There’s something I call “the paradox of mediocrity”: what’s made for everybody is mediocre for everybody, and pleases nobody¹. That’s because quality is, in large part, subjective; and the same things a demographic hate are often the reasons another loves it.

I’ll reuse an example from the text, Pulp Fiction. I love that movie. But I know plenty people who hate it. So let’s say we’ll make a Pulp Fiction 2.0, and address the issues they see with it…

• “It’s too violent!”—now the violence is only implicit.
• “It’s too hard to follow what’s going on!”—no problem, change the narrative structure to a stock one: setup, development, twist, resolution.
• “Why is Jules quoting the Bible? This doesn’t make sense lol”—let’s tone it down, now Jules speaks a bit less cryptically.

Done. Now Pulp Fiction 2.0 should be for everybody, right? Well. For some, the move went from awful to mediocre; and for some…

• It was supposed to be a violent world; violence should be an explicit part of the everyday of those characters—you grab a snack, chat a bit with a friend, and then murder someone. But it’s now implicit, so the movie lost meaning.
• That narrative structure, refreshing and different, was replaced with the same slop you see in almost every Hollywood movie. *Yaaaawn*
• You butchered part of the theme, moral rules in a fucked up world. What’s left is either philosophical masturbations for chair addicts, or no moral discussion at all.

Read the text in the light of the above, and you’ll notice André Franca is talking about the same paradox, through different words. And he’s saying how this happened.

The comparisons the author make show he prefers informationally dense works; plenty people are like this. But for plenty others, informationally dense means hard to follow, and that’s a "problem"². Fixing the “problem” means the work loses appeal for some (like Franca³), but makes it a lot more approachable by other people.

Today’s cinema often feels designed by committee, optimized for streaming algorithms and opening weekend numbers rather than lasting impact. We have better technology, way bigger budgets, more sophisticated effects, but somewhere along the way, we forgot that movies are supposed to move us, not just occupy our time between scrolling sessions.

A/B tests will wreck the soul of the work all the bloody time.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic. Maybe I’m romanticizing the past.

I do think survival bias does play a role (we forget about the older slop, but the newer one is still on our faces), but it isn’t just that. I believe there’s a general view that your work should appease every bloody body—and if it doesn’t, then “why bother”. And it’s outputting content that is lukewarm for everybody.

1. Neither “nobody” nor “everybody” should be interpreted categorically here. There are exceptions, just not enough to be relevant.
2. I want to emphasise that this shit is subjective. That’s the point of this comment dammit—it’s a “problem” for some, but part of the appeal for others.
3. Or me. I’m by no means a cinephile, but the same thing applies to other media.

[Edit: fixed grammar, reworded some things, but the basic meaning is the same.]

Recently came across this video that I thought was very well done. It has a similar thesis and goes into some more details about the ‘why’ in terms of direction, shot composition, etc.

Give me The Road Warrior, or give me, like, The Man With No Name trilogy. They’re just good looking movies. Modern movies are unreal looking, they just don’t suspend my disbelief.

I see a lot of bleh films. They are aimed at the boring nuances of life. Focused more on relationships or average situations. The characters generally live in perfect homes with slow worlds. And they either spoon feed everything or go to the opposite for statement purpose.

There’s very little I want to watch lately.