How Hollywood plays to your weaknesses

Everybody's a fish out of water. Most movies involve fishes out of water. This is because Hollywood has happened on a quirk of human nature: everybody can relate to this. Everybody can relate to not feeling like they belong.

You are each so unique, audience
Note how in every small-town, even if everybody else is a dumb hick, there is always that one person from there who is pretty cool, this person is either the hero or the loyal sidekick to the hero. Every real life dumb hick who sees that movie will identify with that person. They won't see themselves as being any of the other assholes. The same goes for the ghetto, the large corporate office or any other place where the denizens can be stereotyped. The way you get people to identify with your lead character is to make it clear that they are better than everybody else.

Everybody is the hero of their own little movie life.

When the movie ends the hero must have a girlfriend
Everybody wants a sexual relationship. More than that, sexual relationships are a measure of happiness. You have to fall in love with somebody to be happy in life, and have a good future. You can kill the bad guy, rescue the hostages, save the city from destruction, but you haven't really won, and cannot be truly satisfied unless the audience can see that you are now in a new relationship.

There must be a climactic showdown
People believe that confrontations are are definitive and that when one person emerges as “victor” from a confrontation, this indicates that they are victors in life. You can't really settle anything without a climactic battle to determine who is more dangerous or, in many cases, lucky. The bad guy has to die or get beaten up, what's more the fight has to go on for a really long time so that you know that the good guy really has to work for his pay off. He has to get hurt a lot so that when the bad guy gets blown up, skewered, or has a shipping trailer fall on him you feel relief or even joy.

Revenge is always a good idea
People are naturally vindictive. Even in situations where retaliation is not practical or reasonable, everybody still wants it. You got cut off on the way to work this morning, your boss adopted a certain tone when instructing you, a customer of below-average intellect insulted you. Everybody carries a set of repressed grudges. Seeing somebody act on their grudges on film allows a release of tension and delight in vicarious brutality.

Why newspapers so very badly need to die

Ok, so these guys went to journalism school and learned all the tricks of the trade. They do not like having all their hard word and expertise devalued. I understand that. Professional web-developers tend to look down on people who never went to school operating websites, chefs tend to look down on home-cooks as barely-competent amateurs. I get that. It goes with being being trained in anything, you resent all the people who have not paid their dues. It still does not mean that your product is worth my money.

The truth is that of all the professions listed above, journalists are the least necessary. Their “professional product” least worth paying for.

When was the last time a journalist did anything useful? Seriously. What have you read in a newspaper or seen on TV that changed how you went about doing anything? The front page of the New York Times today has stories about Judge Sotomayor, the CIA-Cheney conspiracy to hide things from congress, and Obama’s trip to Africa. Most people in America have made their minds up about Cheney and Sotomayor without having to read the Times, and their opinions have nothing to do with anything these people say or do. Most of the content of the major news outlets is worthless. It is reportage for the sake of reporting. You have all these journalists and this equipment so you have to put something out or it would all be wasted. There is a lot of effort put into making it seem important, meaningful, but it’s not. In a way bloggers have highlighted this. With hastily written, ungrammatical, inconsistently spell-checked work cobbled together in basements, they can put together a product that sells almost as well.

I did not know Michael Jackson, and aside from liking one or two of his songs back when I was still young, I have no sentimental connection to the man. If his passing and the subsequent issues were of any importance to me I would bookmark TMZ.com, not purchase a magazine or newspaper. Every issue that a newspaper might cover has dedicated bloggers who are obsessed with that one thing, people who would sell their first-born to find out something new and to share it with a network of similarly obsessed individuals. The blogs might be repetitive and hard to read, but you will get more information in five minutes than you would from a long, padded-out NYT article written by some disinterested preppie.

The big question is why this is even being debated. There was once a time when the fastest you could get your news was in the next days’ paper, where the stories would be fact-checked and edited and those writers would get another 24 hours to follow up. You got your stuff slowly because there was no more efficient means of dissemination than tree-flesh. Now there are better ways, or one better way, something faster and more efficient. All the stuff that we didn’t have to know is available along with the very few bits of info that it might be useful to have.