How Can Artists Exist in an Age of Hyper-capitalism?
A potential big-publishing merger and the decision to shelve “Batgirl” are two reminders that conglomerates put margins over culture.
Trite though it may seem, one of my favorite films is It’s A Wonderful Life. When I was a kid, my grandparents made it compulsory watching, but unlike lentils, this was a mandate that I could get down with. I still watch it at least once a year, usually around the holidays. Yes, I appreciate the Capra film’s sentiments about gratitude for what you have, but it’s another theme that runs through the movie that has carved deep grooves in my psyche. It’s the idea that George Bailey, the film’s hero, is tempted by greed and riches time and time again but chooses a more modest—but more personally meaningful—path, building affordable housing in his community. While it never makes him a materially wealthy man, he’s able to provide a lovely home for his family, and by the film’s end, he realizes that his choices have helped him create an enriched life and community.
As I came into young adulthood, I naively regarded George Bailey as one archetype of the “American hero”: the American Businessperson. I thought that America was a land of great opportunity, where a person of ambition could “make something of themselves.” But I believed that it was George Bailey, not Mr. Potter or even Sam Wainwright, who provided a model of who I should aspire to be. Someone who finds something they’re passionate about—in George’s case, improving the lives of people in his town of Bedford Falls—sees an entrepreneurial way to fix it, and finds a sense of satisfaction and pride in building something that creates homes and jobs for the community around him. I believed that businesses should have heart and that success could be defined by more than the balance at the bottom of a bank statement.
Decades after It’s a Wonderful Life was made, the thinker and former advertising executive Simon Sinek would put a name to this theory in his 2009 book and Ted Talk, “Start With Why.” Sinek argues that understanding the purpose of a business, a movement, or an organization is the key to not only better and happier work cultures, but potentially transformative ones as well. In my own experience—first in my 15 years as a small-business entrepreneur and even currently as a working artist—knowing and communicating my “why” has been a crucial tool, helping me determine not only how to prioritize my time and energy, but also how to evaluate my own successes. My first business was a luxury-social-event production company—hardly curing cancer or aiding world peace, and certainly not destined to grow into an Amazon or a Starbucks. But my partner and I were clear on our “why” (life is worth celebrating well) and passionate about what we did (creating flawless, creative, and fun events), and were therefore able to recruit staff that were equally passionate. My inner George Bailey was able to take pride in a job well done and in retaining a happy team, even in moments of bitterness and frustration (when, say, a surge in fuel prices ate away all of our margins on flowers, or any of the myriad other obstacles that small-business owners weather on a daily basis).
Of course, it’s easy to stay focused on your “why” when your business is small. And while the majority of U.S. businesses are small, most people employed in the U.S. work for midsize-to-large corporations, with a steady and growing number of people working for “giant” companies (those with 10,000 employers or more.) These are places where, particularly of late, the answer to “why” seems to be a combination of growing even larger, delivering shareholders the largest profit margins possible, and ensuring the ability to float the eight-figure salaries of CEOs.
I’ve been thinking about George Bailey, Simon Sinek, and the importance of “why” a lot lately, but particularly in the past couple of weeks. I’ve been following the Simon & Schuster–Penguin Random House–merger antitrust trial and the HBO Max shakeup following Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the reportedly $90 million movie Batgirl. In addition to writing this newsletter, my creative and working life consists of writing novels and screenplays, as well as the business of attempting to get said screenplays produced. In other words, my work as an artist, and the work of many of my colleagues and friends, is deeply impacted by these two news stories.
Writing a book or a film, creating a series, directing a film, preparing for a role—or even joining a cast or crew and committing to the grueling hours and work schedules that these jobs demand—require the individuals involved to have an intensely strong sense of “why.” (This is true of all artists, but I’ll focus for a moment on those working in these two industries.) The “why” might vary slightly from person to person, but a common thread is the belief that powerful storytelling can provide comfort and joy, change perceptions, shift a culture, and even bring people together. There are nuances and personal variances in this, of course, but I can tell you that for me, personally, those motivations are a large part of what drives me to get up every morning and sit in front of a blank page for eight, 10, or 12 hours a day.
Our challenge as artists working in these particular mediums is that, with some exceptions, our work cannot get out into the world and find an audience without first getting past gatekeepers. Books need to get published in order to find their way into stores, whether those are indie booksellers, big-box stores, or online sellers. TV shows and films need studios and streamers to finance, market, and distribute them to viewers. These gatekeepers are increasingly housed within mega-sized corporations. These corporations are big and seemingly only getting bigger; their “why” seems impossibly distant from—and even sometimes at odds with—the “why” of the artists producing the products that they profit from.
Ostensibly, every publishing house was founded with some sense of an artistic aesthetic and a desire to bring books to market that forwarded that aesthetic sensibility. Despite the many quirky nuances of publishing that have been revealed in the trial thus far, one thing that has been demonstrated—and borne out in my own experience-—is that the industry is still largely driven by people who have a passion for bringing good books to market. However, as publishing houses have swallowed one another over the past few decades—and each publishing house has, in turn, become housed inside of another larger, often even more diversified corporation—the result is a matryoshka doll. The “why” of the largest doll (profit dividends) gets further and further from the “why” of the smallest (publishing great books). The reduction in competition, as well as the pressure this consolidation puts on editors and publishers to bring to market not just “good” books but highly profitable ones, means that the industry could become less supportive of artists financially, as well as potentially less interested in taking creative risks.
But as I noted above, a person following this trial at least gets the sense that everyone involved appreciates and is proud of working with books. I wish I could say the same about the Batgirl cancellation and what I can only describe as the mishigas happening at Warner Bros. Discovery. CEO David Zaslav’s stated corporate “why” is to attempt to turn back the hands of time—not to renew the era of creating classic Oscar-winning films or even to producing groundbreaking, risky television, but to make the company as profitable as the old, pre-streaming TV business was.
On the one hand, Zaslav’s move to shelve the highly anticipated Batgirl movie should come as no surprise. He is, after all, the same man who pulled the plug on the $300 million CNN+ service when it was barely in its infancy. But the move of shelving a nearly complete film—blindsiding the directors and cast and crew—was still shocking, especially coupled with the message Zaslav offered on a WBD earnings call: “Our job is to protect the DC brand.” (Wait. I thought your job was to tell stories in the form of film and television?) One could argue that Batgirl perhaps wasn’t “up to snuff,” except that quality seems not to matter in Zaslav’s universe.
Despite HBO Max being one of the most critically recognized streamers, one that basks in the glow of creating prestige television and film, Zaslav announced that the service would be swallowed up by Discovery+. (Yay, I can get my Succession right next to my Deadliest Catch!). Although one of the delights of streaming is the chance to discover “small” or under-marketed shows, Zaslav has already reportedly begun removing lower-performing shows from HBO Max in order to further benefit from the opportunity for tax write-offs.
The question is not whether Zaslav’s moves will grow profit margins for the corporate giant; I’m sure they will. It is what the artistic and creative community—a community that these companies rely on to produce content—is supposed to make of being told that the art they create, that they have often created hand in hand with development executives at these very companies, is disposable. That there is no difference, nor any reason to differentiate, between the merits of 90 Day Fiancé and The White Lotus.
Be it books or film or television, no artist involved in commerce is unaware of the fact that they must work within the context of markets and capitalism—but as I wrote last week, we are in an age of hyper-capitalism, where the Henry F. Potters are corporate heroes and the George Baileys get branded as “socialists” on social media. When the gatekeepers of the checkbooks required to fund artists prioritize profit over art—or, worse, lose interest in art altogether—what impact does this have on the society around it?