The Bluestocking 350: Netflix and no-chill pubs
"I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard"
Happy Friday!
And it really is a good one for the Bluestocking, which just passed 25,000 subscribers—not bad for a lo-fi little links roundup. Hello to the new joiners from Lucy Worsley’s freshly minted Substack, My Life in the Past. (In the last few years, Lucy has been kind enough to invite me on her podcasts, Lady Killers and Lady Swindlers, to talk about historical wrong ‘uns.)
Thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter, and particularly to the eager beavers who send me tips for stories, leave comments, or recommend the Bluestocking to their friends. You can do the last of these by clicking the button below.
Helen
Casual Viewing (N Plus One)
But high output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt. Cindy Holland, the first employee [Ted] Sarandos hired, who eventually served as vice president of original content, once compared Netflix’s rapacious DVD acquisition strategy to “shoveling coal in the side door of the house.” This remained true as Netflix ramped up its original-film production. In researching this essay, I was told by sources about two high-level Netflix executives who have been known to green-light projects without reading the scripts at all.
Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)
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Will Tavlin goes deep on what Netflix (and the other streamers) have done to the film industry. I’m slightly obsessed with the film Irish Wish, having seen—and boggled—at the trailer, where a good premise for a lighthearted romcom is blighted by a series of terrible artistic decisions. If you want a rough idea of the production’s attention to detail, check out the photoshop job on Lindsay Lohan’s arms in the promo shot above.
What the Left Refused to Understand About Women’s Sports (The Atlantic, gift link)
Sia Liilii comes from a big family in Hawaii, the ninth of 11 children. Without her volleyball scholarship at the University of Nevada at Reno, she told me recently, she would never have been able to go to college. So when she got wind this past summer that one of Nevada’s opponents in the Mountain West Conference, San Jose State University, was fielding a transgender player, she rebelled. “It’s not right that this person is taking not only a starting spot but a roster spot, from a female who has, just like us, played volleyball her whole life and dreamt of playing at the collegiate level,” Liilii said.
The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.
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I snuck this piece in to publication before the end of 2024, because I think now is a great time, post-election, for the American left to rethink its sex denialism, which wounded the Democrats so badly at the last election. Surely we can treat people with decency, without having to pretend that men aren’t stronger and faster than women, on average?
Humphrey’s World (The Guardian)
To say that Samuel Smith Old Brewery prides itself on tradition is to wildly understate the intensity of its chairman’s longing for a different era. His aim seems to be to build an entire world in which the past – or at least, his idealised picture of the past – is preserved just as it was. For decades, Smith has used his considerable personal means to pursue this vision. He seems to regard his properties as stage-sets, on which people – pubgoers, managers, local residents – must perform the roles he assigns to them, exactly as he directs. Where this is not possible, the curtain instantly falls. (Think of it as something like Synecdoche, North Yorkshire.)
The pubs, of course, are testament to this curious project, but so, too, is Tadcaster itself. Much of the town has been owned by the brewery since the 19th century. Of late, Smith has attempted to exert his influence in a complicated dispute over the development of the town centre. Smith insists that the town honour a nearly half-century-old pledge to pedestrianise the central streets, pave them with cobblestones and use only gaslit lamps – a view the town council does not share. When we spoke, Chris Metcalfe, a Tadcaster town councillor, compared life under Smith to feudalism: “A Selby planning officer once said to me, ‘Market forces don’t work in Tadcaster, because there’s only one landlord.’”
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The deeply odd story of an eccentric Yorkshireman, Humphrey Smith, who buys pubs and keeps them empty, or runs them with his own quixotic rules (no phones, no swearing, no other brands of beer). Along the way, Smith also became a kind of laird of the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster, like it’s his very own rotten borough.
Quick Links
“When reached for comment, Rich called this article ‘very good’ and ‘delightful,’ but admitted that he has ‘a vastly different thinking pattern around what is clean and what isn’t clean’.” My very funny colleague Olga Khazan has a baby and a partner, Rich, who doesn’t pull his weight around the house. She has written about a new card system that claims to resolve all such disputes. I laughed out loud at this piece. (The Atlantic, gift link).
Paul Krugman has left his column at the NYT and immediately become a Substacker. This piece on how scammy crypto is—which explains a lot of “debanking” stories, because banks don’t want to be near dodgy assets—also contains a fact I didn’t know: “the great bulk of U.S. currency in circulation, at least in terms of value, consists of $100 bills.” And yet most Americans never see a Benjamin: because they are mostly held outside the country, for purposes both legit and nefarious. But even Benjamins weigh a lot, while crypto weighs nothing (Substack).
“On Nov. 18, about two weeks after the election, I deleted my news apps, unsubscribed from all my podcasts and filtered all my newsletters to the trash. And for the next week, from early morning till late at night, I got all my news from Rumble.” (New York Times, $)
“Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC).” More enshittification news: Spotify is pushing AI muzak on its platform (Harpers).
On the Past Present Future podcast, David Runciman and I discuss the politics of Fight Club, which Roger Ebert once called “cheerfully fascist.”
“The young man’s friends were already grieving. Now many of them were unnerved. In the hours after his death, his name and likeness ricocheted around a dark corner of the internet, where profiteers using artificial intelligence tools capitalized on the anguish and desperation of the people who were mourning him.” The New York Times on “obituary pirates”, who make pennies by pumping Google full of AI-written misinformation to fill the gap after someone dies in a noteworthy or unusual way (gift link).
See you next time!
I spent most of the time I’d allocated to reading this trying to work out how the actress did that with her arms, sat here at my kitchen table attempting to make my palms-up hands parallel to the ground other than when held in front of me. I had to give it up, of course, and raced to the end only to find, with some relief, but mixed with a smidgeon of disappointment, that it was impossible. So thank you for that. And for everything else too.
On the subject of Fight Club, another big cultural touchpoint of that time was the Radiohead album Ok Computer.
"Fitter, happier, more productive. Not eating too much. Regular exercise at the gym three days a week. Getting on better with your associates, employers and employees... a pig in a cage on antibiotics."
The artwork for that album by the artist Stanley Donwood could have been lifted from a scene of that film almost- whitewashed infographics and aeroplane safety cards. My friends and I were all convinced should have had No Surprises as the song at the end, instead of Where is My Mind, which has sort of a 'lol what am I like' quality to it. "A heart that's full up like a landfill, a job that slowly kills you, bruises that don't heal".
The other thing worth mentioning is just how good the music of the film is generally, and how ubiquitously it's been reused for documentaries and TV.
I seem to remember the book was far darker and pointed, and there was far more of the apocalyptic manifesto, which in the film gets compressed into a single line about stalking deer through New York. It really prefigures the 2000s and 2010s obsession with post-apocalypse and cultural decline.