On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a bartender named Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) tells four local children a fairy tale of New York: Once upon a time, in the historically Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan at the height of summer, a younger Usnavi is on the verge of leaving his bodega behind to return to the D.R., intent on reclaiming and reviving his late father's business (apparently destroyed in Hurricane Maria). With three days to settle his affairs, he finds that his little cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), being too young to have "island memories," has no interest in leaving his own island behind. For what it's worth, the undocumented teenager, having come of age in the Obama era, is a blooming activist, more interested in joining the youthful phalanx against socio-economic injustice than in retreating into nostalgia for the Old World. The shy Usnavi also has his eyes set on the lovely Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), whose own near-term dreams of renting downtown and becoming an independent fashion designer are shot down when she is unable to provide good credit. Maybe these caged birds can make some sweet music together in the short time they have, or maybe their shared desires to break free of the Heights, and the impediments to doing so, will smother this fairy tale love story.
In ensemble fashion, we also have Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace), the first in her family to make it to college, returning from Stanford University as a minor neighborhood celebrity and the pride of her friends and family. But Nina has dropped out, her own dreams deferred by economic stress, her experiences of racism, and the trauma of sudden isolation from her community. Her father Kevin (Jimmy Smits), swelling with pride, is deaf to the generational drift between himself and his daughter; and having already sold half of his taxi cab company in order to pay for Nina's tuition, intends to sell the rest in order to keep her going. This is not a good sign for Nina's high school sweetheart Benny (Corey Hawkins), who works for Kevin as a dispatcher. Rounded by a supporting cast that serves to map out the historical and cultural diversity, the emotional and sexual intensity, and the granular struggles of the Heights, our melodrama simmers under the escalating heatwave, set to boil over at the climax which is, appropriate for a fairy tale, set at a ball. Or, rather, at the club.
* * *
Lyricist and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda penetrated the mainstream of public consciousness with the explosive success of Hamilton. But before that, his rise to stardom was well-anticipated in theater circles with In the Heights, which slowly built up momentum over the course of three years before premiering at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway in 2008. The production swept the 62nd Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Musical Score, Best Choreography, Best Orchestrations, and Best Musical Show Album, and established Miranda as a groundbreaking talent whose future was synchronized with the germination of a new norm in representational discourse as cultivated among college-educated liberal progressives. Having made his bones in the waning hours of the Bush years, Miranda went from marginal wunderkind to certified celebrity during Obama's second term, and now sees his Hamilton residuals, ironically, giving his first baby new life as a movie adaptation, with a screenplay by Quiara Alegría Hudes, who also wrote the book for the original stage production.
As COVID-19 restrictions relax and Biden's United States approaches a nexus of acceptable risk even as the novel coronavirus continues to ravage the world (remaining a particular source of danger, ironically, for the exact types of economically precarious communities of color that Miranda and Hudes's musical focuses upon), those willing to return to the movie house are already in for slim pickings as far as the mainstream goes. Many, even musical theater geeks and Miranda stans, will probably settle for the streaming experience, as the film is simultaneously rolled out by distributor Warner Bros. Pictures through HBOMax. But for those of us itching to repatriate the dying medium, In the Heights manages to be more than just the easy top-line attraction in a slow, barely real summer season. It is also a breath of fresh air for those hungry for a true musical; not a live-action Disney remake, not some jukebox dreck, and not, for the love of God, some gimmick monstrosity courtesy of Tom Hooper. The reader will forgive me if the phlegmy textures of Hooper's Les Misérables still cling to the back of my throat, but they will understand if they simply brave a rewatch of that 2012 film adaptation of another great musical. They should do so in order to better appreciate In the Heights, which, instead of being directed by a period T.V. hack coasting on the cultural cache of a bunch of craggy white mummies' film tastes, is here realized by Jon M. Chu, a hack in another regard, but who, having at least some footing in the concert and dance film genres, actually understands how to shoot and cut drama to music.
In the coming weeks, a lot of this country's cultural intelligentsia is gonna make a lot of hay about how In the Heights is exactly the kind of progressive corrective we need after the Donald Trump presidency. But in the wake of an election when Trump actually gained in electoral support among Latinos, and in which the average person descended from the southern Americas, just like black people under Obama, has faired increasingly worse under the bipartisan thrust of accelerating income inequality and austerity; it is precisely the socio-political framing of In the Heights that is its most phony and alienating aspect. Rather, it is the appreciation of its purely formalistic aspects, presented with restrained stylization by Chu, that is its highest achievement. And it is in appreciation of this fact, that In the Heights is significant as "just" a straight musical entertainment, that one finds a far more starkly rendered commentary on systemic inequality than any of Miranda and Hudes's intended, fantasist agitprop.
For those who are only viewing In the Heights through the veil of Hamilton, it should be said that Miranda's providence as a generator of earworms is much better demonstrated here than in his later work. To be sure, Hamilton still has quite a few showstoppers, and even its clunkier numbers, when presented in their proper theatrical narrative context, sustain the production through a prerequisite over-earnestness that manages to effectively distract from its inherently corny mixture of ersatz classical orchestration and ersatz Hip Hop and R&B in the service of a spuriously educational (really, nakedly propagandistic) hagiography. When people say they don't like musicals, they usually cite the inherently artificial, often forced nature of song-and-dance as a vehicle of dramatic expression and character development. But what they are really referring to, more often than not, is the convention of acceptable kitsch, bordering on the willfully obnoxious, that has become the standard of musical theater and its surrounding culture as it has waned in relevancy as a popular art-form in the mid-20th century.
There has emerged, particularly in the realm of "dirtbag" podcasters, a Left critique of Hamilton and Miranda that fails to disaggregate a perfectly fair rejection of Miranda's arguably astroturfed celebrity on ideological grounds, from a critique of his songwriting. Indeed, if Hamilton was all there was, this might be fair enough. On balance, Miranda is a mediocre rapper, his even more defanged variant on socially conscious Hip Hop couldn't be any less relevant to the contemporary idiom, and his bars exude a pathological A.P. student obsession with frippery and reference as a hollow signifier of intelligence and cultural sophistication. It's basically nerdcore. That sort of posture may make a certain amount of sense coming out of the mouths of the property-owning, colonial ruling class characters of Hamilton. Their real life inspirations were, after all, as obsessed with such moralizing signifiers and justifications for one's wealth as the late-capitalist bourgeoisie is now. But that doesn't precisely resolve how we then find ourselves back to In the Heights, where, yes, even here in the barrio, everybody raps like a college-educated nerd.
Hamilton, as a completely logical progression for Miranda from the stage version of In the Heights, doesn't really exist primarily as a groundbreaking demonstration of Hip Hop and R&B's cultural salience across races, cultures, classes, and mediums; nor does it exist primarily as an activist piece that forced a confrontation with Broadway's discrimination against talent-of-color through a combined boon to its coffers as well as an optics nightmare, heightening contradictions between outward facing liberal multicultural doctrine and systemic reality. It primarily exists as an experiment in identification. Miranda's casting of young people-of-color as founding fathers (i.e., white supremacists) serves to coach the identification of young people-of-color in the audience with historical figures and historical parables from which they might otherwise feel excluded, while at the same time resolving the guilt of established white liberals with the ultimate ideological fantasy of the universal salience of their own oppressive and exploitative history. In other words, Miranda's songwriting is not merely corny. It is propagandistic, preparing its audience to adapt to a more sophisticated rationale for status quo liberalism. The frank reality is that if Miranda had decided to keep everything else about Hamilton the same, but cast white performers in these roles, it would rightfully be seen as the height of obnoxious Broadway kitsch at best, if it ever would have made it to Broadway, if even Broadway was un-hip enough. The agitprop, experimental casting is the primary factor that makes the whole thing pan out as a new liberal classic and a cynical generator of capital.
However, that Miranda is a crappy rapper, and a presumptive propagandist, does not mean that he is also a bad songwriter. It should be said that the very "dirtbag Left" cohort that frequently conflates Miranda's reactionary politics with the apparent mediocrity of his art frequently do not have the same trouble disaggregating ideological and artistic critique when it comes to the canon of out-and-out reactionary filmmakers, be they Clint Eastwood or S. Craig Zahler. But let's relate this back to what I mentioned before about the strange culture of deliberate corniness in musical theater. It's not camp, nor is it always kitsch, but an undercurrent pervades musical theater that allows for the relative tolerance, or even embrace, of the clunky and the dorky, if only because musical theater is a dead art-form that attracts a lot of clunks and dorks. Even a certain amount of badness -- whether it's the bad rapping of Hamilton or the rap-less clunkers of 1776 -- is appreciated in musical theater to a both pathetic and endearing degree. Because sometimes badness works. Sometimes badness is deeply human and endearing. Rap is Miranda's badness. But as for the rest of him, he has an undeniably slick-but-sophisticated command of popular music. He is the Alan Menken of his generation.
In contrast to Hamilton, there are no clunkers in In the Heights, though Miranda's stabs at rap continue to point up his and his age cohort's blinkered nostalgia for the '90s renaissance in Hip Hop. He and Hudes have put in the minimal work to "update" certain aspects of their script to fit the current moment, but relatively little attention has been payed to updating the musical lexicon that, say, a teenage character like Sonny would inhabit in contrast to his 30-year-old cousin. Even still, strictly as a composer, Miranda is clearly more at home, and even his corny raps feel better complimented by, a soundscape drenched in Latin-Caribbean pride and nostalgia. Certain numbers are rearranged or excised entirely. A particular loss is "Inútil," in which Kevin (originally portrayed by Carlos Gómez), remembering his own father, worries that, despite everything, he has perpetuated a cycle of failing to provide a better future for his children and alienating them from himself. But what compositions remain are wall-to-wall bangers, modulating between volcanic bravado and maudlin introversion. Without a doubt, the centerpiece of the entire production proves to be "Paciencia y Fe," which chronicles the experience of migration, isolation, and ceaseless work endured by the block's surrogate matriarch Abuela Claudia, portrayed by original Broadway cast member Olga Merediz. A veritable film-within-a-film, "Paciencia y Fe" is a brutal foray into the psychic universe of a character whom we had previously only seen from the outside and, like the younger characters in the show, taken for some granted. Miranda weaves between pumping up the audience and tugging at their heart strings in a way that is undeniably commercial, veritably Disney/Pixar-esque in its motivation and appeal; but is also, just as undeniably, a product refined by diligence and technical mastery, rather than mere cynicism.
Hudes' screenplay provides just enough basis for stylization to ensure that, unlike, say, Rob Marshall's adaptation of Into the Woods (2014), Chu's presentation of Miranda's music and characters will breathe as its own cinematic work. Chu, for his part, having cut his teeth on the first two sequels in the Step Up franchise and being a dancer himself, proves an ideal choice. Unlike Marshall or Hooper, Chu never falls back on scope, even when a number like "96,000" employs literally hundreds of extras. To watch his direction to music and dance and to compare it to other recent high profile musical adaptations, one can't help but be reminded of the gulf in effect between a film featuring martial arts composed by artists actually entrenched in the form, and those who fail to understand how to tell a story through fighting moves, or those who are forced to cut around stars who don't know what they're doing. Indeed, there's a fine line between the martial arts film and the film musical, a fact that Christopher Scott's choreography, informed to a degree by literally more combative urban styles of step, renders patently obvious. The cinematic direction of action requires more than the mere representation of a kick. It involves marshaling the power of the shot and montage in order to both excite the spectator through the visceral thrill of watching the body moving dynamically through space, while also conveying the character and motivation behind action, all the while maintaining a sense of verisimilitude. But the cynical calculus of commercial film production often means that, in the case of both the action movie and the musical, you are often forced to pool from a narrow set of identifiable celebrities, and not necessarily those whose talents match the demands of the story you are telling. It also means that the people behind the camera are just as often those who have the opportunity to direct in these genres not because they are necessarily familiar with its nuances, but rather because they themselves are coasting on professional connections and the financial success of their previous ventures. In both cases, you get a work that is forced to stage and cut action around less competent performers, and often under the direction of filmmakers whose frame of reference is not germane to the more granular demands of a certain discipline of action, be it dance or fighting. The result in both cases is a weakened cinema premised on a compromised representation of the body as an artistic medium unto itself. To watch In the Heights is to watch an exemplary display of the body as art, with performers whose talent in song and dance, regardless of their relative obscurity to a mass audience, requires no compromises.
This gets back to what I said above about how it is the formal excellence of In the Heights, far better than Miranda and Hudes's conscious gesturing towards social and political concerns, that brings into stark relief the systemic inequality inherent under American capital. Written by two prominent Latino artists, directed by an Asian-American filmmaker, and featuring a company of hundreds of people-of-color representing the peak of song-and-dance talent, In the Heights inevitably points up the disparity in excellence ordered by an inherently racist culture and economy. It will most assuredly please the same irrelevant Hollywood taste makers who also nominated Tom Hooper's Les Misérables for Best Picture; but, then again, these jokers also nominated Les Misérables for Best Picture. Featuring a cast of mediocre-to-terrible singers, guided by a director whose misbegotten choice to record all of its singing "live" in order to overcome what he saw as the "slightly strange falseness" of the conventional film musical, the period Les Misérables cost only slightly more than In the Heights to produce and only cost as much hard work to produce in the sense that the production literally gave themselves a bunch of unnecessary gimmicks to overcome in the name of delivering an objectively bad product. But in the grand scheme of both commerce and the self-obsessed pageantry of Hollywood, a dehydrated Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway choking on her own nasal drip, and Russell Crowe struggling to find his note every time he opens his mouth, is ostensibly as Oscar-worthy as a debatably less technically ambitious musical production that actually functions as a competent display of songwriting, singing, and dancing talent. The significance of In the Heights is that it might actually do a good job of reminding people what a good musical looks and sounds like.
If the entire production has one misfire, it comes early on and threatens to derail the entire endeavor. As the opening theme builds on the soundtrack and Usnavi makes his way down the block to his bodega, an abrasive (poorly mixed) record scratch cuts the music short. Poor Usnavi has stepped in some gum. Scrapping it off the soul of his shoe, he scratches a manhole cover like a record, kicking the soundtrack back into gear. That's right, In the Heights opens with a record scratch gag, a bit so hackie that even trailers for comedies don't use it anymore. More than Miranda's raps, it summarizes the extent to which even this cream of the crop of commercially vetted talent from marginalized groups are, in their own way, certifiable hacks. That being said, one should still endeavor, as always, to not only not let the corniness of this moment ruin the experience, but to rather embrace it as part of musical theater's culture of pathetic but endearing over-earnestness. Taken in context, this sliver of humanizing badness is a small toll barrier for what is, on the whole, a pageant of true formal excellence.
* * *
A film adaptation of In the Heights was in talks to be developed as early as 2008. Gestated from a less than perfect situation at Universal, passed over by Miranda's distraction with Hamilton, revived with the Weinstein Company, and finally auctioned off to Warner Bros., aspects of the musical changed significantly not only in terms of structure, but also in terms of attempts to keep the story contemporary. Explicit reference is made to both the D.R.E.A.M. Act and D.A.C.A., with Sonny's undocumented status providing a minor subplot and contributing to the melodramatic tension of the film's climax. Nina's alienation from college is less economically fixated in the film, and when the main cast sits down to dinner, her fallout with her father is buttressed by a detailed description of her painful experiences of microaggression. But the most telling change, clarifying the historical and political significance of In the Heights, is a minor change in lyrics.
The revelation that Usnavi's bodega sold a lottery ticket that will net the winner $96,000 leads into a musical number in which various characters describe what they would do with such unimaginable and sudden wealth. Benny, for instance, would put it towards tuition to get into business school:
I'll be a businessman, richer than Nina's daddy
Donald Trump and I on the links, and he's my caddy
That is, those are the lyrics in the original stage version, and on the original Broadway cast album. For obvious reasons, the filmmakers switched out "Donald Trump" in the second line for "Tiger Woods."
At the time that In the Heights was originally performed, Donald Trump was primarily identifiable as a celebrity, if slowly building his reputation as a Fox News call-in regular. He'd been a low-hanging reference point for inscrutable wealth and attention freakery in rap lyrics for decades. Miranda's participation in the name-dropping is probably one of the most authentic bars he's ever written just in terms of its situation in a deep-cut legacy of rap references. From another perspective, the original line clearly even takes a prescient dig at the presidential hopeful. But the namedrop is a predestined bomb now, and not just because the past four years of rhetorical extremity have made even mentioning Trump in the context of an urban fairy tale musical, particularly one set in a Latino immigrant community, completely toxic. Rather, mounting an adaptation of In the Heights after four years of Donald Trump makes mentioning Donald Trump a point of redundancy. His lurching specter shadows the production like an unspoken, metaphysical embodiment of everything to which the filmmakers' vision is defined in opposition.
But the conspicuous absence of Trump from In the Heights also distills what it represents in terms of, not a path forward in progressive vision, but rather a retrenchment into liberal ideological fantasy. In the Heights is one of those movies where a character will say something like, "Life is not a fairy tale," only so that the protagonists can have their fairy tale ending, the fulfillment of their own sueñitos, their "little dreams." Even beyond the "slightly strange falseness" of the musical genre, it occupies a space in which no semblance of uncomfortable reality can penetrate deeply enough, even at the level of the environment. Ostensibly taking place over the three hottest days of the summer, the characters' make-up and costumes remain unmolested by oppressive sun and humidity. Alice Brooks's cinematography itself takes in the physical environment that the characters inhabit with a much too temperate air, and Chu's direction proves unimaginative in terms of giving us any cues as to how the weather is effecting his characters and the melodrama of their lives. Do the Right Thing this is not. Heck, this isn't even West Side Story or All That Jazz; it's like God hung a giant AC over the barrio. Perhaps the filmmakers figured that stray exposition and subtleties of performance would be enough to impress the audience. Or maybe, like Miranda's shallow affect at rap, it was just another formality taken for metaphorical granted, something to be read into by the college-educated pop culture discourse, rather than something to be felt. More likely, though, is the unconscious explanation: Like Donald Trump, oppressive summers accompanying climate change are too real to be maturely addressed in this work of fantasy. It will be interesting to see how much of the film's inevitable fawning praise even takes into account the bleak irony of how little the filmmakers' vision reflects upon the physical and psychological tolls of the real world, particularly, again, with regards to the experience of the actual marginalized communities that the film and its creators ostensibly represent.
Whether it's Trump or climate change, In the Heights portends the inability of hegemonic liberal culture to engage with the acceleration of current crises. The "little dream" that it offers as a corrective to this age of extremity is not progressive, but necessarily regressive and reactionary. Spurred to offer a more progressive representation of marginalized peoples, Miranda, Hudes, and Chu can only reproduce a narrative that fetishizes the "color" of immigrant communities because it is thus rendered attractive to white capitalist monoculture, meanwhile extolling the virtues of certain "model minorities" who work ceaselessly to advance themselves, directing their private passions towards "representation" of their community interests. Implicit to this "nation of immigrants" melody is always a conscious rejection of that which seeks to heighten a conflict with, rather than merely mediate and reform, the cult of American exceptionalism. Miranda's celebrity itself is exemplary of how liberal hegemony has only become more sophisticated in terms of making overtures toward the emergent Left -- with its focus on the solidarity of the oppressed and exploited -- while maintaining a patronizing air towards those aspects of it that prove most problematic to capital. Take, for instance, small business-owner Usnavi's own verse on "96,000":
It's silly when we get into these crazy hypotheticals
You really want some bread? Then go ahead create a set of goals
And cross 'em off the list as you pursue 'em
And with those ninety-six, I know precisely what I'm doin'
In this same song he literally tells another character to pull his pants up. Who wrote this, Bill Cosby? In the absence of catchy hooks, Miranda's most apparently self-reflective characters always eerily come off like conservatives. And not just the honest kind, but the really corny kind who then try to appropriate rap music in order to make teenagers respect their elders more or eat all their vegetables. And as a certified celebrity of cultural liberalism, he distills its trajectory towards incorporating the superficial content of anti-establishment critique and redirecting its energy away from an attack on capital. The vision that In the Heights offers is of the marginalization and inequality experienced by Latino immigrants and people-of-color as a grievance, a question of moral unfairness that compels them to work twice as hard to get to the same place as a white person. His characters rarely, if ever, even broach the notion that his immigrant strivers are operating under exploitation; i.e., that their labor is not just going without sufficient cultural acknowledgment or not being fairly compensated, but that it is being directly stolen from them for the benefit of whites and the ruling class. Tellingly, at the climax of In the Heights, at the crescendo of the ensemble's economic and environmental desperation, Usnavi is there to redirect the impatient Sonny's energy away from political organization and towards, amazingly, the spectacle of the "Carnaval del Barrio" musical number itself:
SONNY
Listen up, is that
What y'all want?
We close the bodega
The neighborhood is gone!
They selling the dispatch
And they closing the salón
And they'll never turn the lights back on, 'cause--
We are powerless, we are powerless!
And y'all keep dancin' and singin' and celebratin'
And it's gettin' late and this place disintegratin' and--
We are powerless, we are powerless!
USNAVI
Alright, we're powerless, so light up a candle!
There's nothing going on here that we can't handle!
...
Maybe you're right, Sonny, call in the coroners!
Maybe we're powerless, a corner full of foreigners
Maybe this neighborhood's changing forever
Maybe tonight is our last night together, however!
How do you want to face it?
Do you wanna waste it, when the end is so close you can taste it?
Y'all could cry with your head in the sand
I'm a fly this flag that I got in my hand!
Quite literally, the triumph in In the Heights is defined not by a solidarity in pursuit of basic material interests, but in the symbolic politics of "representation," in flying la bandera in a cultural spectacle "so loud and raucous / They can hear us across the bridge in East Secaucus." The vision of the musical is sequestered in a cul-de-sac of optimistic pragmatism that consciously rejects even the most basic confrontation with material reality ("We are powerless") because it is too depressing to the story that Miranda and Hudes actually tell. This story is oriented entirely around the romanticized, Sisyphean struggle of individual actors to achieve their "little dreams," so that these can, in turn, incrementally represent and influence the elevation of their community.
The problem is that, especially in this moment of continuing extremity -- in terms of socio-economic inequality, collapse of any semblance of democratic control over a sclerotic government, microwaving of the ecosystem -- Usnavi's self help-style speeches about plan-making and pulling one's head out of the sand promote denial rather than progress. They remain almost entirely oriented around the fetishizing of business ownership and higher education as vehicles for promoting a new crop of identity-based representatives, or "influencers." Vetted for their merit within the current system, the influencer then further enforces the parameters of what constitutes realistic or acceptable action under capitalism. Want to go to business school like Benny? Want to be a career activist like Sonny? Want to finally have sex, like Usnavi? Make a plan! Work hard! If you really want it, you can make it!
And if you can't?
Liberalism, when conceptualized as it most commonly is, as a cultural identity, connotes tolerance, multiculturalism, and an interest in promoting social progress. But as an ideology, one only needs to peel back the cultural affectations of liberalism just a little to reveal its persistent basis in and perpetuation of fundamentally reactionary values, particularly the veneration of the strident individual and the possessive investment in status quo institutions as determinants of who gets to represent collective interests and who gets to then influence the trajectory of society. Like Aaron Sorkin before him, Lin-Manuel Miranda has inherited the mantle of producing liberalism's ideal cultural products. And like The West Wing and The Newsroom, In the Heights and Hamilton work far more effectively to talk down to and discredit the Left than to actually fight exponentially extreme right-wing movements. Indeed, both Sorkin and Miranda's output, over the span of three decades, expresses a continued obsession by cultural liberals with signifying one's intellectual and moral superiority as a rationalization for privilege, the secular version of the prosperity gospel that animates the right. And when liberalism, the dominant valance of what the general public perceives of as being "left-of-center," continues to pride institutional elitism, to inhibit radical structural change, are we to be surprised when Trump's electoral numbers among the same groups that his party marginalizes actually go up? This rightward shift in demographics that have been conventionally taken for granted as either lumpen non-voters or Democratic strongholds is, quite frankly, a logical externality of the retreat of cultural liberals into ideological fantasy, pathologically denying the failure of identity-and-representation based politics to actually improve the vast majority of people's lives. Assuming a tautological continuity between "identity" and "ideology," they have, effectively, engineered their own blowback.
Emerging from the nightmare of the flailing Trump and on the verge of four more nightmarish years under the crumbling Biden, In the Heights is the "influencer" movie. Its fantasist aesthetic and agitprop content elides for its core liberal audience that the only thing progressive about America is the withering disintegration of even the pretense of its social contract. The film is, in its own way, just as much the product of a degenerated industry, professionalized by elite academic institutions and consolidated into fewer and fewer market titans, as any live-action Disney remake or franchise crossover. And, more likely than not -- as we enter the phase of acceptable risk from COVID and, thus, the return to psychotic normality that opens up the movie theaters again -- we can rest assured that we are now at the point where it is only going to be this type of movie that we ever see until the Sun swallows us and everybody else on the screen still doesn't even show the slightest perspiration. Nobody who gets into a position to actually make movies gets to actually do anything, and deep down they all know it. And so the only reason to have movies now is to soothe and validate our egos. Our age of extremity is also, truly, an age of influence, in which the ideal is that we watch a movie that we already want to be socially constructive and, rather than from the film itself, derive joy from the fantasy that it is in some way influencing others to be better people.
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