The recent tumble taken by Hollywood’s Halloween box office is like watching a $425 million juggernaut slip comically on a banana peel and nosedive into its own custard pie. To schadenfreude aficionados, it’s a spectacularly humbling spectacle. Here we sit, having watched the overlords of moviedom spend ungodly sums on a smorgasbord of spooky slop that only managed to rustle up enough cash for a small popcorn, provided an aged cinephile offered his last nickel with a heartwarming pat on the back. But let’s not indulge in too much conspicuous glee over Los Angeles tumbling down this well of humiliation. After all, we’re only on the 500th iteration of the national Bob Iger effigy-burning s’mores party circuit, where folks are merciful enough to cloak their celebration under the guise of chocolate and marshmallow melting.
Meanwhile, confused studio execs are scratching their heads—and hopefully not much else—pondering why the audience isn’t cuing up at their altar. The brain trust over at Hollywood seems befuddled by America’s apparent allergy to the cinematic harvest they’ve sown. Apparently, and rather shockingly, films heavy on the algebra of socio-political lecturing, couched in narratives where everyone’s favorite heroes now deliver monologues cribbed from a Karl Marx manifesto, aren’t quite hitting home runs. Adding layers of irony, these are the same films that reduced classic characters into modern polemics and instructed masculinity and femininity to take a seat in the back row.
The theories abound like kernels in an unpopped bag of corn. Maybe blame is best assigned to the World Series, a government hiccup, or even the suspicious timing of Halloween falling on a Friday. Or, it just might be that America grew tired of throwing its hard-earned cash at talking heads who seem to hate their very guts. Take your pick, though perhaps all could agree that the sequence of shrugging it off has grown tiresome, leading only to the next vicious cycle of head-scratching.
Even as the Tinseltown titan struggled with these cultural growing pains, they were met with an unexpected jolt when one starlet deployed her secret weapon: modesty. Her red-carpet appearance in a shockingly conservative attire, a full-sleeved blouse, rattled the fashion provocateurs. Not one to be shown up, The New York Times, grappling with its own definition of modern femininity, threw down the gauntlet. How dare she undermine years of practiced debasement for the sake of what, dignity? Apparently, the self-respecting wardrobe became a point of feminist contention much like when napalm hit polyester.
In predictable Hollywood style, capitulation was swift. They issued oaths smoother than a campaign-season politician, promising more nonsensical casting choices and another bout of self-exposure, this time starring a seasoned Nicole Kidman—nudity, evidently, once being merely an actor’s rite of passage, now hailed as a potential movie-saving miracle. But for the rest of us, there’s hope—hope that perhaps nothing will woo back the audience, and that another chapter in Hollywood self-destruction will merely be another rhyme in our merry songbook of cultural observation.
