three masks @bambamramfan - Tumblr Blog

Žižek's "Liberal Fascisms" trilogy wraps in 2026, and he's doing the Barbican in May, tickets through How To Academy's box office

So the thing that's actually funny about the Royal Institution booking him for May 7th, a four-way God debate with William Lane Craig, Rowan Williams, and Sabine Hossenfelder over whether we need God to explain the world, is the venue. The Royal Institution is an 1799 lecture-theatre, purpose-built to put science in front of a paying subscription audience as spectacle. Faraday did the Christmas Lectures there. It's a stage.

And what Žižek has actually been for about thirty-five years is a man who performs theory as spectacle for paying audiences. The God question is the set dressing. The venue is the tell.

Okay, let me back up, because the conventional wisdom on Žižek is that he's a brilliant-or-fraudulent (pick your team) Continental philosopher with a coke-spoon nose-tic and too many books, and both teams are arguing about the wrong object. The interesting thing is the machine that turns a Ljubljana Lacanian into a globally distributed intellectual commodity, whatever you think of the Hegel, and that machine is specific, and it has dates.

Start in Ljubljana, because you have to.

Žižek's a 1949 baby, grows up in Tito's Yugoslavia, and that's the part nobody foregrounds: Yugoslav self-managing socialism was the one Communist country that let Western film and theory in. He's watching Hitchcock and reading Lacan as a teenager because the border was porous in a way the Soviet bloc's wasn't. People file that under biography color. It's the whole intellectual formation: a guy trained on Western pop culture and French psychoanalysis inside a socialist state, which is exactly the hybrid he'd later sell to the West as exotic.

And then the institution. In the late '70s there's a circle of Slovene Lacanians, Žižek and Mladen Dolar and the sociologist Rastko Močnik, that becomes the Ljubljana school, working through the journal Problemi (running since 1962) and eventually the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis. Alenka Zupančič joins later and rounds out the famous troika. This is a real school doing something unusual: reading Lacan through Hegel and German Idealism, hard, as philosophy rather than as clinical practice.

The point being that "Žižek" the brand is downstream of a collective project that existed before the brand and still exists. Most of the people consuming the brand have never heard of Problemi. The dry cleaner gets famous; the laundry stays anonymous.

He gets the PhD at Ljubljana in 1981 on German Idealism. Then, and this is the move, he goes to Paris, 1981 to '85, to study under Jacques-Alain Miller.

You have to understand who Miller is to see why this matters. Miller married Lacan's daughter and became the legal executor and editor of the seminars; he controls the transcripts, decides what gets published and how, runs the whole institutional apparatus of Lacanianism. So in Paris Žižek is apprenticing to the man who owns Lacan, the one who controls access to the principal. Every Lacanian after Lacan is in some sense leveraged against Miller's editorial position, the counterparty the whole French-theory book is exposed to. Žižek gets a second doctorate out of it in '85, a Lacanian reading of Hegel.

Then the late '80s, and here's where the Western team's mythology gets the story exactly backwards. Žižek comes home and writes columns for Mladina, the alternative youth weekly, which is anti-regime, running pieces against the militarization of Yugoslav society. In 1988 he resigns from the Slovene Communist Party with a bunch of other intellectuals. In 1990 he runs for the four-member collective Slovenian presidency as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party, the liberal party, and narrowly loses.

Look at the contradiction for a second. The man marketed for thirty years to Anglophone audiences as the dangerous Marxist, the guy who'll tell you Stalin had a point, was in actual political fact a liberal-democratic anti-Communist dissident candidate in the only election he ever stood in. Both halves are documented fact, and the contradiction itself is the product. The provocations are calibrated for an audience that was never in the room in Ljubljana in 1990.

1989: The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first English book, comes out from Verso. And the publisher is the whole story. Verso is the book imprint of New Left Review, founded 1970 as New Left Books, with Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson on the board, the house organ of Anglophone Marxist theory. So Žižek's path into the English-speaking world runs through Verso, the single most prestigious distribution channel the Western academic left has, with a preface by Ernesto Laclau, himself a Verso figure, rather than through a university press or a trade house.

The seed capital was an existing institutional left that needed fresh continental product and got handed a Slovene who could do Hegel and talk about Hitchcock in the same paragraph.

That's the seed everything compounds on. From the early '90s he's a visiting professor everywhere, and the books start coming, and they do not stop. Looking Awry in '91, Enjoy Your Symptom in '92, Tarrying with the Negative in '93, and so on, and so on, until the count gets hard to establish; the bibliographies list north of 200 items if you include the edited volumes and the translations and the introductions to other people's books. Forty-some monographs at minimum. He wrote intros to Slovene editions of Chesterton and Le Carré. In 2007 he edited selected Robespierre, selected Mao, and selected Trotsky for Verso, the "Revolutions" series, where Žižek's name on the cover sells you the dead revolutionary inside.

And once you notice the edited-volumes-and-introductions habit you see the whole operation. "Žižek" became a valorization mechanism, a name you bolt onto other material (a film, a dead Jacobin, a concept, the news) to revalorize it as Theory. The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, where he narrates Hitchcock and Lynch from sets recreating the films, is the purest version: Žižek as the value-add welded onto someone else's images.

2005, Astra Taylor makes the documentary Žižek!, exclamation point and all, and the copy that sticks to him in this period is "the Elvis of cultural theory," "the most dangerous philosopher in the West." That's rock-tour language, and the people writing it know exactly what they're doing, because by 2005 the product had stopped being the argument and become the performance of the argument: the sweating, the lisp, the digressions about toilets and Coke ads, the sense that you're watching a mind overheat in real time. The arena act. When the LSE reviews the new trilogy and reaches for fireworks-in-daylight imagery, that's the tell. People reach for that vocabulary when they're describing a show.

Which gets us to now, and the recurrence.

The 2024–2026 trilogy is Bloomsbury: Against Progress, Zero Point, and the forthcoming Liberal Fascisms. The titles do exactly what the titles always did, take the thing the audience believes is good (progress) and deadpan that it isn't, the same provocative-minimization that ran the engine back when he titled a book In Defense of Lost Causes.

There's a Substack now, "Žižek Goads and Prods," which opens by complaining about puritanical editors cutting his dirty jokes. Meaning the man whose whole apparatus was built on prestige publishing houses has, like every other content producer in 2026, disintermediated down to the newsletter. There's a ten-week EGS seminar on Zoom, $575, taught on the Žižek-as-singularity premise. And there's the live circuit: Barbican in May, the Royal Institution God-debate, How To Academy moving the tickets.

So here's what the whole sequence adds up to, visible now in a way it wasn't at any single step. The Anglophone left spent thirty-five years consuming a Slovene liberal-democrat's Lacanian Hegelianism as if it were the cutting edge of Marxist thought, when what it actually bought, structurally, was a distribution deal. Verso needed continental product. The documentary economy needed a character. The lecture circuit needed an act. A brilliant man from a real but invisible Ljubljana school was the asset that satisfied all three at once.

The Hegel is real, and so is the school. The commodity built on top of them is a separate object, and it's the one with the May tour dates.

None of which is a complaint. Nobody's lying. He's been on the record as a liberal candidate, the Slovene school publishes under its own names, the books say what they say. And here's where I'll cop to the limit of my own read: I've been telling this as distribution capturing a man, the channel making the brand. It's possible I've got the arrow backwards and he engineered the whole thing on purpose, picked Verso, courted the documentary, built the act, and the wide-eyed Ljubljana Hegelian is itself the performance. That would be a better story than mine, honestly, and I'd have no way to tell the two apart from out here in the cheap seats, $575 for the Zoom, watching the man sweat through a bit about toilets. Either way the tickets are moving.

The thing he's actually contributed that I don't think will be undone — once you set aside the books, the celebrity, the YouTube clips, the Peterson debate (which was bad, both of them were bad, Peterson bad in his way and Žižek bad in his, which is, he was tired and he didn't bother because Peterson is beneath him and that came across as not bothering rather than not needing to bother) — the thing he actually contributed is a way of reading ideology that takes seriously that ideology operates as the structure of consciousness rather than as false consciousness, that you can know perfectly well that the commodity form is a fetish and still treat it as one because the treating-as-one is built into the social practice and not into your beliefs about the social practice. This is in Marx, it's in Sloterdijk, it's in Lacan, but Žižek synthesized it into a form that you could USE — you could pick up his ideology critique and apply it to a movie, a political speech, a piece of architecture, a joke — and the application would yield something. That's why people who are not his fans keep using his moves.

He's 75 now and the late stuff is, frankly, not great — the Ukraine writing has been bad, the COVID books were filler, the Peterson debate was the moment where you could see that the engine was sputtering — but the engine was a real engine and it ran for a long time and it was doing something nobody else was doing, which was, taking continental philosophy seriously as a tool for reading the present moment without retreating into either jargon or pop simplification, and the failure cases of that project function less as arguments against the project and more as arguments about how hard the project was, and how few people are even attempting it now, and how the space he occupied — the public intellectual who's actually a philosopher, not a journalist with a Wikipedia article on Foucault — has basically collapsed back into journalism since he aged out of it, which is its own historical phenomenon, and which I'd argue is downstream of the same forces that produced him, which is to say, the post-89 opening where suddenly the West needed people who could explain why the Eastern bloc had failed without admitting that the West also had problems, and Žižek was uniquely positioned because he came from inside the failure and could narrate it in a tone that flattered nobody.

Anyway he'll outlive us all out of pure spite and write thirty more books and half of them will be the same book and the other half will contain, buried somewhere around page 140, a single passage that makes you sit up and reread it three times.

arcticdementor

"I recently drove several thousand miles through small town heritage America during my PCS. Mostly in the South. Hopping from home to home of the families of my friends I made in the military while on the East Coast. VFW posts prominently doted many small towns. Banners of their fallen in the streets, town halls, courthouses, small stores. I remember the media mocking the Russians for doing the same. They take pride in their patriotism and they made sure to point that out to me as I talked with them. They welcomed me, an outsider, into their homes and places of worship. These people are not bitter, nor angry at the state of affairs. They largely seem, not ignorant, but sort of in a strange trance that they are still living in a long past republic that still loves them. They are, in Yarvin’s term, the very definition of Hobbits. Good, moral Christians, who are being abused and don’t realize it. It is horrifying and depressing. The big blue cities don’t honor their fallen, their VFW Posts hidden away, their veterans keeping to themselves as private individuals, and often I see foreign flags more than my flag. The heritage American is by far not the “deplorables” they are portrayed as. Their sacrifices derided and insulted. It burns in a way I can’t really describe well. I don’t really have a grand point with this post other than vent. I’m powerless regardless of what little authority has been delegated to me. It seems like all I can do is stand my post like that one Roman soldier at Pompeii waiting for terrible things to consume all that matters."

—Pax Imperialis

bambamramfan

"You know what people say about you where I’m from?" "Let me guess, bad things." "No. Worse. We say nice things. “We took them literally, when we should have taken them seriously.”"

-----------------------

I wasn't going to say anything, until I saw the tag "blue america hates red america."

So this quote is being passed through three factions of culture war, and each adds to its interpretation.

It's describing a small town ethic that isn't out to get anyone, just wants to be respected and not bothered.

It's being written up by a cosmopolitan right wing ideologue who emphasizes the elements of resentiment, while thinking that makes it better.

It's being shared uncritically by roughly center-left aligned (socially at least) people who want to use this to criticize how the left is treating #1.

All the while, its most concrete depiction of that """hate""" that the left has shown is a word quoted from *ten years ago* from a party's presidential nominee, that was quickly condemned from everyone right and left.

When was the last time the right's actual President said something that cruel about American citizens who disagree with him? Tuesday. (It *is* Tuesday. Yeah, I know.)

Which is the part that infuriates all the progressives, that they are held to a standard of "if one of us says one bad thing you will resent it for a decade" vs "Trump told veterans to go die in a ditch, that rascal." But that's such old hat no one even bothers to complain anymore.

But it's not 1 saying this, it's 2, a tiny unrepresentative slice demographically, LARPing about the Roman Empire (yeah I said empire not republic.) Who sees a bucolic idyll and can only think "they hate you! get mad at all the hate they have for you! (why aren't you more mad yet.)" And 3 who spreads it, presumably about a desire for the left to stop fucking up (I feel you man) but is so out of date they need to rely on plot points from three presidential administrations ago.

If you read Tolkien, the point is to be Hobbits, not to patronizingly try to protect them while never being of them.

maidthings

elf liberalism probably goes insane

maidthings

"elf liberalism is basically the same as gnome fascism" - phrase that has been echoing in my head for the past 30 minutes

autisticexpression2

What the fuck does this mean?

maidthings

its not my job to educate you

materialist-scumbag

The first edition of The Hobbit, 1937, calls the high elves Gnomes. On the page. Elrond is descended from them, the swords from the troll-hoard were forged by them, and the word Tolkien uses for the most exalted, most learned, most tragic people in his entire invented cosmology is the word you now associate with a ceramic man holding a fishing rod next to a birdbath.

He kept using it. Gnomes survives in the Lord of the Rings drafts as late as 1944, deep into the writing of the Frodo-and-Faramir material, and only dies in the late 1940s when he's drafting the appendices and concedes the word is too misleading.

So when the phrase "elf liberalism is basically the same as gnome fascism" started circulating on tumblr in the summer of 2024 (tumblr user maidthings, quoting a phrase already rattling around their head, in a thread that also produced "elf liberalism probably goes insane," which is the better line), everyone treated it as a joke about vibes. Elves are wine-mom NPR listeners, gnomes are little angry men, ha. And it works as that. But the reason it works is that for about thirty years in the most influential fantasy corpus ever written, the elf and the gnome were the same guy, and the thing that split them apart was a manufacturing sector in Thuringia.

Tolkien wanted "gnome" for philological reasons. Greek gnōmē, thought, intelligence; the Noldor are "those who know," the craftsman-scholar elves, the ones who invent writing and gems and most of the plot. A gnome, to a man trained on Greek, is a knower.

The problem is that the word had a prior owner. Paracelsus, the Swiss alchemist, coined or at least popularized gnomus in the sixteenth century for his earth elementals, little people who move through soil the way we move through air. That's the folkloric gnome: subterranean, small, attached to the ground itself.

And then the ground-spirit got a supply chain.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the ceramics towns of Thuringia, Gräfenroda above all, started turning Paracelsus's earth elemental into terracotta. Philipp Griebel is the name that survives, August Heissner the other one; bearded little miners with picks and lanterns and wheelbarrows, fired and painted and sold by the gross. This is the same German toy-and-ornament belt that gave the world the mass-produced Christmas ornament, and the gnome was a product line. Folklore in, SKUs out.

In 1847 Sir Charles Isham, tenth baronet, comes home to Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire with twenty-one of them for his rockery. Isham was a spiritualist who believed the figures had a real connection to earth spirits, which makes him roughly the last man in history to take garden gnomes at theological face value. He also, and the photographs from 1897 confirm this, posed three of them holding a placard, on strike, demanding better pay and conditions. A Victorian baronet built a miniature labor action out of German ceramics in his rock garden.

His daughters hated them. After he died in 1903 they went after the collection, air rifles, the works. One gnome survived by falling into a crevice in the rockery, was found decades later, got named Lampy, and now sits behind glass at Lamport Hall insured for a million pounds.

Hold Lampy in mind. He's the whole arc in one object: working-class iconography, purchased by an aristocrat, exterminated by the next generation of aristocrats, then re-valorized as heritage once it was safely rare.

Because what happened to the gnome between Isham and Tolkien is a price collapse. Mass production made gnomes cheap, and the British suburban expansion of the 1930s gave millions of working-class and lower-middle-class households their first gardens, and the cheap ornament went into the new small garden the way the flying ducks went onto the wall. The gnome became the marker of the wrong kind of garden. The Royal Horticultural Society kept gnomes off the Chelsea Flower Show for about a century, with the explicit logic that they were tacky, and didn't relent until 2013, as a one-off for the show's centenary. The ban was a class boundary maintained with a list of prohibited ornaments, and the gnome was the named offender.

That's what poisoned the word for Tolkien. By the 1940s "gnome" no longer suggested knowledge to anyone; it suggested the pebble-dashed semi with the concrete fisherman. The Noldor couldn't afford the association. So the knowers got folded fully into "elves," a word that had spent the same century moving in the opposite direction, up through Victorian fairy painting and Edwardian children's books into Oxford philology, and the gnome was left holding the wheelbarrow.

One word goes up, one word goes down, and the sorting mechanism is retail price point.

And once you see the split as a class split, the post-Tolkien product lines all make sense, because every fantasy property since has had to decide what a gnome is FOR, given that "small earth-person" was already taken by dwarves, and they all converge on the same answer: the gnome is a technician. D&D makes him a playable race in 1978 and can't find him a personality beyond illusionist and tinkerer. Dragonlance, 1984, gives Krynn its tinker gnomes, an entire race that is one joke about engineering committees. Warhammer had gnomes early and simply deleted them. And World of Warcraft, 2004, ships the purest version: the gnomes are refugees. Their city, Gnomeregan, was irradiated in a botched defense of their own homeland, and the survivors live in a corner of the dwarves' capital, a displaced population of engineers with no territory, valued for their skills, owning nothing.

The elf in the same period keeps his real estate. Rivendell, Lothlórien, the eternal forest kingdoms; nobody can enter without permission, dwarves get blindfolded at the border, and there is no visible economy in any of them, no farms, no trade you can point to, just the kind of effortless abundance that in any actual society means the money was made somewhere else, earlier, by someone whose name is on the gate. Galadriel calls her whole project "the long defeat." Tolkien himself, in the long letter to Milton Waldman laying out the legendarium, says the elves' sin is that they became embalmers, that they wanted to stop change itself, to keep Middle-earth as a private preserve of unfading beauty. And when the preservation finally fails, they liquidate and sail west, to a jurisdiction where their assets are protected forever.

A deathless person is a perpetual trust. Immortality in these settings does the narrative work that inherited capital does in ours: it means time is always on your side, compounding is always working for you, and you can afford a politics of patience, procedure, and tasteful regret. Elf liberalism is the liberalism of the secured. Tolerant in the abstract, cosmopolitan in self-image, and absolutely gated in practice. The blindfold at the border of Lothlórien is the most honest institution in Middle-earth.

The gnome's position is the opposite balance sheet. Skill but no land. A workshop but no rents. Everything he has, he has to keep making, and one bad decade, one irradiated city, one shift in what the big people will pay for, wipes him out. Historians of actual fascism have spent a century on exactly this class: the artisans, shopkeepers, and smallholders, the Mittelstand, proprietors small enough to be terrified, big enough to have something to lose, and convinced that organized labor below them and finance above them are jointly arranging their extinction. That's the gnome's structural position in every setting that bothers to give him one. The meme's instinct that his politics curdle nationalist (the soil connection, the racial gift for craft, the ancient claim on the underground) is just reading the class position correctly.

Here is where the joke stops being a joke. Gräfenroda, the town that manufactured the garden gnome, is in Thuringia. Thuringia is where the AfD, under its most openly extreme state leader, won a German state election in September 2024, the first far-right plurality in a state parliament since the war. The gnome's actual hometown, the small-workshop ceramics belt that lost its markets twice, once to the war and once to reunification, voted the way the meme says gnomes vote. I am not claiming the lawn ornaments did it. I am noting that the meme reverse-engineered, from fantasy-race vibes, the political sociology of the exact region that produced the fantasy race's commercial form, which suggests the vibes were carrying real information the whole time.

And the equivalence, the "basically the same" part, holds up better than the joke needs it to. Both peoples are ancient, declining, demographically doomed, and organized entirely around what they hold: the elf around land and time, the gnome around tools and skill. Both run a politics of loss management. The difference is whether the portfolio is currently safe. Elf liberalism is what gnome fascism looks like when the assets are still appreciating; the other line in the thread had it right, elf liberalism probably goes insane, because the moment the long defeat stops being long, the moment somebody actually moves on the forest, the tolerance was always a luxury good and luxury goods get cut first. Tolkien wrote that part too. The Noldor, back when they were still called Gnomes, responded to their first real dispossession with an oath of unlimited vengeance, three kinslayings, and a multi-generational war of revanche over inherited property. The most liberal-coded race in fantasy has, as its founding political document, a blood feud over stolen jewels.

Anyway. Lampy is still at Lamport Hall, behind his glass, a mass-produced Thuringian worker figurine that survived an aristocratic extermination campaign by hiding in the rocks, and is now itself landed heritage with an insurance valuation and a gift shop. And somewhere in the 1897 photographs his three colleagues are still on strike, placard up, waiting on the baronet for better pay and conditions.

#elf liberalism #gnome fascism #tolkien #garden gnomes #the noldor were gnomes this is real #class composition of fantasy races #thuringia #same as it ever was

Start with the thing everyone gets wrong, which is that they think left and right are positions on a number line. You hear it in the languag

You hear it in the language. “Far left,” “centre-right,” “moving towards the middle,” as though there were a single road running east to west and every political creature on it could be located by a single coordinate, and the only question worth asking about anyone is how far along they’ve travelled. This is the dumbest map ever drawn and we keep using it because it lets a newspaper sort six hundred million people into a bar chart.

How Poly are you?

I am not saving any results, so reply or put yours in reblog tags.

#polyamory #personality quizzes

materialist-scumbag

HOUSE (HAUSU, 1977) is back at the IFC Center in New York this spring, running in their Late Night Favorites series — which is the same room where Janus first put the remastered print up for American audiences in January 2010

So the cat in this movie is named Blanche, and Blanche is a matte painting for about half her screen time, and when you kill her the portrait of her sprays enough blood to flood an entire upstairs room, and a girl named Melody gets her fingers bitten off by a piano that then eats the rest of her. Everybody who writes about Hausu starts here, with the inventory of insane images — the flying severed head that bites a butt, the futons, the disembodied legs that flying-kick a painting to death — because the images are genuinely like nothing else, and because starting there lets you skip the boring part, which is the only part I care about, which is: why did the biggest film studio in Japan pay to make this.

Because that's the actual weird fact. Not the piano. The piano is downstream. The weird fact is that Toho — the Godzilla studio, the Kurosawa studio, a company that is literally a component of the Nikkei 225 today — green-lit a script that every director on its own staff refused to touch because they thought it would end their careers, then sat on it for two years, then handed it to a guy who had never made a feature and wasn't even an employee. That doesn't happen at a healthy studio. Healthy studios have a development process specifically so that this never happens. So something had to be broken for House to exist, and the thing that was broken is the entire Japanese studio system, and it broke on a schedule you can date.

Okay so. The Japanese film industry in the 1970s is in what one historian flatly calls a virtual collapse. In 1975, for the first time, domestic films drop below 50% of the box office in their own country. The thing eating them is television, same as everywhere, but the Japanese majors respond to it in a specific structural way that matters enormously for our piano movie.

Here's the move. There's no Paramount Decree in Japan — no antitrust ruling forcing the studios to divest their theaters, the way it gutted the American majors in 1948. So Toho does the opposite of what Hollywood was forced to do. In 1971 it spins its actual film production off into a subsidiary and keeps the theaters, the real estate, the exhibition business. The studio stops being a place that makes movies and becomes a landlord that occasionally finances content to fill rooms it owns. By 1972 the trade press is already describing Toho and Shochiku as companies expanding by gradually shrinking the production arm and making the money on exhibition and theaters and other business. The lots empty out. Crews get "farmed" over into television work, conventions, expos — anything that isn't the expensive, money-losing act of producing a comprehensible feature film.

And I mean that last phrase literally. Obayashi's own account of how he finally got the job is that his producer told him Toho was tired of losing money on films people could understand, and figured they'd give the incomprehensible one a shot. Read that as a balance-sheet statement, because that's what it is. The legible product was a money-loser. So the studio took a flier on illegibility as a hedge, not as an artistic bet. The thing nobody could explain was, on net, no worse a gamble than the things they could.

Now. Where does Obayashi come from, this guy who isn't on staff. He comes from commercials. This is the part that explains the texture of the entire movie and almost nobody foregrounds it, because "TV-commercial director" sounds like a knock and it's the opposite of a knock — it's the whole engine. Through the 1960s and into the '70s, the place in Japanese visual culture with actual money to burn on optical tricks, on chroma key, on matte work and animation composited onto live action, was not the dying film studios. It was the advertising industry. Commercials were where the special-effects R&D budget lived, because a thirty-second spot for Calpis or whatever amortizes a gimmick across a national audience in a way a feature can't. Obayashi spent that decade making CMs, building exactly the bag of optical-printer tricks that he then dumps, undiluted, into House — he says outright he wanted the effects to look fake, like a child made them, and he could make them look any way he wanted because he'd been doing this commercially for years. The seven girls? Cast largely out of models he'd used in his commercials. The aunt is played by a woman he'd shot in Calpis ads. The composer scored CMs with him. House is a commercials unit that briefly got loaned a Toho soundstage and a horror premise, with a commercials guy directing.

And it was pre-sold like a commercial campaign, too, which is the detail that should really make you sit up. The soundtrack album by Godiego — the rock band, the Monkey Magic guys — was written and released before the movie was even shot. There was a House manga, a House novelization, a House radio drama, and it was the success of the radio drama that finally got Toho to officially commit to production. Sit with the sequence: the ancillary merchandise generated the demand that justified making the thing the merchandise was ancillary to. The film is the loss-leader the franchise was built to subsidize, except the franchise existed first. That's a media-rights structure the rest of the world spends the next forty years catching up to — ahead of 1977 and ahead of 2010 both — and Toho fell into it sideways because the production economics were so wrecked that the only way to de-risk a movie was to sell everything around it first.

So that's how the thing gets made. A landlord-studio with empty stages, a hole in the schedule where comprehensible profitable cinema used to be, an effects industry that had migrated into advertising, a director who is really an ad-man, and a financing logic that treats the actual film as the least important object in a bundle of products. Run all that through one Toho soundstage for two months with no storyboard and you get a haunted house that eats schoolgirls.

The film comes out July 30, 1977, double-billed with a romance picture nobody remembers, gets panned by the Japanese critics who bothered, and is a hit — specifically with the young audience, the exact demographic the industry was convinced it had permanently lost to TV and Hollywood. Jasper Sharp's line is that House recaptured a youth audience believed lost. Which, sure, but notice what recaptured it. What recaptured it was a blast of the visual grammar those kids were already swimming in from television and advertising, ported onto the big screen at a scale advertising couldn't afford. The studio system got beaten by TV-and-commercial aesthetics and then briefly saved, in this one case, by hiring the TV-and-commercial aesthetic and pointing it at a movie screen. The disease and the cure are the same organism.

And then the film just sits there for thirty years. This is the second material fact people skip past. House spends those thirty years as a regional Japanese hit that essentially never gets a proper American release, no home video in the States, for three decades. It exists in the way a lot of things from a collapsing industry exist — as an asset on a shelf, technically owned, commercially inert, waiting for someone to figure out it's worth something.

That someone is Janus Films, and the mechanism is worth naming because it's the same kind of machine as the rest of the story, just thirty years later. Janus and its prestige arm, the Criterion Collection, build a sub-label called Eclipse — explicitly conceived as the bin for cult and minor titles that don't merit the full white-glove Criterion treatment. Eclipse is a way to monetize the back catalog cheaply: no commentary tracks, no restoration budget, just get the rights and get it out. House is slated for that bargain shelf. And then Janus starts getting requests for theatrical screenings — there's demand for the thing on a big screen — so they run a remastered print on a small theatrical tour, two sold-out shows at the New York Asian Film Festival in 2009, and then in January 2010 a wider rollout that begins at the IFC Center in New York. Then the Criterion disc in October 2010. The cult forms on the other side of all this, not before it. The "cult classic" is the dividend; the distribution play is the principal that got put up to earn it.

Which is the loop closing, and it closes in the same building. The IFC Center is where House's American afterlife was capitalized in 2010, and the IFC Center is where it's running again this spring as a late-night favorite. A movie that exists because a landlord-studio needed cheap content to fill rooms it owned is now, sixteen years into its second American life, content that a New York arthouse runs at midnight to fill a room it owns. The economic function is the same as it always was: programming to put bodies in seats. The only thing that changed is that the bodies now think they're at a cult event rather than at the bottom half of a 1977 double bill with a forgotten romance.

I don't want to oversell the rhyme, because the rhyme breaks in the obvious place — Obayashi was making something he believed in, out of grief, even; he was from Hiroshima, lost his childhood friends to the bomb, and the whole engine of the plot is a woman who waited for a fiancé who never came back from the war and curdled into something that devours the unmarried girls the bombings spared. That's real, and it's the part the merchandise structure can't account for and didn't need to. The financing logic explains why a movie this strange could get funded. It doesn't explain why this particular strangeness, and the grief is the answer to the second question, not the first.

But the funding logic is the one I keep coming back to, because the legend is always "a studio inexplicably let a madman make his vision," and there's nothing inexplicable about it. The studio was broke, the production economics were upside down, the talent and the techniques had already decamped to advertising, and selling the soundtrack first was just prudent. Every weird thing about how House got made is what prudence looks like inside a collapsing system — the empty stages, the ad-man director, the soundtrack out before the cameras rolled, the radio drama greenlighting the movie, the cult that arrives thirty years late to a midnight room, all of it the most cautious available move at each step, and the cumulative result of all that caution being a piano that eats a girl named Melody.

Supergirl bombed this weekend, $38 million which is less then Morbius, but that's never a sign of the quality. Opening weekend is a mix of marketing spend and uninformed buzz (such as who loved the previous movie.) So what that tells me is Paramount didn't spend much, and buzz for superhero movies is lower than it was. NEXT week we will see how audiences reacted to it, but it could be the most tasteful dive into our own souls, and we wouldn't know it yet.

bambamramfan

Lessons from Quizzes

I made two web quizzes this weekend, one of which has been taken by the entire internet now, and one just a few people tested. I found a few commonalities.

I had no idea how deep into the weeds it was going to get trying to balance all the results, so that every result gets some love. Here is a paragraph of text Claude was regularly giving me as we tried new attempts:

Centroidal Voronoi / Lloyd (capacity-constrained CVT). Provably gives round, equal, central-generator convex cells — generator = centroid by construction. But the generators migrate to density centers, so archetype names unglue from their concept coordinates. This is the k-means re-tile the project already tried and rejected (15/41 recovery). Round cells, scrambled labels. Drop equal-mass (plain Mahalanobis Voronoi). Rounder, but corners get ~nobody and the center jams — exactly the reachability problem equal-mass was added to solve.

The second thing I learned is more important.

bambamramfan

folks see this is what i mean

Lessons from Quizzes

I made two web quizzes this weekend, one of which has been taken by the entire internet now, and one just a few people tested. I found a few commonalities.

The second thing I learned is more important.

chaumas-deactivated20240115

It is kind of crazy how often Batman stories raise the question of “is Robin ethical?” and ultimately come to the conclusion that Robin isn’t really a child. His trauma and experiences have transformed him into something else, something that looks like a child but isn’t, or only is sometimes. It’s no longer necessary or even possible to treat him as though he is a real child. Some fundamental essence of purity has been lost; further trauma and harm may heaped on the Un-Child indefinitely.

Obviously Robin is about punching clowns and telepathic gorillas, so whatever. But it betrays certain attitudes about children that are really pervasive in our culture—that children are definitionally innocent, and that innocence is a product they produce and perform for adult consumption. If that innocence is lost, damaged, or imperfect, their value is lessened and the need to protect them becomes a need to protect other children from the contamination they might spread. The Un-Child becomes a sort of contagion, a threat to the harvest, who is conditionally allowed access to childhood if they can convincingly pretend at innocence.

materialist-scumbag

Michelin handed out its 2026 stars all spring (France in March, Britain and Ireland in Dublin back in February, Hong Kong and Macau in March marking the centennial of the star itself), and the company finally said out loud, last October, the thing everybody in the trade already knew: tourism boards pay them to show up.

Okay so the star is a tire-company loyalty program, and I mean that with total literal precision, not as a gotcha.

In 1889 André and Édouard Michelin formalize a rubber-goods business in Clermont-Ferrand that their grandfather had been running since the 1830s. Hoses, belts, agricultural stuff. They pivot to pneumatic tires, and they have a demand problem that's almost comically specific: there are fewer than 3,000 cars in all of France, the roads are bad, gasoline is hard to find, and a tire only wears out if the car drives on it. The product is fine. Nobody's putting miles on it.

So in 1900 they print 35,000 copies of a little book and give it away free. Maps, where to find a garage, how to patch a tube, where the petrol is, and, almost incidentally, one section among many, where a driver might sleep and eat. The whole apparatus exists to get the bourgeois early-adopter into his car and OUT onto the road, because every kilometer he drives is depreciation on a set of Michelins he'll eventually have to replace.

The restaurant listing is downstream of tire wear. That's the literal mechanism, printed in the preface, where André says the point is to give the driver everything he needs to travel through France. He's describing a marketing department's flowchart in plain terms.

For twenty years it's free, which is the part that matters, because a free thing carries no obligation and confers no status. Then the famous anecdote, which Michelin tells on itself so it's at least half-true: André walks into a garage and finds copies of his guide stacked under a workbench, leveling it. And the line that comes out of that, "man only respects what he pays for," is carrying an enormous load, because it's the moment a marketing subsidy turns into a product. In 1920 they start charging seven francs, they pull the paid advertising out, and they begin sending anonymous people to eat in the restaurants instead of just transcribing whatever the hotel sent in.

You see the move. The credibility comes precisely from severing the guide from the thing it was built to sell. A free pamphlet that wants you to drive carries an obvious agenda; a thing you bought, written by people with no stake, who paid for their own lunch, reads as trustworthy. The anonymity and the cover price are the same gesture, Michelin manufacturing arm's-length distance from Michelin, and that distance is the entire asset. The tire company's most valuable property turned out to be the appearance of having nothing to do with the tire company.

Then 1926: a single star, "worth a stop," appears in the regional guides. The second and third stars get added over 1931 to 1933, and the definitions everybody quotes now, worth a detour and worth a special journey, don't get printed until about 1936, five years after the tiers exist.

Read those definitions again. A detour and a journey are tire wear. The rating scale, the actual semantic content of the thing chefs will eventually kill themselves over, is denominated in kilometers driven. They never stopped selling the road trip. They just got a priesthood to score it.

And for about seventy years that's a stable, almost elegant arrangement: the guide costs money, the inspectors are ghosts, France gets an annually-updated map of where to point your Citroën, and Michelin sells rubber. The cost of running the inspection corps is a marketing line item, written off against tire sales, the way a company pays for a billboard. The book losing money is fine. The book existed to make you drive, and the inspection corps was a cost of doing that.

Here's where it turns, and the turn is the interesting part.

Tires got good. This is the unglamorous fact the whole later history sits on. A modern radial lasts 50,000, 70,000 miles; the replacement cycle that the guide existed to accelerate stretched out to the point where one Frenchman's road trips barely move the needle. Meanwhile Michelin globalized into a commodity manufacturer fighting Bridgestone and Goodyear on price, and the guide, this expensive, prestigious, money-losing thing, was a marketing expense justified by a connection to tire sales that had quietly evaporated.

The collateral the whole thing was borrowed against had stopped securing anything. You're now running an anonymous fine-dining inspectorate, in dozens of countries, for reasons that made sense when there were 3,000 cars in France and make none when you're a multinational selling truck tires in forty markets.

So the guide had to learn to pay for itself, and around the mid-2010s it found out how. It started charging the destinations. (One widely-repeated account says a consulting firm handed them the idea; that one I can't source past a single blogger, so take it as trade gossip.) The part people get wrong, and it matters, is who pays: the destinations, never the restaurants. The restaurants can't pay; that would collapse the arm's-length distance that's the only thing the star is made of. The tourism boards pay. A city or a state or a country wants Michelin coverage because a star reliably moves dining traffic, and culinary tourists stay longer and spend more, and Michelin will send its inspectors for a fee, dressed as a "partnership."

And the numbers are a real document of how the prestige gets priced. California's tourism board put up $600,000 in 2019 to get a statewide guide, the first American market to pay. Visit Florida and its cities paid around $1.5 million. Texas and five metros, about $900,000. Atlanta, a million. Thailand spent roughly $4.4 million over five years; South Korea about $1.8 million for Seoul; Israel agreed to something like $1.6 million for Tel Aviv over loud objection that this was a strange use of tax money. Estonia signed up. A venture capital firm reportedly paid to drag Kuala Lumpur in. Colorado's state board paid $300,000 and then Denver and Boulder and Aspen each kicked in another $70,000 to $100,000 on top.

The design is tight. Paying gets you the inspectors and the coverage and exactly nothing else, with the stars and the floor on the count left entirely to the inspectors. Virginia looked at a $360,000 ask for the Michelin South guide and walked.

Because the second the payment bought a star, the star would be worth zero, and everyone in the chain understands this, which is why the fiction gets maintained so carefully on all sides. The tourism board pays for the gaze, never the verdict. What it buys is the right to be judged by a judge whose incorruptibility is the product. The 1920 move (sever the guide from the money so it can be trusted, then sell the trust) is the same move in 2019, with a tourism ministry standing where the seven-franc cover price used to stand. Same machine, new costume.

Which is the centennial they were quietly toasting all spring. A hundred years of the star, and the financial logic ran a full circle: a free book subsidized by tire sales, becoming a paid book to manufacture independence from tire sales, becoming a "partnership"-funded book once the tire-sales rationale died, with the independence now sold to governments instead of bought from readers. The thing being monetized was always the same, the credibility of seeming un-monetized.

I should say the part that isn't structural, because about one piece in ten earns a little heat and this is where mine does. The star is also a thing people die over, and that part isn't a pricing question.

In February 2003 Bernard Loiseau shot himself with a hunting rifle at La Côte d'Or in Saulieu. He held three Michelin stars. A week earlier the rival GaultMillau had cut his score from 19 to 17 out of 20, François Simon had written him up badly in Le Figaro, and the rumor going around was that Michelin was about to take his third star. It didn't. The 2003 Guide Rouge, published the day of his funeral, kept all three. He had told another three-star chef, flatly, that he wouldn't survive losing one. He was also bipolar, deep in debt, off his Prozac because the evenness it gave him felt like being someone else. Paul Bocuse, eighty years old, said GaultMillau killed him.

Maybe. Loiseau was the first French chef to float his company on the stock exchange, which means a downgrade landed as both an insult and a hit to an actual share price, an actual debt load. The rating wired straight into his balance sheet in a way it never had for any chef before him. He'd turned himself into a security and the guides into ratings agencies, and then the agency downgraded the bond.

Thirteen years later, the night before the 2016 Michelin ceremony, Benoît Violier, running what had just been named the best restaurant in the world, three stars, was found dead by gunshot in Switzerland. Same eve-of-the-verdict timing. People remembered Loiseau immediately.

And the thing I keep landing on is that the kilometers never left. The scale still means what it meant in 1936: a stop, a detour, a journey, all of it distance, all of it the road. Loiseau died over his place in a ranking system that a tire company built to get bourgeois Frenchmen to wear out their tires faster, and that's still, underneath the white tablecloths and the suicides and the $4.4 million from Thailand, a way of selling you the drive.

Two men shot themselves over a unit of measurement for tread wear. The guide cleared its centennial. The accounting holds.

vomitdodger

Based

edward-blake-unknown-knight

"But but if their unarmed they might be trying to feed their family, think if they have a mental illness, the morality of it all"

Yea sooo anyway!!

tbry

"If you kill a burglar you're evil because you value your stuff over a human life!"

No, if you decide to burgle someone it's because you value their stuff more than your own life.

generallemarc

Um, no? To all of this? If someone breaks into your house and tries to run at you(or any direction that could be interpreted as such in the moment) despite you pointing your gun at them and yelling "don't move!", then it's ok to fire and that has nothing to do with burglary, because anyone who charges someone with a gun can be reasonably assumed to have intentions alot worse than stealing a tv. If they're clearly no threat, like if you somehow know for a fact that they're not dangerous like these scenarios all imply, it's murder. Life>property, and one guy who, in this scenario, you know doesn't intend to harm you is not a mass of rioters trying to break into your property for who-knows-what and necessitating you become a Roof Korean.

otakuvampyre

If you see a stranger on your property, obviously you are obligated to give them the chance to retreat UNLESS it's immediately obvious they're a danger to your life or that of your family's.

But if you aim your gun at someone, tell them to stop, and they don't, you have a right to defend yourself, your family, and your property. You are not obligated to let someone walk off with your stuff, but you are obligated to give them a chance to stop and if they're not a threat to your life (for instance, if they're already leaving the premises) you aren't really within your rights to shoot to kill.

Shoot to maim, however? I'd say if you're breaking into someone's house to steal shit, taking a bullet is just the risk you have accepted to take, but I would support shooting to injure rather than kill in cases where there is no threat to life.

siryouarebeingmocked

Shooting to maim can still get you in serious legal trouble, because it looks better to a judge and jury if you used deadly force to kill someone. Personally, I'd rather avoid harming someone at all if I can. This does not include, obviously, if they're risking the life of myself or my family. Hopefully I'll never have to test this principle.

beardedmrbean

Rule 2

Shoot to maim and they're armed they then have the chance to attempt to return the favor, your job is to neutralize the threat and center mass is the biggest target meaning you have the best chance to hit it.

Warning shots could also get you arrested so those are also a bad idea,

because they get treated the same as "not" warning shots in most US states that I know of.

generallemarc

A warning shot is a live round that you fired at a point you probably don't know the end of. "I'm sure there's nothing in those trees/behind that wall" is often a true assumption, but because people can fucking die when it's wrong it's never a good one to make with firing so casually. And yes, firing into the air counts. That kills people every single year on the Fourth of July or New Years because some idiot doesn't know the risks and thinks they can just pop off rounds with no conseuences.

celticcanon

With the exception of the Navy and Coast Guard, we don't even do warning shots in the military anymore - they are simply too unpredictable to do safely even for trained and experienced shooters. So either shoot for IC, or don't shoot at all.

As far as home invasion is concerned, anyone in my house uninvited has two options. Either immediately surrender and follow all verbal commands, or I run a Failure to Stop drill through the midline of their body. I don't care which direction they are facing either. Just because the threat has turned their back does not mean they are no longer a threat. They could be running away, or they could also be trying to gain a tactical advantage. I don't know the answer to that question, so they will be treated as a threat until proven otherwise.

generallemarc

If they're running like, directly away from you without stopping, I'd say it's a reasonable assumption that they're not a threat. But if it's dark and in a cramped space(ie indoors), it'd be pretty hard to ascertain that's what's going on, and a much more reasonable assumption that someone who responds to "don't move I have a gun" by moving is a danger.

isaacsapphire

There have been more than enough tragic incidents where someone shot a person who turned out to be lost, looking for help, or even a family member or other fellow resident of the dwelling to make it clear that just unloading at a humanoid figure on your property or even in your home without at least trying to verbally warn first is probably a very bad idea.

That said, there have also been more than enough tragic incidents that make it clear that people busting into an occupied dwelling may well have intentions far worse than stealing and refusing to consider use of force in resisting home invaders is potentially allowing others to torment and murder your family in the worst way imaginable.

bambamramfan

Laws like this are *not* in place for liberal namby pamby feelings.

A criminal is in the house and you catch them with a gun. They consider running away but you could shoot and murder them and be off scot free.

They can rush you with a knife, or run off. Knife is bad, let's say 50/50 chance they die or you die or both.

But if YOU're not allowed to fire IF THEY ARE FLEEING, then fleeing is actually a pretty good option for them.

You reeeeaalllly want the illegal assailant who is in your home to remember their life is NOT forfeit, and killing you will make their life much worse. That is what you want them thinking about at the time. And if they understand "so long as I don't escalate he won't escalate" your life is in a much safer place.

So yes, we try to use the law to not escalate from breaking and entering up to assault and murder.

***If you are ever in a fight with someone stronger and bigger than you, for your own safety, do not pull out a knife.

no-sharks-on-the-sun

I think my opinion about Matt Yglesias is that he is a machine whose goal is to turn arguments into influence and little else - he may on occasion make strong arguments pointed in the correct direction, but the goodness is largely incidental and you should not mistake this for him being a real human being

bambamramfan

Other way around. Someone who always makes good arguments is a robot. Someone who occasionally makes good arguments, but gives into petty spite and over-grand theories and sub-cultural-myopia and slowly gets more conservative and less rigorous as they age, is very human.

markovchaingang

the cruelty isn't the point but rather the means to the specific end of "looking like a winner" which is probably stupider

deadgenerations

ive made a few posts about how i think 'the cruelty is the point' is weak thought terminating 'analysis' but, well... it does seem that for some people in the current US administration cruelty is an end sought for its own sake irrespective of any utility towards other outcomes. its hard to explain some actions otherwise.

theaudientvoid

Obligatory True Believer Quote:

When we renounce the self and become a part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage, but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we loose our individual independence into the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame or remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement. Thus, hatred is not only a means of unification, but also its product.

materialist-scumbag

on Roy Rogers, written from a slow news week, no specific peg

Roy Rogers was originally Leonard Slye, born in 1911 in Cincinnati, raised partly on a houseboat his father had built on the Ohio River, the family operated outside the romantic riverboat-people category, his father just couldn't afford a regular house and lashed together a floating one, and he ended up a singing cowboy because in 1929 he and his sister hitchhiked to California to pick fruit in the migrant labor camps that John Steinbeck would later write about, and where Steinbeck would write about it, Slye picked up a guitar.

This is the part I want to start with, because the rest of the Roy Rogers story makes more sense if you start with the migrant labor camp.

Leonard Slye spent the early 1930s in California as a kind of low-grade Okie, despite not being from Oklahoma, the cultural category of the Depression-era migrant from somewhere east of the Mississippi who washed up in the Central Valley looking for work was capacious enough to absorb him, picking peaches outside Chico, working at a shoe factory, living in tent camps, and singing in cowboy-themed western-swing bands at night for tips. He joined a group called the Sons of the Pioneers in 1934, which was one of those acts that was big in California and basically nowhere else, and they got hired to do background music for B-westerns at Republic Pictures, which was the lowest-tier studio in Hollywood, Republic produced what people in the industry called "horse operas," 60-minute B-pictures designed to fill out the second half of a double bill at small-town theaters that needed cheap content to put butts in seats during the Depression.

Republic, in 1937, had one star, Gene Autry, the original singing cowboy, and Autry got into a contract dispute with the studio in 1938, which is the moment the studio decided it needed a backup singing cowboy in case Autry left. They auditioned Leonard Slye. They renamed him Roy Rogers. They built him from scratch.

The Roy Rogers persona, the white hat, the rhinestone shirts, the palomino horse named Trigger, the marriage-of-convenience-then-real-thing with Dale Evans, the sidekick Gabby Hayes, the "Happy Trails" theme, the catchphrase, the whole apparatus, was invented by a studio publicity department in the late 1930s as a substitute for an existing star they were worried about losing. Almost none of it originated with Leonard Slye. The clothes were costume, the horse was a movie horse, the wholesome-cowboy persona was a character he played, repeatedly, in 87 feature films and then 100-some television episodes, until the persona became, through sheer repetition, the thing he was, and Leonard Slye essentially disappeared into Roy Rogers permanently and never came back out.

This is a thing that happens with movie stars more often than gets discussed.

The mid-century studio system had a specific labor-relations structure, the contract player, in which an actor signed a multi-year exclusive contract with a single studio, and the studio assigned them roles, controlled their public image, designed their off-screen lifestyle (literally, there were studio publicists who placed news items, arranged the dates, vetted the marriages, hired the stylists), and in many cases changed the actor's name to something more marketable. Marion Morrison became John Wayne. Frances Gumm became Judy Garland. Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas. The actors had varying degrees of buy-in with their studio personas, some of them, like John Wayne, eventually became indistinguishable from the personas; others, like Judy Garland, lived in painful tension with them, and the basic fact was that the studio invented the public-facing entity and the actor inhabited it.

Roy Rogers is a near-pure case of this process producing a durable consumer brand.

The Republic Pictures contract didn't just make him movies. It also licensed his image, aggressively, for cap guns, lunch boxes, comic books, breakfast cereal, bedroom slippers, branded ranches, branded cookware, and eventually a chain of fast-food restaurants. By the early 1950s Roy Rogers was one of the most heavily merchandised personalities in the United States, second only to Disney characters, and the merchandising operation was essentially a separate business from the movie career, generating money long after the film output had slowed.

(The fast-food chain, Roy Rogers Restaurants, is the thing the brand survives as in 2026, a small-but-stubborn regional chain in the Mid-Atlantic states, currently maybe forty-some locations, mostly in highway rest stops in Maryland and Virginia and West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Marriott Corporation bought the chain in 1968, Marriott was looking for a fast-food brand to compete with McDonald's, and Roy Rogers's name had the kind of family-friendly Americana association Marriott wanted, and they expanded it aggressively in the 1970s and 80s, then sold most of the chain to Hardee's in 1990, which converted most of the locations to Hardee's, except some of the holdouts in the Mid-Atlantic refused to convert because their local franchisees believed the Roy Rogers name still had real value in those markets. They were right. The remaining locations are doing fine. The brand is older than the people running the company now and will probably outlast them. It has fully detached from the actor.)

The Trigger story is its own little disturbing capsule.

Trigger, the palomino, was a real horse, born in 1934, originally named Golden Cloud, used by Olivia de Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) before Roy Rogers acquired him for the singing-cowboy pictures. Trigger appeared in basically every Roy Rogers film and TV episode for thirty years, became one of the most recognizable animals in the United States, was insured for $200,000 (which was a lot of money in the 1940s), and when he died in 1965, at age 33, which is impressively old for a horse, Roy Rogers had him taxidermied and put on display in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum, which existed at various locations in California and Missouri across the back half of the 20th century.

When the museum closed in 2009, the merchandising-derived income wasn't enough to keep it going, and the family decided to liquidate, Trigger's stuffed body was auctioned off for $266,500. A cable TV channel bought him.

This is the kind of thing that, told in the right tone, sounds like a Coen Brothers movie. The taxidermied horse from a 1950s singing-cowboy picture, sold at auction by the family of the dead actor, ending up as set dressing for a cable network. There's something in this, the way American consumer culture eats its own founding figures, the way the icons of the studio era have been progressively asset-stripped and resold to whoever has cash for the IP, that I find genuinely funny in a dark way.

And the deeper joke, the one underneath the taxidermy joke, is that the Roy Rogers picture being sold at the auction was itself a piece of stage dressing, the studio-invented persona that Leonard Slye occupied for most of his adult life. Roy Rogers, when he died in 1998 at 86, was a wealthy man. Leonard Slye had not existed in any meaningful public sense for sixty years. The fast-food chain, the museum, the auction, the cable-network purchase, all of it is the unspooling of an asset that was constructed in 1938 by a studio publicity department for the purpose of having a backup singing cowboy under contract.

There is something that's almost unique to the American 20th century in this, the construction of synthetic personas at industrial scale, the deployment of those personas as both entertainment products and consumer brands, the gradual detachment of the brand from the human being who originally embodied it, the survival of the brand as a freestanding economic entity once the human being is dead, and the ongoing licensing of the brand for purposes (highway fast-food chains, cable network nostalgia programming) that the original human would not necessarily have understood as connected to him in any meaningful way. Mickey Mouse is the same trick at the cartoon level. Colonel Sanders is the same trick at the franchise level. Aunt Jemima was the same trick before they stopped doing it. Santa Claus, a hundred years earlier, was something like the same trick.

What's interesting about Roy Rogers specifically is that the underlying human was, by all accounts, a fundamentally decent guy, Leonard Slye was reportedly nice, generous with fans, loyal to his coworkers, philanthropic in a quiet way, married to the same woman for 47 years, raised nine kids (some biological, some adopted, including a Korean War orphan and a child with Down syndrome, which was unusual at the time), genuinely religious, genuinely committed to the kind of small-c conservative Americana the Roy Rogers brand was selling. The persona and the man sat in alignment, with the obvious-tension reading not fitting the case. The persona was a marketing-department amplification of a thing the man already was.

Which means the Roy Rogers brand, in the period when Leonard Slye was alive, was operating in the relatively sympathetic mode where the brand and the person were in alignment. After Leonard Slye died in 1998, the brand entered the more morally peculiar phase where it was operating without him, owned by his estate, then by various corporate entities, licensed out for the fast-food chain and the museum, eventually sold off in pieces. The brand went on selling Roy Rogers, the persona, without any further input from the human being who had been Roy Rogers.

This is the standard fate of mid-century American consumer brands built on individuals. James Dean is now a licensing entity. Marilyn Monroe is now a licensing entity. Elvis is a vast and complex licensing entity that has its own corporate structure and that supports an entire cottage industry of impersonators and merchandise vendors and tribute concerts. The American 20th century invented the personality-as-brand model, the studios mass-produced it, and the resulting brands have now mostly outlasted the people they were attached to and become free-floating economic objects that show up in fast-food chains, in licensed apparel, in cable-network programming, in highway rest stops in Maryland.

Trigger is in a glass case somewhere. The horse died in 1965. The brand that the horse was attached to is selling double cheeseburgers off Interstate 81. Leonard Slye is buried in California.

And the pattern accumulates as it always has, a guy from a houseboat in Cincinnati picks up a guitar and gets renamed by a studio and spends sixty years inhabiting a costume, and the costume keeps walking around long after he stops, and the costume's horse is in the back of a warehouse, and the cheeseburgers are pretty good actually.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

three masks