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Two men walk away from camera into a foggy nothingness. The black and white still is from the final shot of the 1942 film Casablanca.

A hill of beans

—

by

tederick
in

Huh boy. Another one of those weeks.

It wasn’t just the Warner Brothers disaster, followed closely by American-Israeli war crimes (which my PM thinks are just great, btw!). Some of it was just, I had some personal disappointments towards the end of February, all bunched up with all a’ that shit. I’m not without a sense of proportion: I know my place, in light of the larger horrors.

Here’s what’s been on my mind lately: I want to stop thinking about the fact that people act against their own best interests. They do — let’s put it to rest. (Also, there’s something cloyingly knowing in the “sigh, of course” reaction to pretty much any given news item.)

What I think I need to wonder at this point is: knowing what we do, i.e. that people act against their own best interests: why do we keep expecting them not to?

I was watching Survivor, in the run-up to 50. You know me: I used to be a Survivor wonk. I skipped a buncha the middle seasons, though, so I’ve been crawling my way forward, which turns out to be a pretty decent proposition in terms of land-speed, if you zip through the challenges and the portentous voting montages. I gobbled up Survivors 14, 15, and 16 in the break between Survivors 49 and 50, which means that the night before the new season began, I watched The One Where The Girls Talked That Idiot Into Giving Up His Immunity Idol.

The short version of the story is that there were four ladies left on a tribe, and one dude. The dude knew he was the next to get voted out, because the ladies told him so. The dude went and won the immunity idol to prevent this from happening. The ladies told him that now they’d vote someone else out instead, but first they wanted him to hand over his immunity idol to them anyway, as a ceremonial display of what honestly sounds like kink levels of submissiveness. The dude, who knew that without the idol he was going to be the next to be voted out, handed over the idol that kept him from being voted out. And then he was voted out.

I’d heard about this moment over the years but never actually watched the clip. It really is an astonishing piece of gameplay: from Cirie, for thinking so far outside the box in the first place (no bad ideas in a brainstorm, after all); from Natalie, whose back was so against the wall that she thought Cirie was fucking with her when the plan was invented, and yet somehow, flawlessly executed the critical maneuver of actually convincing Erik that any of this was real; and for Parvati and Amanda, who mean-girled the poor idiot so hard I suspect he was fully “FIVE LIGHTS!” by the time he walked into to Tribal Council.

Most of all, it’s astonishing because literally everyone, including the people doing it, know that there’s absolutely no way it can work, because no one would ever, so dramatically, act against their own best interests.

I’m not exaggerating, re: the italicized point. The Black Widows are so bafgazzled by Erik actually taking off the immunity necklace and handing it over that they nearly go cross-eyed just trying to keep straight faces. Parvati’s confessional to camera while voting is as delirious with surprise as we’ve ever seen her, including when she wins the game in the next episode.

Look, broadly, I guess I understand that we can’t go around expecting people to act against their best interests all the time. It’s always surprising, or maybe should be, because people contain multiple universes of multitudes and a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and you get rain in Central Park and all that. There’s always something, some drift in the cerebral matter we can’t account for — some hidden cheat code the person thinks they’re exploiting; some four-dimensional chess they’re sure they’re playing, that only they can see. Just ask Erik.

What I was thinking about while I was watching the Paramount nightmare unfold last week, though, was: boy, they’ve really created a system “down there” where the worst-case scenario isn’t just predictable; it’s likely. It’s almost bland, how easily the boulders rolling down hill land right on the defenceless village in the valley. It might be time to start expecting it. To keep it Survivor, it’s like how so many — I mean, so many — seasons of the game are won by heartily “meh” players, who basically get to the final vote by being so underwhelming the whole way along that no one ever takes a notion to get rid of them. You could call it a system that rewards finesse; or you could call it a game that cuts down all innovative and progressive forms of gameplay. Every nail that sticks out, getting hammered down.

So here we are, with the version of the thing that no regulatory court in the universe would have approved even thirty years ago, where two identical old-media behemoths are gonna smush themselves together, obliterating an industry ecosystem for no reason. Thousands of people are going to lose their jobs and a decent chunk of television and film output is just going to get bamfed out of reality. There’s no reason for this other than that it was the worst-case scenario and thus, naturally, everyone ran straight at it — fucking Jim Cameron put out a memo about it! — until it became the real thing that happened. Because of course it did.

Back to my hill of beans. Honestly, at the end of the day: who cares. It’s American movie studios fighting, and there are so many, so much, worse things going on. But even having bet on the end of Hollywood happening by 2030 as far back as 2009, now it’s like I can actually smell it. And I god damn loved it, y’know? It’s been dying a slow death for a long time and now it’s dying a quick one, but I god damn loved it. It was my everything for longer than anything.

An unusually long run of links, to ease your suffering

  • I mentioned Austin Walker a few weeks back. I don’t know how valuable this interview is without at least some familiarity with him and his work; but it’s a fantastic, in-depth conversation, about the politics of gaming, and Star Wars, and journalism, and what will (and won’t) save us. (Unwinnable)
  • You know that thing I’ve been doing where I’ve been working my way through all the episodes of ER, even the ones I never saw the first time around? I’m nearly done, so this Troy Evans interview was nice to revisit. Plus, second David Lynch sighting in a row, linkwise. (AV Club)

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