Thanks for the review. This is a weird piece, because it's a morph between two underlying themes that wouldn't normally be used together. It's a joke, at the expense of paint by numbers America, a bit of surrealist humor, and then it morphs into a parable about the advantages of selling out, and the impossibility of buying back in. A comedic look at an almost sinister paradox that affects the creative world. Creativity doesn't make money, but requires it to be refined into a product that is useful to people. Then THAT, creativity combined with money, can make money. Michelangelo can paint on sand all day long, and it's utterly worthless, He needs the Sistine chapel to be built, and the reputation to get him access to it's ceiling, before he can create a work of art that has real value to the world. The paint, the training, the vision, may have only cost 200 bucks (historic equivalent guess) but the canvas that was an integral part of the work's fame cost millions.
This is how movies are. The paradox is this. Money on the scale necessary to create a viable work of art in this format is only available to people who focus on business, politics (not national politics, but interpersonal, like an HR person's view of the world sees everyone getting along as the number one priority) or who have lucked into wealth. Honestly, the latter group is responsible for most of the best art, for reasons related to the premise here.
People like normal, that's who makes money. Because business is about stability, it's about finding dopamine in mundane tasks by proxying those tasks to be a representation of positive maturity. Doing what needs to be done, limiting risk, insuring a frictionless work environment, and all these practical, positive, normal things that make a business functional on a day to day basis. I'm not as down on it as it probably seems from this humor video. Most things are good and evil simultaneously, depending on your perspective and how they affect us. You look at a crowd of starving people, and then someone kills a bunch of animals. That's a really good thing, all these hungry children can now eat. This slaying of the many animals is an act that helped everybody! If your goals and needs in life differed, you might see the same story very differently. Say you were a person who loved animals, and your main priority was keeping this particular group of animals alive. In this case, the exact same actions would seem evil and brutal, as you watched these monsters slash and maim this group the animal conservationist had grown to consider family.
So what is this act? Is it Evil or Good? I guess it depends on where you're standing. You're my hero, or you're my villain. Same action, different perspective. There was probably a way to feed the people, and let the family of animals live, but everyone is in a hurry, always, for all time. If you look back at humanity's track record, it's really hard to find a time when we actually had the patience to get anything right. Individuals did it, but societies did the quickest, easiest fix for right now, and then their lazy successors would canonize that decision, based on the perceptual bias that the longer ago something was written, the more "magical" it is. My view is that the constitution for example is not any more significant or insignificant dependent on whether it was written Thursday or a thousand years ago. It's value is in it's content. That content's quality is relative to it's functionality in the world, and since the world is always changing, the value of a fixed set of concepts is always changing. This is not a dialogue about the constitution or my opinions on it, it's just an example.
That was a huge digression, so sorry about that, I'm prone to them. Here's the paradox - only normal people are given the money to make large scale business decisions, because they are stable, because they focus on a set of criteria that's effective in sustaining the business, and it's people. Over time they become neuro programmed against imagination, because in their context, it's mostly analogous to risk, which is a known negative. So every decision about which creative projects are minted, MUST be made by someone who is natively adverse to creativity.
This didn't used to be as big of a problem, but in the words of philosopher Tommy Chong "You've changed man" 40 years ago maybe a few percent of Americans exhibited signs of Narcissism. Twenty years after social media went mainstream, that number is nearing 30%. Personal greed as can be measured on charts has increased on average by a factor of 200x. Combining these factors, you now have a situation where every extraordinarily bland bottom line analyst feels that they are likely much more creative than the "dumb artists" who don't realize that catering directly to the lowest common denominator is the way to go. Without the wit to comprehend that using brute force to win an argument simply proves that they didn't deserve to win, they now serially override their creative counterparts, stealing their agency, self respect, and future, and routing those benefits to anyone who thinks like they do.
That's why Fast and Furious 10, that's why spiderman 14, spiderman goes to Ecuador. That's why live action remake. That's why 60's comic book is the plot of 2024 film. Because they have serially disenfranchised creatives like those machines where you try to push the quarters off the ledge. So yeah, Into the Beige. It's more complex and dissonant than it appears on the surface. It's kind of a middle finger to the people who decimated my tribe to feed theirs. I figured people would just laugh at the jokes and forget about it, and I think for the most part I was exactly right.
