“Trumpet equals dick”.
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35 or so years ago, one of my friends paid his roommate (who was also my friend... They both still are, actually) $5 to ghostwrite an essay he needed about Langston Hughes for his music history class. Money exchanged hands, an essay was written, and you just read the opening line. In what was to be one of the great travesties of the 20th century, the essay received a failing grade.
In the film “Roommates”, the titular mates are Devon and Celeste. Celeste gets Devon to write her essay for fashion design class. The *closing* line of that essay is
“In every moment of history, jeans were there.”
Other than being awesome, what do these two lines have in common? Are they true? Well, I’m not sure about trumpet = dick, I would have to get a math person up in here, but I wouldn’t be surprised. “In every moment of history, jeans were there” is objectively true. If you really consider them, what jeans *actually are* are little explosions caused by gluons interacting via the strong force. That’s also what *you* are, what the planet jupiter is, and what ‘matter’ has been since hundreds of years before the dawn the history. So, jeans have definitely been there in every moment of history. So have you. But especially jeans.
That’s burying the lead. What those lines actually have in common, is that they’re direct, and they’re easy to understand. If you wanted to write an essay about Langston Hughes, you *could* start it by writing something like “In the racial landscape of the early 20th century, the poetry of Langston Hughes served to subvert the overarching paradigm” and yadda yadda yadda. Guess what. That shit is DUNZO. Nobody wants to read long winded bullshit anymore. Actually, nobody wants to read ANYTHING anymore. Except... Academics do. Academic discourse and analysis, especially in the arts and humanities, has always been masturbatory. Little tidbits of didactic trash they read amongst themselves to feel smart (by the way, I am guilty of this as well). The model was sustainable only because academia itself was deemed necessary. Higher education was a necessary step to secure “elite” status in society. Well, that ain’t true no mo. As AI ascends and all the capital in the world funnels upward to fewer and fewer people, college is becoming more meaningless by the second. This cycle of “academic intelligentsia” that has *also* been around since hundreds of years before the dawn of the history will slowly, but surely, fade into nothingness. Along with human agency in the face of a vastly superior being in the form of AI, but that’s off topic. “Trumpet equals dick” is punchy. It’s terse. It... Kind of makes sense. If you wrote that as your opening line of a music history paper “now”, I would certainly think that the guarantee your paper wasn’t written by an AI chatbot would at least be worth a B-.
Academia isn’t the only relic that will soon fade into dust... The hollywood studio system will be hot on its heels. People are sick of it, and why would anybody consume lower-common-denominator sludge that is carefully engineered to be as non offensive to as many different folks as possible, while being “actually enjoyed” by none of them.
Case in point: “Roommates”. It’s not actually a bad movie. Top to bottom t2b comedies are hard to come by, and if there are some laughs, I’ll take ‘em. However, “Roommates” certainly isn’t an *exceptional* movie, and it’s because of this centrist studio nonsense I was just talking about. “Roommates” is actually two movies (which might not be a surprise, considering it has two writers). The first movie is a dark comedy about two roommates who each think the other has the perfect life. Despite mounting evidence that neither of them have such great lives, the perception remains, and over the course of the movie that jealousy on both sides slowly morphs into hatred, and they eventually go to war. The second movie, is a feel-good underdog story about an innocent girl victimized by her psycho bitch roommate, and her triumphant victory when she finally fights back and overcomes her evil roommate’s machinations. These are not the same story, yet “Roommates” keeps trying to do both. As a result, regardless of which of these stories appeals to you, you’re only *kind of* getting it.
WHY???
Except for the mega-blockbuster, which is becoming more rare every year, movies aren’t making any money anyway (they’re actually being used to launder it). So why are the studios *still* churning out mediocre movies that are designed to *kind of* be liked by everybody, but are *loved* by nobody? Even before we get the point where people can dictate their own movie to an AI and just have it created (that might not be as far off as we think) this *for the masses* studio mentality needs to ride off into the paste. Appeal to your niche! Make the dark comedy. Make the the underdog story. Just don’t hedge your bets and do both. The money is going to get laundered either way, so pick a freakin’ lane and try to make your movie good.
That being said... I will even take an average comedy these days. Starring an average actress. I don’t want to hand Sadie Sandler a burn notice (even though I just did), because she’s actually getting better. *Average* is a step up from *unwatchable*, which is what she was in “You’re so not invited to my bat mitzvah”. Her comic timing is improving, and she has the good sense to tone it down and let actual comic heavyweights like Nick Kroll, Natasha Lyonne, and the immortal Carol Kane do the heavy lifting. I appreciate her for that. Also... The fact that a character yells the line “SHE’S A NEPO BABY?!?” during the film might just be a wink at the audience that being Adam Sandler’s daughter *might* have helped Sadie land the lead role.
So, I strongly encourage all y’all to leave both antiquated studio mandates and indulgent academic nonsense behind, and be direct and honest. If trumpet doesn’t equal dick, I hope you can find what does.
9/10