Are We Caught In A Real Groundhog Day?
The sad fall of creativity in what was once ground zero for American storytelling.
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
— Phil Connors
A little over a year ago, I wrote about the sad demise of creativity in Hollywood and how it came to be that what was once the zenith of American storytelling now found itself caught up in a nightmarish brew of focus groups, bean counters, and way too powerful shareholders. It’s not just Hollywood, of course. The same can be said for television, music, and literature. Sadly, not much has changed in the last twelve months. What has changed is the number of new subscribers to Strange Alchemy in that time and who might not have caught the original Groundhog post. So I’m reprising it here this week. We think the greatest threat to human creativity is AI. But what if our own greed, our own laziness is the real enemy?
By now, the story is legend.
Local weather man, Phil Connors, is once again sent out to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney. This is his fourth year on the story, he’s not happy and he makes no effort to hide his frustration.
On awaking in his hotel room the next day, he discovers that it's Groundhog Day all over again. And again. And again. He’s doomed to spend the rest of eternity in the same place, seeing the same people, doing the same things every day.
Who would have thought Hollywood itself would become Phil Connors.
Christopher Stevens writes for the Daily Mail. He’s made the assertion— and he is by no means alone in this— that Hollywood has run out of original ideas.
“In the past decade, 90 per cent of the most popular films have been based on earlier movies, comic books or novels. It seems no one in Hollywood now has an original notion in their heads.”
Lately, it’s been suggested that AI will never have an original creative idea since all it can really do is scrape around the internet, gathering up what humans have already imagined.
But if we’re being honest, how is that different from what we’ve been seeing in the movies? It’s as if we’re stuck in some weird time loop where the same thinly disguised ideas show up over and over again.
Even Pixar, one of the mightiest engines of creativity in Hollywood, has been off its feed lately. Luca (2021), Turning Red (2022), and the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear (2022), have all underwhelmed and underperformed with original storytelling. Which might explain Elemental. With a storyline not dissimilar to the comparatively successful Inside Out, Elemental has proven to be a disappointment to put it mildly.
Not to pick on Disney, but what is up with The Little Mermaid? Retelling stories that have gone before, of course, is nothing new for Disney. Snow White. Beauty and The Beast. Peter Pan. Even The Little Mermaid itself, a much darker tale from the mind of Hans Christian Anderson himself. They all started out years before Disney cleaned them up and made cinematic blockbusters out of them. But to retell a story you’ve already retold once, this says something to me. Never mind that the 2023 version is live action. Is Little Mermaid 2.0 good? Yes it is. The cinematography? The editing? The music? Yes. Yes. Yes. But is it creative? If you’re a creativity purist, your argument is likely to be that it is not. I can hear it now. “The story wasn’t creative the first time around in 1989 and it’s even less creative in 2023”.
I have a lot of friends who are rabid Wes Anderson fans. They will swear up and down that Anderson is a filmic genius on a par with Scorsese, Spielberg and Kubrick. And maybe they’re right. But the fact that I can spot a Wes Anderson film a mile away is not a positive sign for me. The casting. The quirky dialogue. But mostly it’s that color. I’m the first to concede that the first time I saw Moonrise Kingdom, I thought it was some of the most creative filmmaking I had ever seen. But then it kept going. The casting. The quirky dialogue. The color palette. It all just kept going. In my world, that’s not creative anymore
Here’s an example from advertising: Years ago, Mastercard launched its Priceless campaign. It was brilliant when it first saw the light of the day. But years later, the idea wasn’t new anymore. You were still entertained much of the time. But you knew what was coming. “For everything else, there’s Mastercard”. Great campaign. But after a long run like Mastercard had, not as creative anymore.
Literature has its own problems. One of the greatest and most prolific mystery writers of the latter 20th century, the late Robert B. Parker, drew heavily from Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe for all three of his main characters, specifically, Spencer, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall. All three of Parker’s creations were inspired by Marlowe’s wisecracking, tough-guy, heart-of-gold archetype, which, in turn, grew out of the early 20th-century hard-boiled mystery genre that introduced other detective greats like Sam Spade.
J. R .R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, surpasses the influential force of Raymond Chandler and has practically defined the fantasy genre. Myriad creatures, such as elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons, and demons set in vaguely medieval British environs, have Tolkien to thank for their popularity. So much of fantasy, from Robert Jordan’s lengthy Wheel of Time series to the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft and dare I mention Game Of Thrones feed off of the mythos that Tolkien brought to life.
Some of you are thinking, what the hell is he talking about? Nothing is purely original. By your unrealistic standard, Ernie Schenck, Einstein never had an original thought in his life having borrowed from the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Isaac Newton, and Henri Poincaré. But of course, what Einstein did with those ideas, the way he fused them into what would become The Theory of Relativity, was one of the most creative acts in history. No argument there.
But there’s something different going on now.
What we’re seeing unfold in media and entertainment isn’t being fueled by creatively driven people seeking to explore what else is possible. It’s the bean counters. They’ve breached the walls. They’ve broken into the cockpit and they’ve taken over the controls. Originality isn’t on the menu anymore. And why would it be? Originality is dangerous. It can bomb as easily as it can soar. There’s profit in sameness, after all. And so here we are in dejavueville.
Welcome to Groundhog Day, friends.
Again.
All this summer, I’m offering a free 30 minute Zoom call with your paid annual subscription. Talk about anything you like. I’m up for whatever. Offer good until Labor Day.