Category: Film
The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading
The only spoilers in this post concern the non-current Star Wars movies. Stop reading now if you wish those to remain a surprise.
The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:
1. The Jedi and Jedi-in-training sell out like crazy. Even the evil Count Dooku was once a Jedi knight.
2. What do the Jedi Council want anyway? The Anakin critique of the Jedi Council rings somewhat true (this is from the new movie, alas I cannot say more, but the argument could be strengthened by citing the relevant detail). Aren’t they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.
3. Obi-Wan told Luke scores of lies, including the big whopper that his dad was dead.
4. The Jedi can’t even keep us safe.
5. The bad guys have sex and do all the procreating. The Jedi are not supposed to marry, or presumably have children. Not ESS, if you ask me. Anakin gets Natalie Portman; Luke spends two episodes with a perverse and distant crush on his sister Leia, leading only to one chaste kiss.
6. The prophecy was that Anakin (Darth) will restore order and balance to the force. How true this turns out to be. But none of the Jedi can begin to understand what this means. Yes, you have to get rid of the bad guys. But you also have to get rid of the Jedi. The Jedi are, after all, the primary supply source and training ground for the bad guys. Anakin/Darth manages to get rid of both, so he really is the hero of the story. (It is also interesting which group of “Jedi” Darth kills first, but that would be telling.)
7. At the happy ending of “Return of the Jedi”, the Jedi no longer control the galaxy. The Jedi Council is not reestablished. Luke, the closest thing to a Jedi representative left, never becomes a formal Jedi. He shows no desire to train other Jedi, and probably expects to spend the rest of his life doing voices for children’s cartoons.
8. The core message is that power corrupts, but also that good guys have power too. Our possible safety lies in our humanity, not in our desires to transcend it or wield strange forces to our advantage.
What did Padme say?: “So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause.”
Addendum: By the way, did I mention that the Jedi are genetically superior supermen with “enhanced blood”? That the rebels’ victory party in Episode IV borrows liberally from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”? And that the much-maligned ewoks make perfect sense as an antidote to Jedi fascism?
It was everything I expected — more in due time
The costs of Sith
Challenger Gray & Christmas, a Chicago outplacement firm, estimated that 51 percent of people attending opening day would be full-time workers, costing employers as much as $627 million in lost productivity.
Here is the story. And will it also be a slow day in the economics blogosphere? — "Nobody contacted for this article wanted to discuss their planned absences."
Revenge of the Sith review
This review (a few spoilers, but nothing I would not have guessed) is from Variety. In my opinion they write the most reliable reviews available. Most of all, they do not conflate or blur together predictions of quality and predictions of commercial success. Variety, which is written for industry insiders, evaluates movies explicitly in both terms, and also for overseas box office. A newspaper also will hire a movie critic to meet the tastes of its readers, but this is typically at a lower level.
I do believe it will be awesome.
Thanks to Todd Zywicki for the pointer.
Addendum: Here are more reviews, no spoilers.
But will they name a NJ Turnpike rest stop after him?
Bruce Willis has been awarded France’s highest cultural honor. Mr. Willis, 50, was formally inducted yesterday into the French Order of Arts and Letters. The French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said the award paid tribute to an actor whose work "epitomizes the strength of American cinema, the power of the emotions that he invites us to share on the world’s screens, and the sturdy personalities of his legendary characters." Mr. Willis, 50, who was in France to promote his latest movie, "Hostage," said that the honor "proves that film has no borders and that we all belong to the same artistic community." Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres said that the actor’s roles could not be reduced to a simple struggle between good and evil, yet he added, "You really have killed a lot of bad guys."
Here is the link. Here are some poets with rest stops named after them.
What I’ve been watching
1. Da Ali G Show: The Complete First Season. Is there a more powerful comic genius at work today? This British would-be gangsta rapper has at least four hilarious personae; Yana’s favorite is Funkyzeit mit Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion designer. Or imagine a funnier Howard Stern interviewing Newt Gingrich, Dick Thornburgh, Ed Meese, and Reed Irvine. His repeated portrayal of a hapless Kazakh man seeking sex has drawn repeated protests from the embassy; it is now what the country is known for.
2. Laibach: The Videos. Laibach was one of the leading Slovenian punk rock metal industrial fascist-mocking groups of the 1990s (the sentence is not a joke). Their Let it Be album redoes the Beatles, and their "Across the Universe" is my favorite Beatles cover, with Joe Cocker as a close second. But note: their Nazi-Wagnerian jackboots reconstruction of "Get Back" will send most of you running away.
3. Goodbye Dragon Inn, The first line of dialogue does not come until about halfway through this 80-minute movie. And much of the film is you watching other people watching a movie, how is that for meta? It is about the passing of the old Taiwan, the transitory nature of observation, the power of the image, and the fundamental sillness of watching a movie through. Not since Tarkovsky has a director used sound and silence so effectively, nor is anyone so good with restroom scenes. It is a help, not a spoiler, to tell you that the two old men are also (much younger) characters in the movie on the screen. Tsai Ming-Liang is one of the world’s seminal directors and this is one of his leading entries. Short enough to endure, even if this is not your cup of tea, and maybe you will love it as I did.
Why are all movies the same price?
Well, not the same price in all cases. Before 6 p.m. is cheaper, there are numerous dollar theaters, and not all films allow for discount coupons. Nonetheless a multiplex will charge the same ($9.50 in my case) for the number one movie and for a flop. Nor is the price more expensive for Saturday night, or during the summer when demand is higher. Can any economic model predict these results? Here are a few observations:
1. Theater owners are trying to maximize profit across all screens. Spillover demand, from people who can’t get in to see their first choice, is a significant source of revenue. You don’t want markets to clear on a screen-by-screen basis.
2. Low prices encourage queuing, which attracts the young and hardy. Those same customers are most likely to spread the virtues of movies by word of mouth. A theater might rather have a young customer than an old customer.
3. Lines for a popular film are one way of generating valuable publicity.
4. A priori, I would have expected the number one movie to sell cheaper, not more expensive. Moviemakers wish to generate snowball effects for potential hits. (For purposes of comparison, it reflects commercial prestige to have your books sell for a low rather than high price.) This also predicts movies will be cheaper in early stages of their run, which does not generally seem to be true.
5. Maybe the whole theatrical thing is a shadowplay for popcorn sales and advertising for a subsequent DVD release. The theater owner, on his side, may not care so much about getting the profit-maximizing price right. So he invests in consumer good will by offering a flat price across all films.
6. The emergence of strict uniform pricing across movies appeared in the early 1970s; it is sometimes suggested that Paramount insisted upon such pricing (illegally) for the release of The Godfather. (The 1948 Paramount decision limited the involvement of the distributor in pricing decisions, but there is pressure nonetheless.)
7. Variable pricing would divert movie demand to weekdays, which would make it harder for a film to be number one at the box office for its opening weekend. And since a top movie will sell out in any case, why bother lowering the price for Saturday night?
8. With differential prices you might buy a ticket for a cheaper movie and walk into the more expensive movie.
You could ask related questions about why restaurants do not tack on a surcharge for Saturday nights, although I find this practice is becoming more common. As far as the movies go, I will put the most weight on #7. And I have turned on the comments section…
New cinema blog by Martha Bayles
Martha Bayles is one of my favorite cultural critics. She is always to the point, writes for consumers rather than for other critics, and is intrigued rather than repelled by commercial culture. I am pleased to see she has started a new cinema blog. And while we are on the topic, here is Larry Ribstein’s blog on how business and capitalism are portrayed in the movies.
How the French play basketball
Watch the video here, courtesy of Jane Galt.
Honesty about illegal file-sharing
The Supreme Court has been hearing a major case on file-sharing. Should Grokster and other web-based file-sharing services be held liable for contributory copyright infringement? Forget about the law, what does the economist say? Yes "fair use" provisions are excessively stringent, but here are three reasons why I cannot accept the radical anti-copyright position.
1. In ten year’s time, what will happen to the DVD and pay-for-view trades? BitTorrent allows people to download movies very quickly. Note that DVDs already account for more than half of Hollywood domestic revenue. Furthermore the process will be eased when TVs and computers can "talk" to each other more readily. Yes, I am familiar with Koleman Strumpf’s excellent work showing that illegal file-sharing has not hurt music sales. But a song download can be a loss leader for an entire CD or a concert tour. Downloading an entire movie does not prompt a person to spend money in comparable fashion.
2. Perhaps we can make file-sharing services identify (and block) illegally traded files. After all, the listeners can find the illegal files and verify they have what they wanted. Grokster, sooner or later, will be able to do the same. Yes, fully decentralized and "foreign rogue" systems may proliferate, and any identification system will be imperfect. But this is one way to heed legitimate copyright suits without passing the notorious "Induce Act."
3. I question the almost universal disdain for the "Micky Mouse" copyright extension act. OK, lengthening the copyright extension does not provide much in the way of favorable incentives. Who innovates with the expectation of reaping copyright revenues seventy-five years from now? But this is a corporate rather than an individual issue. Furthermore economic research indicates that current cash flow is a very good predictor of investment. So the revenue in fact stimulates additional investment in creative outputs. If I had my finger on the button, I still would have pushed "no" on the Mickey Mouse extension, if only because of the rule of law. Privileges of this kind should not be extended repeatedly due to special interest pressures. But we are fooling ourselves if we deny that the extension will benefit artistic output, at least in the United States.
Why are unions so prevalent in Hollywood?
The desire for ongoing health benefits is a big part of the explanation:
The [union] locals combine…welfare plans together in the centrally administered Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans, while the guilds manage their own individual plans. In either case, the system that has emerged in practice has the signal advantage that individuals’ benefits packages are not tied to any single employer but are fully portable from firm to firm. In this way, the Hollywood unions and guilds play a role somewhat analogous to that played by the government-sponsored Intermittence du Spectacle in France, which provides unemployment compensation and other benefits to wokers in the French entertainment industry.
Of course Hollywood is known for its short-term and volatile employment, and for the temporary nature of its projects. The explanation for unions continues:
Additional important functions of the unions and guilds are (a) the codification and regulation of professional categories, (b) accreditation of members’ work experiences, and (c) the provision of educational, labor-training, and other qualification-enhancing services.
That is from Allen Scott’s new and excellent On Hollywood, The Place, The Industry; the book is an applied study in economic geography. Here is my previous query about Hollywood unions. And somewhere in here is a paper on whether Hollywood offers a possible model for reforming our health care system.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias adds: "the Writer’s Guild of America (of which my father is a member) plays an important role in arbitrating credit disputes. Screenwriters often get fired or otherwise leave projects in development, which are then finished by someone else. Oftentimes, three or more writers (or teams of writers) will cycle through a project before it’s completed. Someone needs to look at the final project, decide which writers deserve credit, who deserves the primary credit, and who — if anyone — should get a "story" credit. Contracting these responsibilities out to the Guild lets studios duck a series of nasty disputes in whose outcome they have no real interest. It also protects writers from directors or producers who might want to muscle their way into screenwriting credits."
Tips for viewing The Merchant of Venice
1. There is textual evidence that Shakespeare was anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitism is not the primary point of the plot.
2. Shakespeare uses stereotypes about Jews to mock his audience and to mock anti-Semites. Most of all he is pointing the joke back in the faces of the bigots. "Who is the merchant and who is the Jew?" is one of the central lines of the text. And it is no accident that the play is named after the merchant, not after Shylock.
3. Shakespeare shows most of the play’s Christians to be mean, hypocritical, and full of lies. They have every bad quality that they accuse the Jews of having, and more. This is a very dark comedy.
4. The stories concerning the rings should be followed carefully. The film mentions briefly (too briefly, perhaps) that Shylock treasured and kept the ring from his wife. Compare this to how the Christians treat their rings.
5. The homosexual and lesbian implications of the story are explicit rather than some postmodern reinterpretation.
Elsewhere on the cinematic front, Yana has been watching the Star Wars trilogy for the first time ("…so these are the ones where he has the breathing problem"). I’ve been amazed how readily and appropriately the episodes have made the transition from "slick futuristic vision" to "dark tale of collapse, decay, and clunky technological malfunction." I can hardly wait for May to roll around.
Larry White recommends Bollywood movies
My own choice for best of 2004: Mazbool and Ab Tak Chhappan. Best of 2003: Bhoot, Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II. Bhoot is a ghost story, the others are gritty cop/mafia dramas.
All-time favorites: Sholay, Bombay, Lagaan, Don, The Great Gambler, Mard, Suhaag, Amar Akbar Anthony, Satya, Company, Ganga ki Saugand, Kasam Suhag ki, Nagin, Umrao Jaan, Mera Gaon Mera Desh. I admit soft spots for gangsters, Amitabh Bachchan, dacoit movies, Rekha, and camp.
Here is Larry’s home page. Here are his on-line articles. Here are his links on money and free banking.
Howl’s Moving Castle
The new Hayao Miyazaki movie, Howl’s Moving Castle, debuted in Japan this week, even though the director had ostensibly retired. Here is the official website. I love every one of his films. The best-known, Spirited Away, is in my view the least compelling; here is my favorite, Heisei Tanuki Ponpoko. In theory the entire set will be put out by Disney over the next few years, keep an eye out for them. Here is one short essay on the director and his work.
The Incredibles
The Incredibles is superb. It succeeds as an action-adventure film, a comedic spoof, and as social commentary.