I saw the Ben Stiller “remake” of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I rarely watch movies, and I do not like many of those that I do see. Had the main character not been named Walter Mitty, no one would have suggested that it in any way resembles or rips off the Danny Kaye version or the original Thurber story. The movie starts out slowly, but it picks up about half way through.
What interested me was that a main theme was the evil of the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The background for the plot of the movie is that Life Magazine, where Mitty works, is about to disappear as a print publication. A cardboard-character villain comes to supervise the inevitable staff cuts. It strikes me that this depiction of obsolete businesses as the innocent victims of evil corporate villains has appeared in a number of movies in recent years (and again, I have only a small sample). Some possible reasons for this:
1. This is the zeitgeist. Many people are have lost jobs or are afraid of losing jobs, and this theme draw them in.
2. Showing the benefits from creative destruction is not as compelling. As an acquaintance of mine once said, in fiction, having a hero is optional. But you must have a compelling villain.
3. Hollywood has always been anti-business.
Meanwhile, Paul H. Rubin writes,
If we think in competitive terms, we say, “Wal-Mart has outcompeted small firms and driven them out of business.” If we take a cooperative view of the same event, we say, “Wal-Mart has done a better job of cooperating with customers by selling them things on better terms, and the small firms were not able to cooperate as well.” Same facts, but a very different emotional reaction.
Pointer from Mark Thoma. Somehow, I do not think that this is the magic cure for reducing the cultural bias against markets.
Tyler Cowen’s Economics of the Media course at MRU convinced me that this is mostly a result of consumer demands driving content, and not producers pushing content onto consumers (although presumably that happens a little bit at the margin).
That approach eliminates #3.
That leaves #1 and #2. Neither of these seems satisfactory.
Hollywood films have been against creative-destruction for many years (Wall Street, You’ve Got Mail, etc.), so zeitgeist doesn’t seem a very good explanation.
The villian/hero dichotomy may be accurate, but simply raises the question of why Hollywood doesn’t film movies in which the little business that lobbies for regulatory protection is the villian.
Instead, I think these stories have to do with telling the story along the oppressed/oppressor axis, which registers even for people who don’t self-identify as political progressive.
“I do not think that this is the magic cure for reducing the cultural bias against markets.” I agree, but I also think that the idea that there’s a universal and unshakeable “cultural bias against markets” is a too-easy answer to the complicated issues around how people perceive market exchange. I haven’t read Rubin’s piece (since I don’t have a WSJ subscription), but his alternative scenario of “Wal-Mart … cooperating with customers” rings totally false.
First, I suspect people generally think of cooperation as something engaged in by relative equals, where the benefits and costs to each are roughly equivalent. I can imagine that my patronage makes a difference to (for example) the nearby Japanese gift shop and cafe that’s owned by a local couple; I feel regret and even guilt when I haven’t stopped by in a while. But (similar to Jason Brennan’s argument against voting) it’s extremely implausible that my shopping or not shopping at Wal-Mart means anything at all to the corporation in isolation.
Second, individuals can feel a personal connection even when doing business with a large corporation if there’s some larger emotionally resonant narrative surrounding the transaction. With respect to Wal-Mart competitors, think of Target’s (somewhat self-ironic) narrative around buying good design at lower-than-expected prices (the “Tarzhay” effect), or Costco’s narrative around quirky bargains and (relatively) better treatment of employees.
What is Wal-Mart’s narrative? “Always low prices.” It doesn’t exactly stir the soul (unless you’re an economist, I guess). The only halfway-emotionally-resonant narrative Wal-Mart had was the image of Sam Walton as a homespun pickup-driving businessman — the sort of person whom customers could imagine as sharing their values and their background. But Sam Walton is dead and buried, and as far as Wal-Mart customers are concerned his successors are just another group of anonymous billionaires and corporate managers.
The market, like nature, is no longer a good antagonist in fiction, or the news, it seems. Look the natural disasters, the media quickly pick a bad guy. Living ensconced in their 911 bubble, most Westerners these days can’t handle that there are things that happen beyond all control and all you can do is adapt, improvise, survive. The sea, the wilderness, the weather, and the market, all act without malice, without forethought, without any consideration of the puny humans that end up on the wrong side of events. It seems few can mentally handle this anymore. Perhaps, since they are their own god these days, they feel lost in the face of reality? Can’t accept that you can do everything right and still drown, still freeze, still fail in business. So the stories have to have someone acting with malice, someone being diabolical, someone who failed to warn.
Even in fiction these days, there seems to be no stomach for the bad things happen to good people for no other reason than it was a Tuesday. And the market is like the sea, it just is. It reacts to the forces. It doesn’t care who rides the waves, who wipes out, or who get pounded on the rocks.
I recommend checking out Larry Ribstein’s paper Hollywood & Vine, available on SSRN. Ribstein’s view, as I recall, is that movies are typically made by creatives, who resent the control capitalists (in the sense of sources of capital) have over their ability to produce their art as they see fit.