A Movie Studio Is Not Your Personality
‘Artificial,’ Luca Guadagnino’s controversial OpenAI drama, was dumped by Amazon and scooped up by Neon when all others passed. Should we hail the distributing hero?
Welcome back to Projections, the only generative platform for relentlessly recommending plastic and improving at that task every single second, no data center required.
Programming reminder: I’ll be doing a subscriber-only chat tomorrow, (Thursday, July 2) at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET.
In this edition I want to tangle with something that has fascinated me for about 10 years: movie brand loyalty. Last week’s pile-on of Supergirl drove many disquisitions on the era of fandom—that catchall word we use to describe nerdy people eagerly dorking out over minutiae. I say this with love, as a man with many obsessive sidelines that help me shamble through life, one accrued distraction at a time.
Fandom can be ugly or needy or immature. It’s easy to pick on fans; they’re so sincere and, well, a little pathetic if seen from the wrong angle. But being a fan is also definitional for many people. Loving Marvel can be, if you really want, a personality. You can make friends who primarily care about Marvel’s stories. Find a mate who orients their free time around it, too. Design your lifestyle around the wide array of experiences—movies, games, attractions, merchandise, and, of course, comic books—the brand has to offer. You can wear a Captain America T-shirt, Thor’s helmet, Spidey’s tights, Hulk hands, and Iron Man’s boots to work, if your boss is cool. (During a recent trip to Disneyland, I strongly considered buying a replica of Thanos’s Infinity Gauntlet before realizing there was no joke on the other end of the purchase. I simply would have been a 43-year-old man with the Infinity Gauntlet.)
And so while fandom is under fire these days, and often identified as the root cause of a degraded movie culture—I might add an “anonymous, online” prefix to “fandom” if making this declaration—it is at least a viable path toward genuine community. That it is diminished and frequently maligned right now is neither here nor there, because it is rooted in a rich history of stories, the most connective force in human existence. Religion, history, literature, anthropology, science, friendship, bullshitting at your kids’ soccer game—it’s all stories. Marvel (or Star Wars or Harry Potter or Agatha Christie mysteries or Mass Effect or Pokémon or Bridgerton) is not inherently evil or destructive or lame. They’re just stories. Sometimes their prominence in our wider culture can blot out the rest of the world and make space for alternatives more sparse. But they’re actually something worth celebrating—this exact idea is at the very heart of The Ringer, where I have worked for more than 10 years. (Did you know we turned 10 in June?) I take stories very seriously.
