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‘Infinity Pool’ and accountability in Hollywood

As much fun as it is watching society crumble into the most boring dystopia imaginable, it is reassuring to know that Hollywood will always be there to showcase how much fun we could be having. If you’ve moseyed on over to your local multiplex in the last year or just booted up your favorite streaming service, you might have picked up on a running theme.

So called “Eat the Rich” films were all the rage in 2022, with these projects often made and championed by people with an astounding lack of self-awareness. Not all of them were created equal. “Triangle of Sadness” and “Glass Onion” proved insufferable but played well with critics and Starbucks Marxists. Of them all, “The Menu” was the only one to stick the landing with its satire and actually deliver on the promise to entertain, thanks in large part to its two leads, Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy.

2023 has kicked off with another entry in this stable, the delightfully ghoulish and deviant “Infinity Pool” from the cinema scion Brandon Cronenberg, which recently made headlines at the Sundance Film Festival. Set on a resort in a fictional Mediterranean country, “Infinity Pool” asks its audience to consider what they would do in a world where you can pay for the creation of a perfect clone of yourself, down to the atom and even memory, to receive punishments for crimes instead of yourself.

Reminiscent of 2022’s low-fi sci-fi cult hit “Dual,” another film about the ethical and metaphysical conflicts created by cloning, it’s safe to say “Infinity Pool” isn’t for everyone. It’s the kind of movie that makes you uneasy around your own reflection. In fact, Cronenberg’s third film is proving particularly divisive, not just for the buckets of blood and indefensible subject matter, but also because it lays bare how vacuous our elites can be and how alien their fellow human beings can become to them.

Directors Reuben Osland and Rian Johnson may make the heroes of “Triangle” and “Knives Out” the service workers and blue-collar dregs they champion, but they don’t view these groups any differently than the obnoxious and odious caricatures of the rich and powerful that populate their scripts. Where Osland and Johnson think they’re very clever for saying, “aren’t rich people out of touch and evil?” and delight in sticking it to the straw men they’ve constructed, they can’t escape the fact that they are multi-millionaires themselves.

Cronenberg, in contrast, is totally willing to say something about the rich, famous, and powerful that they would never deign to consider, which is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart, including their own. It doesn’t matter to Cronenberg how much money a character has in their bank account, all that matters is how a person reacts when they are made immune from the consequences of their actions.

Speaking of consequences, Hollywood is operating like a coked-up anti-hero in a Scorsese movie shortly before their final act of self-destruction. As the cashflow from mid-budget, adult-oriented dramas, romances, and comedies slowed to a trickle in the last 20 years, the whole industry has instead become overleveraged on spectacle and a glut of streaming content that no human being could ever hope to completely consume. Given the quality of this mass of quantity, nor would they want to.

This could be due to a permeation of post-modern cynicism within the industry, and a growing resentment and hostility from creators against their very audience. We’ve seen cultural institutions and billion-dollar franchises do a reversal, seeking ideological correction within society in lieu of entertainment, with shame and condescension heaped upon all those with whom our pop culture elites disagree with or dislike.

They’ll toss aside iconic characters and actors who played them, and try to sell you on the premise that their “improvements” are somehow better than the genuine article. Of course, the denigration of such cultural touchstones is entirely the point for those behind these regressive creative decisions, as the only way they can conceive to convince audiences to care about the current offerings is to burn down and replace the entire legacy the property is built on.

There are some very obvious examples that illustrate this, namely the sorry state of every media franchise from “Star Wars” to “Lord of the Rings.” In Peter Jackson’s original “Rings” trilogy, his fanboy credentials were a virtue that served the films; whereas today you have some productions deliberately hiring writers and directors who proudly have no love, let alone familiarity, with the work being adapted.

While not all of Jackson’s creative additions and omissions pleased every single devout Tolkienite, the end result was clearly coming from someone with a healthy love and appreciation for it. Where the team behind Amazon’s “The Rings of Power” felt compelled to till their own ground and “improve” Tolkien wherever they felt appropriate, Jackson spent years visualizing and planning entire sequences shot by shot to serve Tolkien’s prose and everyone who had ever read them.

This is showcased in sequence after sequence, and in particular “The Ride of the Rohirrim,” whose sweeping elegiac glory so stirs the spirit that I sometimes tear up a little just thinking about it even 20 years later. The pop culture arsonists charged with creating content like “The Rings of Power” aren’t making Tolkien’s work more universal or open to more people. All they’re doing is shrinking the window through which anyone can enjoy it, because ultimately, they are only creating something to please themselves.

Historically, when an endeavor is a massive flop like say “Cutthroat Island” was, it would have a detrimental effect on the studios and creatives involved. There was a reason Renny Harlin and Gina Davis found it hard to get gigs and why Carolco Pictures doesn’t show up in any credits you’ve seen recently. I grant you; Amazon has the billions to waste on middling streaming TV like “The Rings of Power”, and it is theirs to throw away. But being “too big to fail” gets in the way of the feedback loop that traditionally governed the excesses of the ideological hacks and the fraudulent creatives in their writers’ rooms.

For some reason, how the audience actually received the work in question isn’t a factor. What is discouraging is how little effect extreme negativity directed against things like HBO MAX’s recent regression of “Scooby Doo” called “Velma,” can have. Everyone, even the people that particular show is pandering to can’t stand the product given its historically low aggregated review scores, and yet for some reason we have another batch of episodes on order before they’ve even finished afflicting us with the first.

What is the consequence for such abject failure? In Hollywood, apparently if someone likes you, there isn’t any. Maybe we’d all be better served by just unplugging from the present, because “going broke” doesn’t seem to be giving the folks in Tinseltown any pause. Hollywood isn’t making this tripe for us anyway. You should see “Infinity Pool” though, if your stomach is strong enough.

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