It often feels as though Washington has run out of ideas: Policy debates break little new ground — often they aren’t even about policy at all. To understand the creative malaise that plagues our nation’s politics, and the incentives that threaten to prolong it, consider for a moment the latest Star Wars film.
There are hardly any new ideas in The Last Jedi. Although it is not quite as slavish as its predecessor, The Force Awakens, in its devotion to the original 1970s trilogy, it consists largely of recognisable elements, remixed and recycled. There are familiar heroes and villains, rousing battles on land and in space, and of course, some cute alien animals, called Porgs, which, after you leave the theater, are conveniently available to purchase in whatever size plushy you prefer.
The movie is well made and occasionally stirring and even satisfying. But it is never more than cinematic comfort food, and like all comfort food, its appeal rests primarily on a combination of palatability and nostalgia.
Disney has made the simplest of blockbuster bets. If you like Star Wars, you’ll like: A stand-alone film about a young Han Solo is due next summer, and another sequel in 2019. Disney has lined up the writer-director Rian Johnson to concoct a new trilogy (though probably not too new) ensuring that the story — or at least the brand — lives on.
Hollywood no longer tells straightforward stories. Instead it creates universes — sprawling, interlinked franchises that serve as advertisements for themselves while rewarding die-hard viewers who return again and again.
Political pros might call it a get-out-the-base strategy. In movie-geek terms, it’s fan service. In either case, the intent is to stimulate well-known pleasure centers while never straying too far from the formulas that have worked, in many cases, for decades. And in both politics and entertainment, the benefits and perils of this model are, if not precisely the same, strikingly similar.
There are clear financial incentives for this approach: Major studios are making fewer films than in previous decades, and the films they are making cost more to produce and market. November’s Justice League is reported to have cost about $400 million (Dh1.47 billion).
Political campaigns, similarly, have become astronomically expensive. Last year’s presidential election cost, including primaries; a special election for a single House seat in Georgia this year cost more than $50 million.
With costs so high, both Hollywood and Washington have chosen to respond by focusing on products that already have a built-in audience. In the movie business, that means a glut of reboots and adaptations, sequels and spinoffs, and eventually, shared universes built on well-known properties. That’s also how every potentially lucrative pop culture brand — from Transformers to The Fast and the Furious to 1980s toy lines you’ve never heard of — ends up in line for the expanded-universe treatment. Yes, there are other types of films in theaters, especially around awards season, but these are the films that command the biggest resources, the foundations on which major studios are now built.
In politics, that means candidates who already command significant personal and political resources — individuals with high name recognition and, in many cases, significant personal wealth or political networks. Which is one reason voters last year ended up with a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, two candidates who were already firmly established in the public consciousness.
The thinking driving these decisions is that with so much on the line, anything untested is too much of a risk. But the strategy poses risks of its own, among them that there aren’t enough properties that can support a multi-movie investment: Even among the most devoted 1980s-toy nostalgics, is anyone really hankering for, say, plus years’ worth of crossovers and spinoffs?
Recent attempts to develop universes with more well-known properties have faltered, too: This summer’s Tom Cruise action-adventure, The Mummy, was intended to start a star-studded classic movie monsters Dark Universe with Mr Cruise at its centre, but it turned out to be one of the year’s bigger disappointments.
You see this known-quantities tendency in politics, too, with not-quite-ready-for-prime-time candidates like Scott Walker and should-be-sure-thing candidates like Jeb Bush, whose campaigns were essentially franchise extensions that flopped.
Even the most successful of the cinematic universes — the Star Wars and Marvel Comics movies — sometimes suffer from timidity and creative stagnation.
Just as the Disney-era Star Wars sequels have borrowed heavily from their beloved 1970s and 1980s predecessors, major policy initiatives on both sides of the aisle are often just a rehash of old ideas that cater to the base, slightly updated for the times.
Among Democrats, one of the hottest new domestic policy ideas, single payer, has been part of the party lexicon for decades. (Senator Ted Kennedy in 1971.) The Republican tax bill now making its way through Congress is, for better and for worse, a deeply conventional piece of legislation that cuts tax rates for individuals and corporations in a way that is sure to cause the deficit to skyrocket and debt to pile up.
It’s true, in a way, that United States President Donald Trump, a professed populist outsider, offered a break from the old Republican story line. In another way, he was just a reboot: The tax bill he is championing is being explicitly pitched as a long-in-the-works sequel to the tax reform passed in the 1980s under former US president Ronald Reagan.
Just as reboots offer the perception of certainty to studio executives staking their jobs on $400 million movie bets, this approach offers safety to our anxious political class: If you like Star Wars, you’ll like more Star Wars. If you like tax cuts, you’ll like more tax cuts.
But in the quest for predictability, both politics and entertainment have adopted an approach that inherently rewards repetition rather than innovation. It’s a strategy that creates a sense that the stories aren’t really designed to be stories, at least not the kind with a beginning, a middle and an end. Both politics and entertainment are, in different ways, acts of storytelling. And like Hollywood studios, our political class has largely forgotten how to tell compelling, original stories, and tell them well.
Too often, today’s sequels and spinoffs come across like feature-length teasers and product advertisements rather than ends unto themselves. They’re all middle. They exist to hype what’s next and sell branded plush toys, rather than dwell in the cinematic moment and provide narrative closure.
Running for national political office, meanwhile, has become a vehicle for ambitions that have little or nothing to do with legislation or governance: selling books, or boosting your family’s business empire, or perhaps becoming president. (I’d rather have stuffed Porgs.) Elections are run as never-ending culture-war campaigns, focused as much on teasing tomorrow’s social and political battles as on definitively solving today’s problems.
There are differences, of course: Hollywood is more directly attuned to the demands of the market, while Washington commands far more direct power over the lives of Americans.
But the long-term danger for both is essentially the same: The end will come only when moviegoers get bored and studios — or political parties — having spent too long strip-mining their popular pasts, have no ideas left to recycle.
In Washington, as in Hollywood, there is always the looming, long-term risk not only of creative sclerosis but also of popular discontent, and the possibility that voters — or viewers — will grow disappointed and disinterested, and finally say, we’ve seen this movie too many times before. We need new stories, new policies and new ideas, but right now, neither Hollywood nor Washington appears willing to deliver.
— New York Times News Service
Peter Suderman is the features editor at Reason magazine.
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