PMC Glasses Have Clouded Netflix’s Vision

  In which I become the 4,263,769th writer to weigh in on "What's Wrong With Netflix"

There has been a lot of theorizing about what might have gone wrong with Netflix that has caused them to have the Earth-shattering minimal dip in subscriptions that they recently reported, causing them to have a 35 percent drop in market capitalization because investors are flighty idiots. (Not that I blame them, I’d be nervous too if I had two nickels to rub together in this ghoulish Late Stage Capitalism nightmare economy.)

Anyway, I want to get in on this whole theorizing thing myself, because I think I have a theory that is more all-encompassing than most other theories, which tend to run along the lines of “Netflix is failing because it isn’t making the kind of movies/shows I like any more.” My theory is more theoretical, more all-encompassing, explaining why Netflix fails to make or buy engaging content for its subscribers most of the time.

My theory is that the Netflix execs, the producers, the showrunners, the directors, set designers and decorators, costume designers and the writers are all members of the Professional Managerial Class (or PMC) or are at least PMC wannabes.

First of all, what do I mean by PMC glasses? I mean the people who make Netflix productions see the world from the viewpoint of one of the top 10 percent of American society, or world society. They are the affluent, the comfortable, the successful. They aren’t angry about anything. They aren’t upset about anything. They may have their causes and their viewpoints, but they’re comfortable causes and comfortable viewpoints.

And I’m not claiming that all these people being members of the PMC class or PMC wannabes is the result of any conspiracy. No one deliberately gave all those jobs to people just because they were PMC class members. Instead they gave people who are successful in film and television money, plenty of it, enough to propel them into the PMC class. By the time they got to the point where they were cutting deals with Netflix, they had been successful for a while. Members in good standing of the PMC class.

That’s why Netflix comedies aren’t funny. To be really funny, humor needs an edge provided by anger, by outsider outrage, which is generally in short supply among the very comfortable PMC class.

For example, one of the most successful, if not the most successful offerings on Netflix recently was “Don’t Look Up!” in which a planet-killer asteroid approaching Earth is an obvious stand-in for the climate crisis. It is edgy it is angry it is full of the sort of stuff that PMC types might find disturbing, looking at politics, politicians, the military and the media with a very hard, cynical eye. It has a downbeat ending and it portrays the mighty on Earth as a bunch of self-obsessed, greedy idiots who are too busy money grubbing and power grabbing to save themselves.

“Don’t Look Up!” would seem prove me wrong, except it had some outsider outrage going from David Sirota who co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay. Sirota was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential campaign, and prior to “Don’t Look Up” was primarily known as a leftie commentator. He wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, but he could fairly be described as a Social Democrat like Bernie Sanders.

It was Sirota’s leftist outrage over climate change and his in-depth knowledge of the duplicity of the media and politics that made the barbs sharp and nasty. “Don’t Look Up” succeeded by borrowing its outrage from a political outsider, Sirota. The instincts of most PMC types would be to moderate the anger and the rage, replacing it with merely clever wordplay and very broad satire, leaving “Don’t Look Up!” in the vicinity of funny. Sirota’s knowledge and anger kept it right on target.

This rarely happens on Netflix, and I think that’s what makes the service dull. Once Netflix started getting up to 100 million subscribers, its major preoccupation became finding entertainment that wouldn’t offend its enormous base, rather than entertainment that would make them glad they were subscribers.

This impulse, combined with the PMC goggles that want to make everything look comfortable and safe makes everything dull and interesting. The comedies aren’t funny (lookin’ at you, “Yes Day” “Bad Trip” and “Starsky and Hutch”) the romances aren’t all that romantic and definitely not sexy (lookin’ at you, all of Netflix’s recent romcoms) and the action/adventure stuff is vigorous and active but not at all compelling (lookin’ at you “Red Notice,” and “Eagle Eye”) and sometimes they’re just godawful (lookin’ at you “Spenser Confidential”).

The sexuality stuff is also indicative. They can’t even match softcore porn in their sex scenes. It’s all ladylike porn, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about movies and shows that have porny scenes and content, and I’ve watched some of them, and they’re a bunch of nothingburgers compared to actual porn. They’re not porny, they’re kinda sorta in a way pornish, at best.

Do an image search of such notably “porny” movies and shows as “365 Days,” “Bridgerton,” and “Sex Education” if you like, you’ll see what I mean if you’re familiar with actual porn. There’s not much of it, it’s underlit, and most of the good parts get blacked out. It’s PMC porn, in short, nothing to offend someone too much and yet give them the impression that they saw something sexy.

The problem is, the PMC vision doesn’t “see” the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, who are definitely not part of the PMC class. They don’t connect with their subscribers psychologically, intellectually or emotionally. Netflix’s PMC types may have some demographic data, but they have no idea who their subscribers are are or how they live, other than “not as well as me.”

So the PMC types turn out generic stuff that doesn’t really interest their subscribers. The bland, comfortable stuff that suites the PMC vision doesn’t work for the angry, increasingly impoverished bulk of Americans locked in alienating, dead-end jobs that bore them and which they hate, while also taking great pleasure in gaming and social media of various sorts that the PMC types typically do not understand well.

If Netflix and its content providers wanted to appeal to their actual audience, if they could actually SEE them, they’d have more characters who were out-of-touch seniors doing and saying stupid things. They’d have more characters who were horrible corporate bosses making their employees’ lives miserable. They’d have more characters who were lovable slackers outwitting their horrible bosses and having sex with all the pretty girls and making the lives of those around them more rewarding, though generally not in monetary ways.

Climate change would be a huge theme in a lot of stories. Housing would be a theme, mostly not being able to get it. The way the PMC and the oligarchs rip off middle class and poor people would be a steady background theme to the stories, and often the main theme.

Homeless people would be portrayed as people, not drugged-out zombies. And most people would be living in cramped apartments, often with roommates to make paying the rent possible. And the struggle to keep the rent paid would be a much bigger thing.

PMC types would say such stories are boring and distressing, not the sort of thing people want to watch to be entertained. But the real truth is that the “people” they’re describing are the PMC class, because they can’t see the rest of us, and don’t want to.

And they would really HATE stories about how they economically oppress everyone else except their oligarch masters, and which detail how horribly managers treat employees as a group, because they instinctively dislike any story that reveals just how much better off their lives are than those of the middle class and poor people they systematically oppress.

So Netflix, its management and content creators consisting only of PMC types, don’t show these things or anything like them. They have shows about wealthy people, often members of the PMC class and oligarchs who lead “interesting” lives. Even when they portray members of the poor and middle class they do so through PMC lenses. The middle class and poor people on Netflix live in housing that is much nicer than real middle class and poor people could ever afford. They generally wear clothing and have possessions that are nicer than most middle class and poor people can afford. In fact, they tend to live like upper middle class and lower upper class people do – PMC types pretending to be poor and middle class, in short.

When Netflix does attempt a realistic or gritty depiction of poor or middle class people, they tend to go way too dark. For example “Hillbilly Elegy”is a gritty depiction of how tough people in Appalachian mountain country have it. It was presented in the PMC-controlled mainstream media as a sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian mountain people. But very quickly reviews came out saying that the movie was actually poverty porn, focusing only on the miseries of the Appalachian poor, creating a misleading view of who they were as people. Even when the PMC types are looking hard at the middle class and the poor, they cannot see them as they are.

Wouldn’t pay them to, you know.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the PMC are conspiring to exclude and misrepresent the poor and the middle class. It’s just a case of shared interests leading to a shared vision, one of those unwritten cultural things that’s invisible and would be denied by most members of the PMC.

But there are some members of the PMC who do intentionally lie and mislead about the economic oppression of the poor and middle class. Academics and media people often know enough to know that the wealth of the oligarchs comes from the economic oppression of the poor and middle class, but you’ll never hear it from their commentating and the media enterprises they work for.

And if PMC commentators do somehow attempt to tell a progressive message, especially on political or economic topics, they are very rapidly fired. For example, when MSNBC hired Dylan Rattigan, Krystal Ball, Ed Schultz and Cenk Uygar to give a progressive “edge” to their coverage, then fired them all when it turned out they had spines.

How does this all relate to Netflix’s woes? Netflix, with its hundreds of millions of subscribers and its PMC staff and oligarch management can’t see its subscribers, and by “see” I mean understand. What’s more, they don’t WANT to see their subscribers. What they really want to do is feed the subscribers bland, feel-good escapism and works that support the status quo, even when they claim to be edgy, challenging work.

(That’s why Netflix, and ALL the streaming media are so ecstatically happy with comic book movies. Movies about spandex-clad idiot good guys flying around and foiling the plans of spandex-clad idiot bad guys are just the pablum they want to serve to subscribers to keep them docile and unaware.)

This is why virtually all the entertianment options on Netflix rouse only half-hearted interest among subscribers, if they rouse any interest at all. Netflix and every streaming service and cable provider would LOVE to provide entertainment that will have audiences absolutely rapt over what they’re watching and eager for more. Many may actually believe they are doing just that. Some people do love a lot of Netflix productions. And some of them are good. (“Don’t Look Up!” “The Witcher” “Stranger Things” “Travelers” and some others.) But generally they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the huge swirling mass of mediocrity that is most of Netflix’s (and most other streaming services’) productions.

There’s a reason for that. Netflix’s content isn’t made for us. It’s made by PMC people, for PMC people, though many of them think they are making shows for us. They aren’t. That’s why they aren’t any good. They’re not supposed to be good. They’re supposed to be tranquilizers. Soma. And they are. Netflix’s collection of merely tolerable films isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

See you at work tomorrow, bright and early!

"Sex Station Slut" is hardcore sexual bondage rape socialist propaganda science fiction porn!

 

Get it here at Smashwords! (Kindle format available)

Here’s a little scene from a great sports movie, “Bull Durham,” that describes my creative process. I don’t know where the story is gonna go!

Take “Sex Station Slut” for example. Like some of my stories (OK, a lot of them) it had its beginning in a pornographic image. [This image here, a hentai.](https://i.imgur.com/MA1F4il.jpg) It’s not the best hentai in terms of graphic quality. Particularly bad is the left leg, where the artist CLEARLY had some issues with handling foreshortening properly, so that the left leg appears to be about half the size of the right leg. 

But that’s not important. What really matters is that the image is insanely hot. The figure of the bound, naked woman is ripe and round and her breasts are large. She’s posed in what appears to be mid-writhe. Why is she writhing? Some of it might be the giant buttplug in her ass. (The butplug n her ass doesn’t bear looking at closely, or thinking about at all. It just serves to make her look sexually impaled.)

But the real clue is her pussy, which is reddened and damp. It looks like someone has been fucking it senseless, or at the very least vibrating it with a wand or finger banging it. Whatever, her pussy is the very picture of female sexual arousal.

Combined with her dynamic pose straining against the ropes that hold her, and the big gag that covers her mouth, and her wide open eyes, she’s just a vision of helpless female sexual arousal. You just want to jump on that pussy and fuck it senseless and make her scream with pleasure into her gag as she writhes helplessly beneath you while you fuck her brains out.

And that’s the feeling I wanted to capture in my story, that jump-on-it raw lust fuck it now feeling.

So I started out writing a story about a horny young dude with money in his pocket wanting to get it on on a Friday night, and wound up writing hardcore socialist bondage rape porn about the way capitalism alienates people from one another, and from their own feelings.

Really. That’s what happened. I had thought about capitalism and alienation before, but never from the perspective of bondage porn. It was always political in nature when I thought about it.

But my main character said early on “That’s capitalism for ya.” It was a throwaway comment, comparing capitalism to the weather, something huge you can’t do much about, just shrug and go on.  And the crux of the story is what sort of relationship might arise from all the intense bondage sex they have. But the male character kept having issues because of the female character’s job.

And that’s when I figured out what was going on, and I went with it, and that’s how I wound up writing socialist propaganda hardcore bondage rape porn.

Now, I tried to go easy on the socialism, and I think I did a pretty good job It was easy in a sense, because it was a relationship story and it was porn, so I kept things focused on their sexual action and their personal relationship, and tried to keep it to the natural thoughts the protagonist would have … no sudden outbursts of speculation on the nature of capitalism and its debilitating effects on human relationships. I just showed the relationship being degraded by the inbuilt assumptions of the protagonist.

I strongly suspect that no one would recognize it as socialist propaganda if I didn’t point it out as such.

The female protagonist is not the POV character, and she spends a lot of time gagged, but when she does talk she is not very forthcoming. She has the kind of clear perspective that people sometimes get when they are on the very bottom of the social totem pole. But she also knows that, being on the bottom of the social totem pole, nobody cares about her opinions. (Something being bound and gagged a lot while strangers rape her has taught her.)

I also found it easy to keep my socialist propaganda in the background because I set my story in my Basic universe, where most people are the survivors of a genocidal war between regular folks and oligarchs that damn near wiped out both sides, with the regular folks survivors, still numbering in the hundreds of millions (but no longer in billions) guaranteed a Basic Income since almost all jobs are automated and the oligarchs own all the machines.

The resulting society is kind of utopia, and kind of a dystopia, depending on your point of view and your experiences. For the oligarchs, it’s a utopia, they have wealth beyond measure and can do whatever they like, constrained only by the knowledge that there are only a few hundred of them and if they make things too tough for the regular folks they might just get wiped out if there’s another war. As they learned in the previous war, they might have all the weapons and all the tech and be able to kill regular folks en masse, but when millions of people are willing to risk death to kill you, you die, even if the chances of your dying are a million to one.

Still, if you can just resist the impulse toward genocide, life is pretty sweet for oligarchs.

Life is also very sweet for Premies, or Premium citizens, those few people whom the oligarchs need to perform important tasks for them. They live like rock stars, with beach mansions and very comfortable lifestyles in general, including the ability to obtain Basics who have misbehaved as sex slaves through the Pet Girl program (I’ve got a freebie book about a Pet Girl called Pet Shop Slave Girls #1 Katie -- feel free to check it out, better yet check out the novel I wrote about a Pet Shop slavegirl, Nataly: Virgin Auction. 

Premies live like medieval lords when they aren’t working for the oligarchs, and there is a lot of media interest in their goings and doings and parties – they are celebrities, in essence.

Life is also pretty damned good for Basics if they can stay out of trouble, which mostly consists of not committing acts of violence or stealing. They get all their Basic needs (housing, food, clothing, medical care) taken care of for free, and a lot more than that, actually. Here’s a bit from the promo for “Nataly: Virgin Auction” that shows how good Basics have it:

>Everything went to hell for Nataly when her dad lost his job as a programmer and he and the family went broke and had to fall back on Basic Income to survive. Nataly, her father and mother found themselves trapped in a nightmarish reality in which they had to eat PRINTED steak and lobster instead of the real thing, when they couldn't charter a private jet for a family vacation, but had to SHARE a jet with other Basics on vacation, and in which they couldn't buy first-run designer fashions straight from the runways of Paris, Rome and New York, but had to wait a MONTH to buy incredibly cheap knock-offs (once again, PRINTED instead of handmade), and endure other such indignities too numerous to mention. 

As you can see, Basics have it pretty good. Vacations, designer clothes, lobster and steak for dinner every day if they like. Cheap 3D printer tech has made material want a thing of the past.

And if you’re a Basic with any intellectual interests, the ollies will not only allow you to pursue them, but will actively HELP you pursue them. And if you want to be a rocknroll star and spend all your time playing music, you can do that, you can do pretty much whatever you want except hurt other people. The Ollies don’t care, and they make no pretense of having religious or moral concerns about the Basics, they just want to them to not be violent. (Though various forms of recreational violence, such as boxing, MMA fighting and football are allowed – useful for giving release to the violent impulses of hormonally swamped younger males and sometimes females.)

And even though jobs are rare, gigs are not rare, many Basics have gigs, like our protagonist, work that can disappear overnight, often very short term work, just things that need to be done and can be done by your average Jamie. And if you have a gig you may not be a rockstar, but you can easily afford to buy the use of a woman like Vanessa for an hour or two – any kind of use you like.

The only people who have it rough are the Basics who can’t live by the rules, for whatever reason. People like the Pet Shop girls Katie and Nataly, and Vanessa.

The Basic universe is hence a cross between Super Ultra Late Stage Capitalism and Super Gay Luxury Space Communism. The oligarchs own it all, but what does “ownership” mean in this case? Not a hell of a lot, to the Basics.

The point of all this is that I could embed my socialist viewpoint in simple descriptions of Basic society – it’s already there for me to use, I don’t have to do tons of exposition.

Well, now you know. Buy the story, get turned on and propagandized! You have nothing to lose but your capitalist propagandizement!

Ted X Hates Porn

So, TedX hates porn. It has to be said. Do a Google search on TedX and porn and you will be inundated with videos about porn and how horrible it is, most of them with a little disclaimer that say "This video contains assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies."

That means the video is bullshit, basically. I've watched several of them, they are almost invariably bullshit. They generally use porn to excite the audience, but by coupling it with a "safe" message that porn is bad, very bad, very very bad and boy isn't there a lot of it?

There are a couple of TedX videos about porn that aren't out and out attacks on porn, but they tend to be corrective in nature, things like "It's time for porn to change."

What this tells me is that there's money in attacking porn. I'm not surprised.  Our culture is really, profoundly weird about sex. It creates porn, and antiporn, and everything in between, as well as bizarre phenomena like the Epstein case, with billionaires sharing out harems of underaged women like sex toys.

But really, people are paying lots of money to watch these stupid videos. As our president would say, "Sad."

Getting Inspired The Fun Way

I never know where the inspiration for an erotic short will come from. But often, it's an evocative photo that pushes it well beyond just an image of a specific person, place or event.  It's a photo that somehow implies relationships between the people pictured, or a world beyond the scene pictured.

Many porn images and in particular kinky porn images do that to some extent or another, evoking another, sexier world than most of us live in. Here are a couple of examples. (Note: the images I am linking to are NSFW images that contain naked women. Do not click on them if such images offend you. I would say they are on the arty end of the scale rather than the porny end -- no sex acts are portrayed -- but whether or not you click on them is your choice.):

Inspiration 1 -- Warning NSFW

“She crouched on the bed, legs spread wide, naked, alert to the least signal from the one who held her leash. How odd that her gender studies degree from Bryn Mawr had led her exactly, precisely, to this moment, this situation. She was furious and ashamed that she was in this situation, but she couldn't stop it, couldn't say the safeword that would end it.”

It's mostly the expression on the woman's face that does it here. She has a wry, rueful expression, as if she is thinkng about how she got in that situation. So my mind easily generates a story about how it happened. Might be a good story idea, might not, but definitely worth considering.

Inspiration 2 -- Warning NSFW

This is a photo that has a great story in it. I don't know where it came from or who took it, but it's wonderful work. It shows two women, one standing, one kneeling. The standing woman is wearing a dress that goes down to her ankles. She's standing next to a trellis of some sort, hanging onto it with one hand as if for balance. One leg is slightly extended and she's wearing ballet slippers. Her foot is raised and resting on the tip of her toes, in the position ballet dancers call "en pointe." She's looking off to her left, outside the frame of the image. Her hair is swept up, her expression is calculating and thoughtful, perhaps a bit of lust or avarice in there, too -- some kind of desire, in any event. And definitely some apprehension, too.

Behind her some tree limbs partially obscure some lighted orange globes, along with some geometrical webbing of some sort. In front of one of the globes four butterflies are suspended in the air, wings fully extended, looking kind of artificial.

It's all very proper, the sort of thing that could hang in a ballet school hallway without raising an eyebrow -- except for the other woman, of course. She is stark naked except for a large string of beads around her neck. She kneels to the standing woman's right, and she's looking off to the left as well, probably at the same thing the standing woman is looking at. Her expression is a welcoming smile. And she's holding her hands behind her back as if bound, which in conjunction with the kneeling emphasizes her large breasts even more.

Furthermore, she has nice curvy hips and a nice round butt which is emphasized by the way her butt sticks out as she kneels, undoubtedly more than it needs to.

What are these two looking at? We don't know, but we can guess, and what we'd guess is, a man. A man they both find intriguing and attractive. And their bodies both express their attraction in different ways. The standing woman is calculating, apprehensive, yet that en pointe foot suggests she's ready to pivot to her left at any moment. Or to the right.

The kneeling woman is much more open in her response, the welcoming smile and outthrust butt say it all. She wants a piece of whatever or whoever she's looking at to the left, and she wants that piece inside her body.

Also of considerable interest is the relationship between the two women. Their physical closeness implies personal closeness as well. Mistress and slavegirl might be a good guess. Friends whose lives have diverged greatly, but who remain friends is another one. Also, they might both be one and the same woman, the kneeling woman a visual expression of her libido as she looks at the man, the standing woman an expression of her conscious mind with its calculation.

There are other interesting questions, too. Like, the background suggests a party of some sort. But at what sort of party do you bring a naked slavegirl? (Answer: a FUN party!) Or maybe it's a theatrical production and they're onstage. What sort of production? Well, one that involves nudity, that's for sure. Rules a lot of stuff right out, though as I recall the BBC did some nekkid Shakespeare.

There's also something a little racial going on. The kneeling woman has broad cheeks and a snub nose, she doesn't look all that Caucasian. The standing woman looks very Caucasian. Is this supposed to be the American South slavery, stylized? Or is it Slavery involving the Middle East or Asia? It's hard to say, once again, there's nothing that really spells it out for me.

I found this piece of artwork on the virtual wall of a virtual tavern in Second Life Gor, years ago. I have no idea where it originates. I did some research but it came up blank. There is a name underneath the image, ANGELa Blank, and there is a German photographer named Angela Blank, but I can't link the two.

There may be a prosaic answer to these questions, I don't know. But I do know that answering the questions leads to some interesting story ideas. What do you think? I'm not sure which story I want to write, if any. Could I write a story worthy of this image? I'm not sure.

Might be fun to try, though.

(I found this piece of artwork on the virtual wall of a virtual tavern in Second Life Gor, years ago. I have no idea where it originates. I did some research but it came up blank. There is a name underneath the image, ANGELa Blank, and there is a German photographer named Angela Blank, but I can't link the two. Doesn't matter – the mystery only makes the image more intriguing.)