Right now, it can feel like the walls are closing in. The coronavirus persists and keeps mutating. Incomes haven’t kept pace with soaring expenses. Rights and protections are being rolled back, with the promise of more to come. Another Black person killed by police. Another gun massacre. I could go on.
I wonder if the stories Hollywood has been telling us these past few years foster a defeatist sentiment, as well. There’s a preponderance of copaganda and superheroes saving the day and a category of narrative best described as wealth-aganda — stories focused on the interior lives of the rich, from the aspirational to the ridiculous to the unscrupulous.
Rarer, though, are stories of regular people working together to solve problems and balance the scales.
Captains of industry tend to get jumpy about ideas like collective action. These elite, ultra high net worth fiefdoms have no interest in being challenged. If you think that doesn’t apply to Hollywood executives, you’re not paying attention. Perhaps they see more upside in churning out TV and film that reinforces the idea that, amid all this anxiety, the best we can hope for is some escapism on screen where, if there’s any saving to be done, that’s best left to cops or superheroes.
Every once in a while, though, something slips through and audiences sit up and take notice.
Stylistically, Quinta Brunson’s ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary’' (returning for a second season in the fall) has little in common with FX’s restaurant drama “The Bear” (which premiered on Hulu last month). Both have proven to be extraordinarily popular. And they share a quality I don’t think we talk about enough: These are stories of people — diverse in age and race, some of whom don’t even like each other — coming together against adversity.
The throughline on each show is consistent: Our lives are a group project. Embracing that is the only way to get anything done. Instead of shutting down in the face of terrible-seeming odds, we have to rely on one another.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out.
But the effort is worth it. Otherwise, what are we doing here?
At a time when so much seems rigged, these kinds of shows remind us there’s another story that’s also true: That we, the so-called powerless, can band together to strategize and bring about change. We’re all we’ve got. Hope is within reach if we put in the effort.
This isn’t presented as naive optimism. Or packaged with an eat-your-vegetables seriousness. The insights and talents of Black women are essential to the end goal. And both “Abbott Elementary” and “The Bear” are funny. Taken together, these qualities are extremely entertaining — but also powerful messaging.
That’s because the media we consume isn’t just entertainment. It seeps into our subconscious and shapes the way we think about the world — and the way we think about what’s possible. In the face of seemingly insurmountable problems, what inspires and motivates people to brainstorm counter-strategies? What kind of support do people need to turn those ideas into action? What does that look like in practice? How do you build momentum and how does that become widespread?
Ed Yong, who writes for the Atlantic, published a story not long ago exploring some of these questions as they relate to the coronavirus. For now, “figure it out yourself” is the default sentiment we have begrudgingly accepted. The sociologist Elizabeth Wrigley-Field told him: “The pandemic has fostered beliefs that people are inherently selfish or permanently polarized. Neither is true” — but that kind of messaging can have an insidious effect. In response, she said, her goals are simple but clear: “Do something that helps, even when it’s very small. I believe that doing the small stuff now is setting us up for bigger things.”
I think a lot about the way different shows and films play into that mindset — or work to dampen it.
A series like HBO’s “Succession” asks us to laugh at the obscenely rich and their avaricious games. But it also quietly argues that this is all we can hope to do when the wealthy and coldblooded have a stranglehold on power. Might as well find humor in their personal failings, at least.
The new Apple TV+ comedy “Loot” stars Maya Rudolph as a recently divorced billionaire who belatedly takes interest in her charitable foundation. You might think it offers a different, more subversive take on the 1%. But centering a show around a billionaire who is well-intentioned but lovably out-of-touch is as cynical an enterprise as “Succession.” Even the most generous of the ultrarich, be they real (MacKenzie Scott) or fictional and played by enormously talented actors like Rudolph, can’t seem to embrace the idea that they can live full and valuable lives as mere millionaires. Or as the critic Simone Ritchie wrote in her review for the digital site Screen Speck: The show is “escapist fluff for us to consume as the gears of final-stage capitalism continue their screeching grind.”
There are exceptions and I find myself clinging to them like a life raft. A caper show like Freevee’s “Leverage: Redemption” — a reboot of the long-running TNT series “Leverage” — is about a group of grifters, hackers and cat burglars who use their talents to target the morally bankrupt and corrupt. The show starts with the same premise as “Succession” — you-know-who has all the power — but doesn’t take that as a fixed state. Instead, it proposes a better idea: If we put our heads together, we can outsmart these garbage people and take them out at the knees. The show is light viewing, the heists improbable. But I’ll never underestimate the power of a story rooted in karmic justice. It allows you, me, us, to open our imaginations to the possibility of righting a few wrongs, bit by bit.
In his piece for the Atlantic, Yong described this psychological process as the “unfettering of the moral imagination.” Sometimes it helps to see it — or something like it — in order to imagine it, and then turn that impulse into reality.
Meanwhile, we’re getting a steady diet of historical dramas that are marvels of costuming and sexual tension served up with impeccable manners. It’s notable that none are set in the U.S. between the 1890s and the 1920s, a time of intense social and political reform known as the Progressive Era. It was a period marked by a rise in antitrust laws, worker protections and sanitation reforms. Pretty sure romance and intrigue happened in those decades too. But perhaps, to borrow from Karl Marx, it’s not religion that’s the opiate of the masses, but historical fiction churned out by Hollywood — specifically, stories of the upper crust starring gorgeous actors moving through stylish settings. Escapism is not without value. Especially when it feels like the screws are tightening. There’s another side to it, though, that I sense from the executives who are greenlighting these projects: A quietly insistent message that escapism is all we should expect from TV and film.
But is it?
My colleague Robert McCoppin recently reported on a fascinating story. In 1859, the people of Ottawa, Illinois, defied the Fugitive Slave Law to save the life of a Black man named Jim Gray, who was one of three enslaved people who had escaped from Missouri. Local abolitionists hatched a plan that was led, in part, by a local Scottish immigrant and grain merchant named John Hossack: “several men restrained the U.S. marshal holding the prisoner, and Gray broke free. Hassock brought Gray out of the building, while the crowd blocked the marshal from pursuing.” Gray jumped a fence, got into a waiting carriage and was transported to freedom in Canada.
This is fundamentally the story of a community recognizing an unjust law — one that strips a person of their humanity — can and should be subverted if enough people work in concert. Imagine if Hollywood showed more interest in these kinds of stories, fictional or otherwise, especially in a contemporary setting.
The writer Aya de Leon, who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley, recently announced she is launching a publishing imprint specializing in climate justice fiction. It’s a genre, she noted, that has been mostly relegated to dystopias set in the future, after all efforts to mitigate the climate crisis have failed: “But what if we tell stories about how we can decide to build a movement that can fight and win in the here and now?”
Yes! What if? And why aren’t more people in Hollywood with decision-making power asking the same kinds of questions when seeking out new stories?
Freevee has another show coming next month that has piqued my interest. It’s a comedy called “Sprung” (from “My Name is Earl” and “Raising Hope” creator Greg Garcia) about a loose collection of less-than-brilliant ex-cons who organize a semi-ridiculous burglary ring targeting bad people. After each job, they surreptitiously distribute some of their bounty to other poor slobs in need, inadvertently becoming a ragtag group of latter day Robin Hoods along the way.
Freevee is the free, ad-supported streaming platform owned by Amazon. The irony is not lost on me that Amazon, of all companies, is producing even a limited number of shows that call out the kind of unbalanced systems that permit its oft-criticized business practices.
But it does feel conspicuous that with all the union organizing happening nationwide, we haven’t seen a studio or TV network bankroll a contemporary version of 1979′s “Norma Rae.” There’s value in seeing what this process looks like — what these conversations sound like — and to contemplate the kind of sacrifices you might have to make. To contemplate what it means when you’re not just an individual, but part of a larger effort to band together as a community and advocate for better conditions for everyone.
“Norma Rae” is unquestionably a drama. That’s certainly one approach. But not the only one. A few years after it came out, the fourth-highest grossing film of 1983 was the comedy “Trading Places,” starring Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis, who team up to outmaneuver a pair of cruel, WASPY, old guard commodities traders. You can critique the movie for a lot of things (it’s tin-eared in so many ways) but the basic storyline — that corruption can be outplayed — is deeply satisfying. Here’s a big studio comedy starring popular actors aimed at a general audience, and telling us not only that the vultures don’t always win, but that they can be bested by the very people they so callously worked to destroy.
It’s always more expedient for power brokers if we, the lumpy masses with our annoying workaday concerns, believe otherwise. Better to pour cold water on any ideas about the possibility for change and joining together to oppose injustice on a small scale or authoritarianism on a large scale.
Gloom and doom is pervasive at the moment. Some of that is coming from people with a vested interest in fostering cynicism and fatalism — who want us to believe it’s too daunting or pointless to imagine another way.
We can prove them wrong. Stories can show us a path forward.
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