A New Path For Us All
People decry all the time ‘kids’ who only want to be famous—meaning all they want is ‘followers’, ‘likes’, ‘subscribers’, you name it. Maybe they want to one day try and parlay that digital fame into traditional fame (success within the entertainment industry) but a lot of them simply want to be and stay independently wealthy as ‘content creators’. That is to say, they want to remain outside of ‘the system’ (some nebulous, bureaucratic, analog evil) even if that means being tied to certain platforms (some nebulous, bureaucratic, digital evil).
It’s a good thing and a bad thing that kids want this different thing. It’s good in that they may not be waking up to everything, but at least they are waking up to something (Hollywood sucks). It’s bad though in that their idea of success is still just built upon people adoring them—or rather, adoring some specific quirky-hot thing that they do, and must do over and over, in order to survive.
There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons where Bart earnestly utters a phrase on live TV (“I didn’t do it”) which turns him into an overnight sensation, with that as his catchphrase that everyone clamors for him to utter. This episode came well before the phenomenon of memes and the like, smack dab in the sitcom-dominated period of television (spanning several decades) where precociousness and a pithy saying was all you needed to become a household name, a pull-string doll, etcetera.
The episode does a great job of depicting how exhausting and demeaning it would be for that to happen to you, but, at least in the long run, it did nothing to stop people from wanting that for themselves—you change the medium, or a generation passes, and brains reset. Social media, for the past decade or more, has been all about trying to have what Bart had and hated—to have that is seen as ‘crushing it’, and the only ‘crushing it’ that is possible for independents.
It may not be a specific phrase, sound, or noise that people want you to utter and only utter—sure, there is that, but more often what people are looking for from the particular social media personality that they are addicted to is a consistent and predictable energy. I find it ironic that there was so much backlash and fright about the ‘NPC streaming’ trend (people acting essentially like robots, with perfectly repeated phrases and reactions, on livestream) when that’s what anyone successful is doing on there at all, period—the NPC version being just a mere pushing of it to its most logical conclusion, its most naked form.
All this would be fine—there’s room for vapidity, and soul-crushing work, in society, I guess—so long as there were other avenues of success available to ‘independent creators’ in this new age, avenues which were not demeaning, or impossible to maintain without wanting to blow your brains out. In a perfect world, you should be able to make just as much money being an intellectual and talented artist of some medium as you can a glorified village idiot with tits. But, there isn’t that. Even if you’ve no tits to push together, you are at least metaphorically in some way doing that, if you have a following on social media. That’s just how the game is played—the game we’re all supposed to play simply because we didn’t want to go the other demeaning route (Hollywood).
Part of my mission, beyond just making the truly independent films that I make, is to create avenues for success for truly independent filmmakers that do not mirror, or follow at all parallel to, that which has been laid out for ‘independent creators’ by social media and the like. It’s a preposterous and downright anti-art proposition to expect people to maintain a certain social media-ready charm and demeanor and pandering and obsequiousness, and content output, and also do the best art of their lives. In fact, it’s the same paradigm as the ‘media ready’ concept of traditional fame—here’s what’s acceptable to say, here’s how it’s acceptable to look, etcetera, if you want to do well at all. The evil was not abandoned, it was simply carted over from one dying industry to a burgeoning one.
There is nothing wrong with looking your best and sounding your best and being enjoyable. But the idea that that must be your product, alongside and more so than what you actually create in this world from nothing, is insane. The fact that I would be vastly more successful as a filmmaker if I looked like a supermodel, male or female, is not something biological, some fact of life, some ‘how we’re wired’ thing we should excuse in audiences, but a symptom of an arbitrary and broken paradigm. You wouldn’t request the doctor operating on your brain be as hot as possible (and to do so would be a sign that you probably do need your brain fixed).
Some of the most attractive and charming people I know have next to no social media presence. And so, they are not particularly successful, despite their natural gifts, because the price of admission to success is to wear make up, whether you need it or not. ‘Make up’ meaning not just literal make up, but everything you must do to yourself in order to dress yourself up for being taken seriously as someone who does something (such as, but not limited to, regular updates and content).
Even just me writing consistently on my Substack is make up, is me pushing my tits together. On some level, even though I’m doing something intelligent here, I’m ‘playing the game’. Fuck it all to hell, honestly, but I do have a lot to say as of late, and I’m broke as hell, so maybe this will help me survive. But, I digress.
The other path forward, which I envision and which is not currently available, is success for our best and brightest independents that does not rely on fandom or popularity. All the most powerful people in the world, from those we do admire to those we absolutely don’t (think Klaus Schwab) do not ever need to push their tits together—they just get to do stuff (horrible stuff). I want the same privilege for all of us who are intelligent, and are effective, and can execute, and are good people. If the worst people in the world get to operate so free from the rat race, the rigamarole, then we should have that too.
If you want me to be able to just be me and make movies and make change in this world, contribute $2.50 per month or $30 per year to my truly independent film studio Kill The Lion Films. And never ask me for feet pics, and never hate me simply because I made one movie that wasn’t exactly what you wanted. Together, we can change everything.