Nous Faisons

It's crazy. I think the film industry is just a reflection of the brutal capitalism that we live in now. The 99% and 1% pendulum of society is reflected in art. You buy the painting by whoever for $50 million, or you buy the shitty thing in the market for $1,000. There's no middle ground. Or in films, you do the $4 million, $5 million movie or the $150 million movie. Suddenly, the middle class is disappearing and all of those middle things are gone. It's a very difficult time for those films that I used to do.

Capitalist modernity, so it appeared, had landed us with an economic system which was almost purely instrumental. It was a way of life dedicated to power, profit, and the business of material survival, rather than to fostering the values of human sharing and solidarity. The political realm was more a question of management and manipulation than of the communal shaping of a common life. Reason itself had been debased to mere self-interested calculation. As for morality, this, too, had become an increasingly private affair, more relevant to the bedroom than the boardroom. Cultural life had grown more important in one sense, burgeoning into a whole industry or branch of material production. In another sense, however, it had dwindled to the window-dressing of a social order which had exceedingly little time for anything it could not price or measure. Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.