Minions & Monsters

I think this might be the longest thing I've ever written on Letterboxd. 

Worth it for both the laughs and the multitudes it shockingly contains. It is incredibly simplistic and funny and a kids movie that lacks some writing finnesse (not quite sure I liked this Dort character -- felt a bit underdeveloped, and the feminist organizer seemed very single-faceted), but well worth a watch if you just want something stupid, or if you enjoy thinking about films in the broader historical and political contexts they exist in. That is an increasingly rare and commendable combination I do not see much of these days, and it feels to me like this did it at least sort of well.

To save the eye strain: I don't think it's a mistake that this uses an octopus and an all consuming creature to depict a looming threat to the film industry during the American Progressive Era. It mirrors and reflects a complex history of consolidation and market power in the film industry.

The fact that the two main characters are named Henry and James and it takes place at the turn of the century just makes me wish that they had a minion named William instead of Edward, so there could an allusion to both Henry James and William James.

Much of what I wrote below is sourced by Tim Wu's book The Master Switch, where he details the history of film industry consolidation. 

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I went into the movie theater expecting to just watch something stupid with my parents after a whirlwind of events these past few days. I had a vague understanding of what the film was about -- "minions doing bullshit while referencing old films" was essentially my perception going in. I am really shocked, though, at how this film contains so much more than that perception. 

Yes, it is a "minions doing bullshit" kids movie, but the historian and economist in me recognizes that there is something more here. It has to do with antitrust enforcement, the history of film and production company consolidation, and the current historical moment we live in where a successful Paramount-Warner Brothers merger could potentially threaten to radically constrain and limit the set of films we as a public audience have access to. 

And the stakes of that really set in when I walked out of the movie theater. People from every walk of life, of all ages, wearing all different sorts of clothes, coming with their families or alone, a father and a son standing next to eachother in the popcorn line barely even looking at one another, a set of young parents bringing their 3 year old to watch Spiderman for the first time, a Louis-Vuitton-bagged white mother and her two sons standing behind a bedheaded 30 year old gamer wearing a Dragon Ball Z shirt, a Bangladeshi guy wearing all black and tortoise shell glasses waiting to see the minions movie -- all these groups of people coming together infront of a singular screen and munching on popcorn. What is wagered when the melting pot capacities of film and cinema are placed in the hands of a few corporate entities? This movie has, surprisingly, a lot to say about that. 

The American film industry in the early 1900s was incredibly consolidated by just a handful of players, which had dramatic effects on what films got produced, who could make them, and where they could be seen. Thomas Edison created the Edison Trust in 1908, which was a de facto cartel of studios and production companies that controlled the distribution of film and owned an abundance of patents on cameras, lights, microphones, and film stocks. They also engaged in price fixing with theaters that sought to purchase reels and conducted vertical mergers with suppliers to cut off the flow of goods to potential competitors (one of those suppliers being Kodak, which was one of the largest film and reel manufacturers during that time). This trust, while having certainly made signficant advances in film technology and distribution, simultaneously engaged in practices that resulted in a monopolized film industry and had also acted as gatekeepers that seriously constrained the set of films that could be made and seen (one of those being essentially the broadband elimination of foriegn films in US theaters during this cartel's reign). In 1915, they were litigated in a federal antitrust case and was sued à la Section 2 of the Sherman Act (mainly).

In that context, Hollywood emerged as a response and retaliation to the Edison Tust. Whereas the trust was centered in New York and was ran primarily by members of the New England elite, Hollywood was built in Los Angeles out of not economic competition mathematics or huge investments from private equity firms, but out of pure necessity to escape the Edison Trust. Carl Lammle, a Jewish immigrant from Germany that owned movie theaters in the midwest challenged the Edison trust and said in his 1909 declaration of independence that he hoped his "fellow fighters" would "denounce the film octopus". This rebellious man with socialist tendencies later founded Universal Studios (the same studio that produced this film, ironically), and his fellow comrade Wilhelm Fuchs, known as William Fox, founded the Fox Film Corporation. In a sense, the birth of Hollywood is steeped in a democratic and revolutionary sentiment, one that stood in opposition to concentrated corporate power and believed in a film industry that resisted consolidation. Today, however, Hollywood has certainly strayed away from that spirit -- the creation of online streaming platforms, two or three major thater corporations, and a handful of studios in the industry mean that the potential for a film industry that resists consolidation, if not completely stalled, is at least severely curbed. 

So what the fuck does any of that have to do with this movie? Let it be known that my read here is probably not at all what the filmmakers intended (or maybe it is, I don't know). In any case, I'm sure there are plenty of details that could be spoken about, but off the top of my head, I can think of two specific characters that I believe resonate profoundly with the history film and media consolidation. They are the octopus, Howard, and the all-consuming orange blob monster thing, Irene. 

What both of these characters do in the context of the movie is simple: they eat, consume, and seek to "destroy and control the world" (whatever that means). It is I think incredibly simplified and single faced character construction, which makes sense given that this is a kids movie, but reading them both against the history I laid out above leads to some quite interesting interpretations. At the turn of the century, many political cartoonists were occupied with monopolization in industries like oil, railroads, steel, and the telegraph, and to depict these industries and their corporations, they commonly analogized them to an octopus. A famous cartoon in particular, "Next!" by Udo Keppler, depicts Standard Oil as a giant green octopus with its tentacles wrapped around a capitol building and a state house, and it has its eyes on the White House. It is also grabbing boats, businessmen, and factories, and its forehead is made up of an oil storage tank. Keppler's cartoon is one of many examples of this commonly recurring motif in political cartoons during this period of time: the octopus-as-monopoly. 

This kind of sprawling all encompassing control that political cartoonists like Keppler sensed through Standard Oil is I think also evoked in this film in what feels to me like a very uncanny historical interval and geneaology. Irene, after being spawned inside of a film studio building, busts through the wall and proceeds to rampage all throughout Los Angeles. As it traverses the roads, it consumes cars, homes, debris, and items from the film studio. When James enters it with a car, we see for a brief moment all the different sort of objects in has consumed. Similarly, the octopus Howard repeatedly asks if he can eat the minions throughout the film. Assuming that one can accurately analogize both characters to the octopus commonly depicted in progressive era political cartoons, then each character performs the kinds of actions associated with the Edison Trust and, generally, monopolization's common features-- blanketed control, endless consumption and greed, and no installation of routes to escape either of those. 

That's fascinating and remarkable in the present moment. I don't necessarily claim this to be true, but it certainly could be: that Universal is a direct competitor of Paramount and Warner Bros, and is making a film that alludes to the negative effects of monopolization in the film industry, strikes me as a way to reveal to its audience that market power may not be entirely desirable. That the film also takes place in a pedagogical setting -- that of a museum exhibit where the tour guide rehearses this history to tourists -- I think also suggests that there could be an underlying incentive to get some sort of historical context across to the audience. In that light, it might not be simply incidental that this film is commenting on the harms of market consolidation, because in a world where there could be a major merger that fundamentally shifts the industry and possibly occurs at the detrmiment of the studio making this movie, using movie theaters as a site to evoke conversations and questions about the state of the film industry, its potential futures, and what an ideal film industry lookes like -- that is, an industry where James gets the chance to create and produce his own films -- seems like an awfully strategic thing to do. 

Again, this is purely speculative, but to put it more cleanly, part of me feels like this is a film made by a studio competitor in order to suggest that a horizontal merger occuring in its industry may have consequentially negative downsides. And if that is true, it may certainly be right -- the psychological power of film is something I've occupied much of my time in undergrad thinking and writing about, and one thing that I repeatedly come across is the capacity of film as a technology of pedagogy, as a tool to educate the masses in an incredibly efficient manner, and as a way of embedding values, national imaginaries, and idealized lives into the hundreds of thousands of viewers that go to movie theaters or see films on streaming platforms. If a merger were to occur, with less market competition among studios, who fucking knows what might happen to film and media going forward.

To be honest, I don't really know what might happen in a world where the Paramount-Warner Bros merger does occur because I can't predict the future. But given what history has shown, where the Edison trust had the capacity to gatekeep and intimately curate the images people could access, where monopolies are depicted as perpetually consuming orange blob monsters with thousands of eyes or as pink/green octopi that also endlessly capture and control, part of me can't help but think that the plurality I encountered in the theater (*1) might be dramatically altered in a world where fewer and fewer corporate entities have more and more control over what it is we see on the big or small screens.

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(*1) If, that is, a plurality even existed -- Adorno and Horkheimer would suggest that film acts as a technology that can create the same consumer subject with the same desires. Deleuze, however, complicates the claim by arguing that in every repetition -- in every repeated customer with supposedly the same desires -- there exists difference, just like how every time Steph Curry shoots a three pointer, there will always exist some difference in his form in each repeated shot. That difference cannot exist without repetition, and, that repetition cannot exist without difference, is I think a complication of Adorno and Horkheimer's argument that the culture industry produces the same exact consumer subject, because in each repetition of something, in each repeated consumer subject, according to Deleuze, there exists difference, such that the "same consumer subject" might rest on a tenuously constructed fantasy of nonexistant difference.