Believe Me I’m Lying
People, I have nothing. Just nothing.
There’s absolutely nothing worth mentioning.
I can’t even get annoyed anymore, that’s the level of nothingness in mighty Hollywood.
It’s out of control of nothingness.
Everything has become so mundane; it’s not even vain and useless, it’s disturbing.
Having said that, people are killing me to write something about that thing called the Kardashians. This is where it gets numbing, and this is where we part ways – I don’t think I should write anything, because anything, even bad - is something. And it gives it legs.
This doesn’t deserve legs, if I can contribute to it.
Lots of people deserve to be written about, even if it’s a critique - it’s still an ode to something about somebody that is head-turning or inspiring, or makes us mad, influences us, or pisses us off, moves us, makes us think, or wonder.
No, I don’t dislike the Kardashians. There’s nothing to dislike about them. Nothing to like or dislike. There’s just nothing to nothing about them. They’re just pointless to me. I don’t evaluate people, I just endure them or not. Well, maybe just a little.
And this is not even about the Kardashians. It’s about EVERYTHING. It’s about Hollywood deciding that in these rough economic times, we don’t need quality anymore. It’s about deciding they don’t have to try hard to please us. It’s about Hollywood deciding they can serve us mindless reality shows and their dull stars, replicable TV-shows, and absurd movies.
It’s about self-assigned industry “experts” and their lack of ambition when it comes to entertainment today. The all-around apathy when it comes to quality. It’s like the ambition is a true casualty of the recession.
The funny thing is – they think that’s what WE want.
They’re trying to convince us what we, the public, need in these tough times – is an escape. Escape yes, but not into terrible entertainment! Yes, we do need comfort food, but we don’t need a made-up reality drama that’s not even slightly interesting when carefully scripted, we don’t need movies where it’s more challenging to design its poster than to make the actual movie, we don’t need to watch boring people doing absolutely nothing – what we need is challenging exciting and above all - stimulating material.
What’s even more defeating is what we all already know – recession or not, mighty Hollywood always has an agenda of trying (and highly succeeding) to dodge a real, interesting, smart, challenging material in favor of some replicable fluff, all camouflaged in – “well, what can we do when the public wants that” excuse.
They can try to justify it by asserting they are only responding to what the public wants, but the public very well knows that’s not the case. It’s all about doing as less as possible, for as much cash as possible.
But why single out the Kardashians when there’s so much that’s wrong with entertainment today? How else would you explain ‘Love Happens’, a millionth Jennifer Aniston movie where she plays a chick unhappy in love who meets the guy that she can’t really commit to, cuz she’s been hurt millions of times before but then her quirky best friend convinces her for 110 minutes that he’s the one and they hook up, bone, and life is great?
How many times will we watch that story?
The bar is so low, they can’t even make an effort to invent an interesting title, but insult us with the banality of Love Happens? The silver lining is, with mindless movies, you don’t have to suffer much. You endure a bit of advertising, and you don’t really need to see the movie when it comes out. Done. Like it never existed. “Love…..What”?
But with the Kardashians, how do you escape it? How do you escape their aggressive PR machinery that is way too loud and laughably deceptive? How do you escape this uninteresting group of people who are so determined to let the public know about every corner of their dull personalities?
Again, why single them out when there are so many? Because with most, we call them what they actually are.
The economic collapse did make a difference. But all those suits making all this happen miscalculated one thing. Trying to serve us pointless material as comfort food, thinking we need to watch some rich idiots bouncing from wall to wall, in order to forget about our problems, give me a break. In these dreary times, we need quite the opposite. We don’t need pointless, we need smart, engaging, inspiring material.
Popular culture has a responsibility, now, more than ever - to stimulate us. We don’t need anesthesia, we need a challenge. Don’t underestimate us by overestimating yourselves. When times are tough, when we turn the TV on or enter the Movie Theater, we leave our problems at the door, not our brains.
