order: my brother, because he and I are closer on Star Wars than we are on anything and he’s the only person in the world I wanted to have that experience with; California, because he lives in Japan now and while the west coast isn’t quite “half way” between us, it’s better than Florida for that (and for other reasons, re: fucking Florida); Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, because even though the Star Wars environments at the Disney parks opened in 2019, we’d delayed for various reasons, endured a pandemic, and somehow ended up in 2023 still having not done it. Newly unemployed and unencumbered, the only thing on my priority list was disappearing myself into that galaxy far, far away.
My relationship with Disney is a bit too complex / embarrassingly hypocritical to fully interrogate here — that conglomerate is both the owner and purveyor of most of my favourite things in popular culture, and a buncha sinister corporate fucks — but for the purposes of this post, I’ll say that the Galaxy’s Edge trip delivered (indeed, overdelivered) on what I needed from it, and a few other things besides. Per my Record of Employment, I quit my job for mental health reasons, following a series of escalating anxiety attacks throughout the spring, which had become unmanageable. I also quit my job because I was over it, which was either the chicken or the egg of the anxiety condition, and who cares which. I had not one, but two, of those proverbial “moments of clarity” in March and April, when all of the deceptions, both self- and other-, peeled away and I saw the whole thing for what it really was. And I could not, quite literally, do it any more. I reached a stoplight, bright green, and found myself unable to cross. (Again: literally. This physically happened to me on my way to work one day.)
Were there tools that I could have deployed in the moment to better mitigate my mental health crises and retain my full-time employment? Absolutely, and I’m grateful to live in a place, and at a level of privilege, where those tools were (and remain) available to me. I could have band-aided and kept going, as many have no choice but to do. But there was always a bigger picture, a big “but” in front of all this, and it was the “but” that was going unaddressed. I didn’t address the “but” at Galaxy’s Edge — the trip to Disney was just the payoff on a feat of investment in my personal health that began with quitting my job — but I did address it, in detail, over the course of my recovery this spring.
The “but” is a fairly ordinary variant of the general self-correction that, I think, we all went throught at some point in 2020 or 2021, as the world closed down and the patterns by which we casually lived our daily lives came up for brief disruption. Most of the people I know or read or talk to had some version of the “wait, why am I doing this?” moment as applied to some or all of the structures of their daily lives, at some point in the time period when some of those structures were taken away. (A trivial example: I used to spend a hundred dollars a month at Starbucks. Once the pandemic started, I missed a lot of things from pre-pan life, but I had to be reminded that I used to spend that much time and money at Starbucks. I didn’t miss it at all. What was I paying the $100/month for? It wasn’t the coffee.)
Now, because of the nature of my job — effectively, running the digital presence for a large annual arts event — I didn’t spend the pandemic working less. I spent the pandemic working more. Shit, we turned an entire in-person film festival into an online event! That’s pretty cool! It was absorbing work and I was, for the most part, glad to do it; but it did mean that for all the degree to which I got to stretch my mental legs in some areas (I probably had a more enriched and rewarding experience with Twitter and Twitter-adjacent writers in the pandemic evenings than I ever had before, just before Elon came in and Musked that web site clean off the surface of the Earth), I was otherwise wholly occupied with my day job in a way that, probably, many people in cognitive-load jobs are: the thing where it becomes central to how you structure your day (and thereby, your entire life), and how you think about the structure of your life (and thereby, your entire self), because it’s the central preoccupation of your mind. Now, I wasn’t that bad, really. I could get away from it a bit. But my point is merely that my job, during the pandemic, left very little time to fully acknowledge and process the other thing, which was the sheer number that the pandemic itself (and all of its descendent effects) did on me. I’d wake up and my brain would be problem-solving something to do with digital streaming platforms or go-to-market workflows, because in its resting state, it considered those things the priority. Absorbing, analyzing, articulating and processing the other stuff just… didn’t happen. Stewed around in the subconscious, or came out in tweets, or in hearts-to-hearts with friends, or not at all.
All of which means that, three years later, I had the big “wait, why am I doing this?” moment, except I had it for my whole life.
Yeah, it was a bit galling, earlier this year, to realize that I’m so freaking ordinary that I couldn’t even escape having an old-fashioned mid-life crisis. Mine didn’t involve sportscars or cheating on spouses but it did, I think, come from the similar collapse of self-definition that (presumably) most dudes go through in their forties, where the build-up is over, the downslope is now underfoot, and we’re seeing the cognitive gap between what we thought we were doing and what we’ve actually done. At least, that’s what happened to me, and not for any lack (generally speaking) of my forties being a supreme period of self-awareness and self-care. I was, for the most part, on top of this shit. I just wasn’t on top of it enough, or, not on top of it on a wide enough scale that got out of the day-to-day, year-by-year of it, and accepted the totality of who I am, where I live, and what being alive now, specifically, is like.
And there are a lot of external, late-capitalism pressures on this. Maybe they’re endemic to this era, or maybe they’re transmuted forces that have existed throughout history. Dunno, don’t care. (I’m reading a book about Henry VIII’s time and I’m like, boy, no matter how we’ve set up our society, it’s always been visibly, obviously insane.) Either way, the pandemic felt like it compelled the people of the world to pull the emergency alarm on a series of civilization-wide forces — too many name, but let’s at least focus in on wealth disparity, racial violence, and the collapse of the biosphere — thereby creating just enough of a space to see those forces from outside their day-to-day, year-by-year perspective. For workplaces specifically, an entire generation of people went through the process of realizing that they wanted more out of their lives than just to be defined by their jobs… which, in a world entirely defined and manipulated by wealth access, is a pretty tricky inflection point.
The big-ticket shenanigans, the things we’re told to value, sort of showed their bare ass in the pandemic era. They continue to do so in the post-pan, “we really want everyone to come back to the office!” era of upper-class dimwits and CEOs trying to roll back the playbook to the time before any of us were granted that space to really look at how dumb the playbook was. You can’t un-ring that bell (or un-fuck that dog), and the lessons are lasting. In the simplest terms, it seems, people just want to make stuff, earn enough money to support a reasonable quality of life, and enjoy being alive. I’m people. Why not me?
II. The Strike
The day after I went to Disneyland, I went to the Disney head office in Burbank, and walked the picket line with the actors and the writers. The actors had been on strike by that point for about a week; the writers (as of this posting) have been at it for a hundred days. The real party was over at Warner Brothers, I later discovered — I drove by there on my way out, and it was like a street festival had had a baby with an Eistenstein film — but at Disney I quietly trudged the line, past wrought-iron gates with little mouse-head spikes on top of them, and thought about how much money I’d personally pumped into the Mouse House the day before (my credit card company called me twice), let alone life-long. Full disclosure: I own a bit of stock there, too; although Bob Iger’s recent comments and strategies have shown a leadership so wildly out of step with where the company actually is that I’m pretty eager to sell.
Out of step how? Leave aside Iger’s comments on the strike actions themselves — made by the CEO from billionaire summer camp, with all the self-awareness that God granted a starfish — because ultimately, the finances at stake in both the writers’ and actors’ strikes are a rounding error in the financial model of the entertainment industry. No, the real question mark is simply, how do the major studios resolve the fundamental void collapse in their business models, now that they’ve all pivoted towards streaming in an ill-thought-out attempt to beat Netflix at a game that even Netflix wasn’t going to win?
Back in 2013 (!), on one or more episodes of Mamo — the podcast I used to co-host about the movie industry and popular culture, no longer online — we reported on the announcement, from Netflix, that they were amping up their original programming budget from $6 billion a year to $18 billion, in the wake of the success of House of Cards (a series whose title proved all too prophetic for the industrial disruption it helped author). It wasn’t hard, at that point, to work out that Netflix would be running at a loss against subscriber revenue in their original content investment; it was harder, though, to work out how they’d get back into the black or what the endgame would be. The original programming budget was only going to continue to swing upwards as the major studios began withdrawing their licensed content from the rival streaming platform and began trying to build their own; there are only so many Netflix households or potential Netflix households on the planet. It seemed dumb, and still does. I’m far from an expert on the macro or microeconomics of it all, but, like most tech companies, Netflix was getting away with valuation economies instead of straight P&L, which worked out great until the Great Streaming Correction of 2022, which was arguably a couple of years late (thanks, again, to the pandemic). At which point, as has been reported elsewhere, Wall Street decided that revenue, not growth, was probably a better horse to bet on, streaming-wise. And the whole industry went to shit.
It would have killed Netflix, if every other company hadn’t already followed the disruptor into the abyss; now, they’re all trying to pull themselves out of the quicksand simultaneously without touching one another, and parity has been achieved in the death-spiral. As an industry spectator, it rules; as a consumer, juggling streaming platforms month-by-month to avoid paying a fortune for TV, less so; and as a creator, it sucks. It sucks for me, with whatever delusions I had three years ago of taking my streaming-ready television series pitch to one of the majors; and it sucks way more for actual professionals in the industry, because they’re being horse-whipped with claims of insolvency by billionaire CEOs whose companies are money-printing machines, so long as you hang on to tried-and-true distribution models like theatrical, linear, and licensing.
(Aside: a fantastic explainer on the strike, including an absolutely gobsmacking reveal about the AMPTP that most people probably don’t know, is to be found on the A More Civilized Age podcast.)
The strike will be resolved at some point between now and the end of the year; but the real question is, can these studio chiefs restrategize themselves back from the edge and keep the American entertainment industry alive. From here, I bet we’re going to see one or two of the majors give up their streaming platforms entirely and license their content to one of the others (my money’s on Paramount and NBC/Universal, there); we’re going to see Disney abandon linear distribution (for everything except sports) and become Netflix’s only true non-linear competitor, but at great cost to both titans; we’re going to see what happens with Max / Warner Brothers in general, because their strategic play isn’t going to work and Zaslav has pushed all his chips into the middle of the wrong table. We’re also going to have to wait and see on the flankers — Apple and Amazon — because they ain’t in this business in the same way, and their model is therefore so different from the studios’ that the same pressures aren’t generally at play.
And in the meantime, we’re going to see strike action after strike action, because these dunderheads were dumb enough to light a match under celebrity culture in a country that still generally does not understand celebrity culture, other than to know that they need it / covet it / can’t get enough of it. Regardless of how much longer WGA and SAG are on the picket lines, the downstream impacts will continue, both within the industry and outside it. The VFX artists will start to go, and over time, more and more non-entertainment business models will start to shudder under the same weight of realization that is hobbling Hollywood right now. This is all very visible, thanks to who it is happening to, and what industry it is hitting. And see above re: people just want to make stuff, earn enough to support a reasonable quality of life, and enjoy being alive. In North America in 2023, it is becoming less and less possible to ignore how hard the super-rich are working at making that all but impossible, and they’re not just doing it in Hollywood. They’re doing it everywhere.
When the WGA strike started, I leaned forward in a way that I almost never have with respect to anything going on in the American film industry; and the American film industry is my life, for all intents and purposes. I grew up on it. I thought — still think — my purpose on earth was/is to join it, at some point. I consume it voraciously. I’ve podcasted about it for fifteen years. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about it. I published a book about it. I decorate my house with it. And in spite of all this — in spite of literally working within a corner of that industry, albeit on the Canadian side, for the past seven years — very little about the streaming disruption has engaged me in quite the same way as watching these forthright guilds come forward and begin to push back against the degree to which the business model they work within has fallen apart; and how that doesn’t just make for bad business or even bad work conditions (although it does both); it also, sorta maybe kinda, makes the world a shittier, less-interesting place to live in. Because at the end of the day, all of these studios are making “product” or “content” or whatever else you want to call it and selling it to us for profit; but all these people, in the guilds and supporting the productions that these guilds are part of, are making art.
It may not be great art, it may not be your idea of art, but I’ve come around to a very broad understanding of expression, creation, and the place of the human desire to make stuff in the overall ecosystem of what makes it possible for us to be us. And all of it, from Andor to Vanderpump Rules, is an idea in the vast, unknowable mind of the collective human unconscious.
III. There Is No Next
So anyways, I was in Los Angeles. And I kind of liked it there. No real surprise — going to L.A. as a Spielberg-besotted teenager with my family in ’93 was one of the eight best times of my life. But given how completely I’d given up on America in the past eight years — literally given myself a policy to never travel there again — I figured I’d hold my nose through this visit as a once-in-a-lifetime personal necessity, and that would be that, America-wise.
There’s an honesty about L.A., though, which is a strange thing to a say about a place layered in so much mythology and shellacked with self-deception. The whole spectrum of the American experience is fully visible in L.A.; there are pieces of wrecked cars littering the streets, bleaching in the sun like the bones of La Brea’s dinosaurs, which no one has come to collect because why would they, up the road from tent villages, which are down the road from mansions, and the signage everywhere — everywhere — reinforces the fundamental Consumerist maxim that literally anything — anything — troubling you can be solved for, with the liberal application of money. Being in Los Angeles costs buckets of it; I don’t think I spent less than forty dollars doing anything, down to and including having a cup of coffee and a scone. Up in the hills — I was stationed near Griffith Park — it’s so fucking dry that any reasonable person would find the fire-hazard signs wildly unnecessary and would, rather, fear taking their phone out of their pocket, lest it melt and cause an explosion. Every midcentury restaurant feels as new and perfect and fresh as if it opened an hour ago, while every establishment from the ’90s or the ’00s feels like background from a zombie apocalypse movie. An Uber downtown costs a hundred dollars, but that’s ok, because you’re gonna expense it to your office; Uber BLADE hasn’t made it to that coast yet, but when it does, the omnipresent dragonfly buzz of the helicopters hovering over every square inch of the city will, at least, make a different kind of sense. It’s the maximalist supermetropolis, everything everywhere — yes — all at once. If you can’t find it there, it probably fucking sucks.
Back home, rested and recovered across May and June and finally at a place where I didn’t need every second of every day to feel “productive” (whatever the fuck that means), I started following my whims more and more, listening to “should” thinking less and less, and ambled my way through the necessities of the day in the same manner in which I’m currently writing my novella: instinctively, based on less of what you’d call a “plan” than a loose schematic of poetry words, which only mean something because they feel like something, and not because they are something. I diagrammed out some big-picture thinking about what living a good life actually looks like, for me. I let go of a lot of stuff that I’ve been carrying in the “just in case” file in the back of my head. My intentions and preoccupations are slimming down; the divestiture era has begun. The question of what I’m taking into the ground with me has, at least in principle, been answered.
Not working, these last three months? Honestly, it feels like getting away with a crime. I recommend it for everyone, even though pretty much everyone knows it’s nuts. It solved the problem, and for that, I am so grateful. This grace period won’t last much longer; I’ve been thinking about what earning money looks like in the months to come, emphasis on the phrasing, because that’s what it is: earning money. I have a big imagination about what that money is going to support, and that’s where the focus in my mind actually stays, when it bothers to stay on anything more concrete than the trajectories of the hawks circling above my building as I read in the afternoon for an hour. I try to sit outside my expectations, and just dream bigger, and believe more fully. I’m so fascinated. It’s good. Life is good.