Why Heroic Movies Aren't Happening

And why movies are the way they are

Iain Glen as Richard the Lionheart, Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 2005)

I often read complaints about the failure of Hollywood to bring the life of Richard the Lionheart or Scanderbeg or Godfrey of Bouillon to the screen in a blockbuster epic.¹ It certainly sounds like a grand idea—but always be careful what you wish for. Even if the studios could be trusted to depict the hero as heroic (rather than “problematic,” perverted, or overrated) and show his cause to be just (rather than brutal Christian aggression against noble Muslim victims), little subversions still have a way of creeping into the projects and undermining the whole thing—democratic cliches, enlightened pieties. Then there’s the question of quality. Truly getting Richard right would require a director with elite vision, a screenwriter with a deft touch and knowledge of the past, an actor who could credibly pass as one of the greatest men who ever lived, and more—and the likelihood of all these pieces coming together are increasingly slim. More likely they would just make him a toxic mediocrity and/or a repressed homosexual.

Would you rather have a C- version of the hero or no movie at all?

With every passing year I grow less and less interested in shows and movies. My divorce from Hollywood is certainly made easier as everything on the screen turns embarrassingly shoddy and emotionally manipulative—an inevitable consequence of frenzy for sidelining talented white men in favor of DEI hires. But I’ve come to suspect something larger at work than just declining skill and political machinations. The current embarrassments are likely more of a feature than a bug, the kind of thing that can’t really be solved by simply putting “based” people in charge of the studios.²

Managerialism is at the root of these problems. Several decades ago, perceptive men noted that the Western world was changing in subtle ways. The driving force behind these developments was massive scale: so many things, from cities to companies to governments, were getting bigger, and bigness requires new ways of operating and new operators. As Sam Francis explained:

Just as business firms expanded far beyond the point at which they could be operated, directed, and controlled effectively by individual owners and their families, who generally lacked the technical skills to manage them, so the state also underwent a transformation in scale that removed it from the control of traditional elites, citizens, and their legal representatives.

Into this crisis stepped the manager, who brought with him a certain kind of competence, but also a rage for standardization, “best practices,” human resource departments, organizational sloganeering, and other ways of strangling anything personal, unusual, special, lively. Over the decades these managers colonized every facet of American life and blurred the old lines between “public” and “private” organizations: corporations and government bureaucracies started to look more alike and actually work in tandem, while institutional religion, education, charity, and more have followed suit.

Not that there aren’t upsides, but you pay for the manager’s competence in very real ways.³

The managerial revolution leaves art and culture in a tricky place. Bold choices don’t play well with managers. Better to play it safe and trust in focus group testing. Studios have to think long and hard about turning over a major production to a Mel Gibson-type, a creative genius with unapproved opinions which make him a liability. Executives also have to reconsider anything like a patriotic American tone in a film that might jeopardize its chances in the Chinese markets. They feel compelled to add ridiculous diversity hires to draw minority audiences who, we are told, want to feel better “represented” on screen.

If it were just a matter of maximizing shareholder value, most people could probably still make sense of it. But something stranger happens as the revolution fully unfolds: managers mysteriously stop caring about profits. The last decade offers countless examples of studios setting money on fire as they reboot beloved franchises in the image and likeness of social justice zealots—gender-swapping, race-swapping, and generally making expensive productions that nobody wants to see.

This too is tied to managerialism. As James Burnham observed, a defining feature of this system is the separation of ownership and control, which means the people making decisions want different things than the ones who actually have skin in the game. The rift between them grows over the years. Managerials ultimately aim to serve the interests of the managerial class, to signal virtue to other managerials, to get high on the resulting fumes of status and acclaim and applause. And they cover each other’s backs so well that their fellows rarely have to suffer consequences for disastrous decisions. Just remember that the woman who lost $1.4B for Anheuser-Busch (by hiring the trans-icon Dylan Mulvaney) landed on her feet quite nicely with a gig at LIV Golf. One example among many.

If the managers were actual aristocrats—men of quality who rigorously cultivated a love of what is best—their freedom from financial pressures could potentially be good news. But these people aren’t aristocrats. They’re ruthless conformists who care more about credentials and approved opinions and the Current Thing. This is the nature of their system and priorities.

Americans, sadly, invited the managerial revolution into our hearts when we built our living rooms around the televisions and outsourced our cultural formation to the movies, basically begging to be propagandized. It wasn’t so alarming as long as the propaganda was entertaining enough (though the truth is the propagandizers also taught us to like shoddy productions). But the deterioration was already guaranteed and propaganda has become so much a part of our lives now that most can hardly imagine life without it. What would we even do with ourselves?

Managerialism, Movies, and Chivalry

What, you might ask, does this have to do with chivalry? It has everything to do with chivalry! A culture is shaped by the kinds of stories it tells. And those stories get shaped by the mechanisms that deliver them.

Chivalry arose in an age of decentralization. What mattered in feudal times was personal loyalty, which is pretty much the opposite of bureaucratic management. When “the rule of law and the political authority of the state had disappeared,” writes Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, “the only remaining principle of social cohesion was the direct personal bond of loyalty and mutual aid between the warrior and his chief, and that of service and protection between the serf and his lord.” Certain kinds of stories get told in those conditions, and they are told in certain ways.

The closest thing we have to a “principle of social cohesion” is the gigantism which invites depersonalization and institutional blandness. Movies and shows are the cultural vehicles of this system.

Even the revered productions from the Before Times have fatal flaws that we have been trained to overlook. To cite one example that will raise hackles: though Peter Jackson did an altogether respectable job in bringing Lord of the Rings to the screen, even his beloved trilogy is shamelessly democratic, thanks in large part to the ladies who wrote the screenplay. It’s hard to imagine it could have been any other way, with such an involved scale and so much feminized bureaucratic oversight.

Tolkien’s books meanwhile are the creative work of one man, who did not have committees and departments managing the genius out of his work. This is how an aristocratic arrangement works.

There are no simple solutions to these problems, and quixotic calls for a RETVRN to the old ways always ring cheap in my ear. It would be theoretically great if all Americans threw their televisions out of second-story windows, but we don’t live in theoryland, and even I’m probably not going to be doing that any time soon. At the very least we can be more skeptical toward the mechanisms of “popular culture” that serve our adversaries’ designs by dulling our hearts and programming our minds. This means giving less of our lives over to movies and shows, and instead reading books to our children or maybe even trying to cultivate our own bardic capabilities. Serious people are up for the task of taking charge of their home and setting a different tone than the one the managers in Hollywood intend for us. Real renewal will demand different forms of cultural transmission and story-telling.

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Related:

Dangerous Times, Knightly Virtues

Commercialism Destroys Everything It Touches

Don't Do It, Beowulf!

1. The simple fact that Ridley Scott made a 12th century epic about Balian of Ibelin rather than Richard the Lionheart (who does appear in the final scene, but not before) should be outrage enough.

2. A recently released trailer for Angel Studios’ Animal Farm raises all sorts of questions about how long rogue studios can actually stay rogue. It is both literally and figuratively an Orwellian adaptation.

3. The food industry illustrates the point. Joe Consumer has become accustomed to the convenience of walking into a Chipotle in every city across the country with a pretty good idea of what he’s getting—while setting foot in the independent Mom & Pop’s Burrito Shop is a toss of the dice. But as a restaurant becomes a chain, and a chain becomes a mega-chain, the pressure to cut costs intensifies: every penny that might be saved with the introduction of a lower quality ingredient gets multiplied across the organization. Why cook in butter when you could save millions of dollars over the course of a year by cooking in canola oil? For Mom & Pop’s the pressure is manageable; for Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc it’s overwhelming.