Sunday roundup

Michael Walsh at PJ Media asserts that the pending purchase of most assets of the Murdoch empire related to the movie business - that would be 20th Century Fox - by Disney confirms the death of the American cinema industry as we have known it since the 1890s. I don't always align with Walsh's positions 100 percent, but he's a fine writer, having honed his chops at Time magazine as a classical-music critic and foreign correspondent. And those chops are on full display here as he takes his time to build his case.

There's this:

The death of the motion-picture business as founded has been on the horizon since the Industry learned all the wrong lessons from the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws back in 1975. Whereas theaters had once touted air-conditioning as the prime means of putting fannies in the seats when the weather outside was steamy, the "summer blockbuster" now enticed them with chills and thrills. When Jaws begat Star Wars and the customers were shelling out record sums of money to watch what used to be called "B" movies, the moguls were quick to respond.

[A word to our younger readers: once upon a time in a galaxy not far away at all, there were "A" movies and "B" movies, so called because they were two halves of something called a "double bill," in which for the price of a single ticket you got two movies: a big-budget picture (in color!) with famous stars, and a cheaper film, usually in black-and-white, plus a couple of short subjects and maybe a cartoon or two. Similarly, 78-rpm records had an "A" side -- the song you wanted to hear -- and a "B" side, which you got more or less for free. You could look it up.]

In due course, the summer blockbusters morphed into "tentpole" movies -- mega-productions around which the studios would hang their entire yearly schedules, until at last the tentpoles became  the schedules, with a few voguish pictures chucked into theaters just before Christmas in order to qualify for "awards season" Oscars. Civil-rights dramas, coming-of-age movies (by which read: first sexual experience), and gay coming-of-age movies -- this is how a movie that nobody you know actually saw, Moonlight, won Best Picture last year.

And so it has come to pass that, at what's left of the multiplexes in what's left of shopping malls, you can see just about any kind of movie you want as long as it's a "franchise" movie -- in other words, a sequel or a remake of something you've already seen -- or a superhero movie -- in other words, based on a comic book; you know, the kind of thing you gave up reading when you were 14 years old. Just about every other genre -- westerns, dramas, thrillers, action-adventures, romantic comedies, slapstick comedies -- has been subsumed into the maw of the Things That Ate Hollywood. 

He goes on to discuss how the old studio system gave way to hot dogs from just about any old industry getting in on the game.

He doesn't say anything about the visionary - Walter Elias Disney, a failed advertising-graphics artist from Kansas City with a fondness for anthropomorphically imbued common animals -  whose name will now be the emblem for an unprecedentedly influential media giant, but it's the natural leap to make from Walsh's piece. What would Walt and his brother Roy think?

The actual piece I'm linking to here - one at The Resurgent by Peter Heck on pornography - is a worthwhile read, but for me, its main value was making me aware of a magnificent witness to the redemptive power of the Lord: one Rosaria Butterfield. She started her professional life as an English professor, which position permitted her to also teach gender studies and queer studies. She also was living as a lesbian, and had a longstanding relationship and a nice house with her partner. In 1999, she discovered the Truth, became a Christian, ended that relationship and only lasted another three years as a professor, even though she'd earned tenure. She's now married to a Reformed Presbyterian minister, is a mother of three and a homeschooler. I've bookmarked her and intend to export further.

We know about alpha males and beta males. Derek Hunter at Townhall coins a useful term - the zeta male - to describe guys like the Harvard student who, while out at a pub with some buds one evening, participated in a discussion of who the hottest chicks were in some class they all had together, and the guilt then consumed him to the point of public self-flagellation:

“During Orientation Week in August of 2016, I was out late drinking in Harvard Square with two classmates. The topic switched to the women in our class. Over the drunken hum of the bar’s collective conversation, one guy proposed the ‘hottest’ girls in our class. The other did the same. They both then asked me to rank the girls in our cohort in the order I wanted to get with. My alarmed heart bolted blood to my cheeks. I crossed my arms, unable to speak. ‘Are we making you uncomfortable?’ one asked me. I cannot remember my exact response. But it was not: ‘Yes. Objectifying women, even though it seems harmless to you, demeans them and creates an environment that makes sexual assault more likely.’ Instead, I uncrossed my arms, I shook my head, and yes, I discussed which girls were hot.”

Look, we are in the midst of a painful societal eye-opening regarding the magnitude of the problem of powerful men acting like brutes, but, dude, if men and women do not acknowledge their attraction to each other, the whole business of more human beings coming along to keep society going comes to a screaming halt.

Jonathan Haidt at City Journal has a consideration-worthy take on why post-American society is so hobbled by raw tribalism.

Everybody likes to say, in. response to the pointing out of the hair-raisingly alarming state of the North Korean crisis, that China must play a key role in walking the world back from the brink. Ain't gonna happen, according to several prominent world-affairs scholars in China. The situation, they say, is too far gone, and it's time for their country to prepare for apocalyptic war.