This week, Neil Calloway takes a dim view of Simon Pegg’s comments on the film industry…
This week Simon Pegg cited the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in an attempt to clarify comments made in an earlier interview about the infantilization of film. Pegg said this “as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc.”
Not only does it sound like slightly like the crazed, paranoid ramblings of a minor character from Spaced, it’s also not true; media moguls do not sit in smoke filled rooms with politicians trying to work out how to distract from famine and pestilence; they make money and become media moguls by making films and television we want to see.
Aside from being wrong, Pegg’s comments also came across as being slightly hypocritical. A complaint about the infantilization of culture, of people being made to be passionate about things they enjoyed as a child might be valid coming from a learned French cultural theorist, but not the man who stars in big screen reboots of Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. If there are “dominant forces” ruling over what culture we get, then Paramount and Fox, the producers of those two franchises are among them, as are Random House, the biggest publisher in the world, which put out Pegg’s autobiography; he’s not part of the solution, he’s part of the problem.
As well as sounding like a badly written essay from a film studies undergraduate (Pegg’s dissertation was a Marxist critique of 1970s cinema), he completely nukes the fridge when he says “There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman v Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election.”
He may be correct, but he’s spectacularly missing the point; there may have been more discussion about these things on Twitter, but out there in the real world, more newspaper ink has been used and more conversations have been had about the General Election than the DC Universe. The trailer for Batman v Superman has been watched just under 40 million times online, which sounds like a lot but when you consider people watching it multiple times, and that there are almost 3 billion people connected to the internet around the world, it’s not a huge amount. 30 million people voted in the UK Election, out of 50 million who were eligible to vote, and most of them probably had at least one conversation about it, too.
There has, as I have stated before, been a decline in studio films that are aimed at adults. This is something that needs to be reversed and I’m glad someone of Pegg’s standing has raised the issue. I’m just disappointed it was Pegg. I like Pegg’s work; Spaced remains one of the finest British sitcoms of the past twenty years, and Big Train is one of the most underrated sketch shows ever, but he’s really not the person to be talking about the decline of studio made films for grown ups. If a tortured art house director had said something similar, I may have some sympathy with his argument, but the bloke who is writing the third of the rebooted Star Trek films when he’s not playing Tom Cruise’s court jester is living in a glass house and chucking some large boulders about.
The truth is, actors who talk about the industry, or politics, rarely come out looking good, and often end up making themselves look silly. Pegg, whose entire Hollywood career is based on studio franchises based on old TV shows, looks silly when he complains about the infantilization of culture, and the next time I watch his work it will be tarnished by the voice in my head going “but he’s wrong about how the industry works.” His poor attempt at clarification is the equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival showing a film with a strong feminist message and barring women in flat shoes from the red carpet for it. But that would never happen, right..?
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
https://youtu.be/8HTiU_hrLms?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published May 24, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
