HOPE IN DENIAL

LegalDispatch 119

Dec 13, 2024

Howdy.

For me, there’s one work week left until the holidays. I’ve spent the past month or so working diligently to clear my desk of as many projects as possible before the New Year. I’m now down to finishing the series format for PROJECT BRIMSTONE.

In addition to PROJECT BRIMSTONE, my output in December alone has been two comic book scripts (one extra-sized and requiring a substantial rewrite), a short film for the Apple Vision Pro (PROJECT WINDOW), and Netflix notes on the pilot for Last Flight Out. And while it feels good to check boxes off my to-do list, it feels better to avoid what’s happening in the country, the world, and the entertainment industry by retreating into work.

In other words, I’ve followed my own advice from my post-election dispatch and made my world small. I’ve been going out more with friends for pre-holiday dinners and drinks. As of last night, my oldest is home from college and I’ve felt an immediate uptick in my mood as a result.

And this is all in the face of the reality that things outside my small world are getting so much worse. It feels like Trump is already president. FBI director Christopher Wray bent the knee this week by preemptively resigning despite having over two years left on his term. Each day, America descends further and further into becoming a Putin-like oligarchy, differentiated only by a more committed head fake towards democracy lite.

And don’t even get me started on the television industry. I’ve come around to the feeling that — apart from Netflix — there are no signs of life on the horizon. The legacy studios have effectively gotten out of the television business and, worse, the ‘23 strikes and subsequent contraction have taught them that they can effectively stop ordering new shows to series without losing subscribers.

And despite all this, I find myself going into the New Year… hopeful? Yup. Credit denial and cultivated ignorance. Credit studied apathy. Credit me looking at recent developments and throwing up my hands and saying, “Sorry, nothing I can do.” I’m not proud to say it, but apathy in the face of impotence is only sensible. Let me step that out a bit further: I, like most people I know, feel — rightly or wrongly but, let’s be honestly, entirely rightly — that there’s nothing we can do about the current state of our country and/or the entertainment industry. (And if you think that the state of the entertainment industry’s woes don’t correlate with the rise of the new American oligarchy, I have news for you.) And given that there is nothing to be done, the only logical reaction is not to care. Because to care about things you have zero chance of effectuating change on is a recipe for madness.

And so I stay in my little family/friends/writing bubble and wait. I’ve made my world small and that world is good. Alexei Navalny, I’m not.

But how does all this “ignorance is bliss” bullshit translate into hope? I think my deliberate obliviousness has allowed me to find some degree of irrational optimism. It’s easier to be optimistic in the absence of facts which indicate otherwise. From my standpoint of unawareness, I can indulge in the fantasy that Trump won’t be as destructive as he claims, that consumers will vote with their dollars in a way that will make TV executives take notice, that the media will wake up to its responsibilities as the Fourth Estate and start saying truth to power instead of enabling it, etc.

We’ll see.

FEEDBACK

KentL writes in response to last week’s newsletter:

Just a point of clarification, Biden got 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million in 2020. Harris got 74 (almost 75) million to Trump’s 77 million this year. She actually got more votes this year than Trump did in 2020. What is more disturbing to me is that more people looked at Trump and thought, “Yeah, that’s what I want!” this time around.

A totally fair point. And, yes, the fact that 77 million Americans chose Trump despite completely botching our Covid response, fomenting an insurrection, being an adjudicated rapist, and being convicted of 34 felonies related to election fraud — saying nothing of his mendacity, stupidity, and general unfitness for office — is terribly disturbing. See, supra, burying my head in the sand.

LegalDispatch

HOPE IN DENIAL

LegalDispatch 119

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