The customer as a victim. - July 10, 2007
From The Godfather:
The policeman believes in law and order in a curiously innocent way. He believes in it more than does the public he serves. Law and order is, after all, the magic from which he derives his power, individual power which he cherishes as nearly all men cherish individual power. And yet there is a smoldering resentment against the public he serves. They are the same time his ward and his prey. As wards they are ungrateful, abusive and demanding. As prey they are slippery and dangerous, full of guile. As soon as one is in the policeman's clutches the mechanism of the society the policeman defends marshals all its resources to cheat him of his prize. Judges give lenient suspended sentences to the worst hoodlums. Governors of the States and the President himself give full pardons, assuming that respected lawyers have no already won his acquittal. After a time the cop learns Why should he not collect the fees these hoodlums are paying? He needs it more. Why shouldn't his wife shop in more expensive places? Why shouldn't he himself get the sun with a winter vacation in Florida? After all, he risks his life and that is no joke.
Is this not very similar to how the artists sees the fan? The producer and his public? The creator and the consumer? It is a very human tendency. But it leads to bad art. And the Hollywood system is prone to facilitate it.
Posted by ryanholiday at 8:34 PM
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Very clever - I wouldn't have thought to make the connection between the two. I was actually thinking the other day about how and why Hollywood is conducive to facilitating that corrupt sort of mindset, and here was a pretty reasonable answer.
Posted by: Brett Crudgington at July 10, 2007 09:44 PM
This is what makes you appreciate people like Stephen Spielberg, who are able to craft compelling tales that the common fan relates to while finding ways to appease the snobbish artist in Hollywood. Only few people reach this cross-section of popularity on both grounds,and they tend to be the most successful.
Posted by: Avinash at July 10, 2007 09:45 PM
More than Hollywood, journalists fall prey to this all the time. Since they are literally teaching their subjects they tend to feel superior and that always translates into shitty, cut rate articles.
Posted by: Ryan Holiday at July 11, 2007 12:29 AM
Is this an argument of living objectively vs subjectively?
Posted by: alex at July 11, 2007 06:16 AM
I think it's more of an argument about avoiding the very real temptation towards become jaded. In Hollywood--or as the quotes says, the police force--being jaded and unethical is where the real money and the glory is, or so it seems. My argument and Tucker's too, is that as counterintuitive as it appears, good art has always paid more than commercial product. But in Hollywood, the easy road and the easy money is to phone it in, to make derivative product.
Posted by: Ryan Holiday at July 11, 2007 09:08 AM
What listening to the masses gets you is average product.
There were two interesting pieces in the most recent New Yorker about how voters don't vote in their best self-interest (One about Simon & Schuster's idiot adaptation of MediaPredict into a book rating system and one by an elitist economist on how the general public does not vote in accordance with actual political harmonization). Consumers usually don't either.
Posted by: thapa at July 12, 2007 09:25 PM
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