As a terrible extra in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) yelled out from a crowd during Harvey Dent’s press conference, “things are worse than ever”.
“Things are worse than ever” – Terrible Extra from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008)
While it is almost a certainty that we are not living in the worst time ever, it certainly feels like a historically turbulent time.
Setting that aside momentarily, this illiterate outburst is one of the worst cases of what I like to call, “the inept crowd”, a phenomenon that plagues movie and TV directors, of all levels of skill.
A phenomonen so distracting to directors and myself that I have to pay attention to it, whether I want to or not.
There simply aren’t enough good actors to make up a large crowd on film.
And so you, as a filmmaker, have to make due with bad actors in your large crowd. Actors so bad they actually stick out and cause many large crowd scenes to stand dangerously at the precipice of the 4th wall , threatening to accidentally break it, which of all the ways to break the 4th wall, is the worst.
In a recent Bill Simmons podcast, Matt Damon recalls watching David Fincher work on the set of Gone Girl saying of the director, “he can’t unsee what he sees”.
Around the 1:02:00 mark Damon elaborates,
Damon: I’m behind him (Fincher) and I’ve got headphones on so I can hear the scene…so when he calls “background” a background actor walks across the scene, right? Then Ben (Affleck) and Rosamund (Pike) enter the bookstore and the scene’s about to start but Fincher is already monologuing. (Fincher)’s going, “who the fuck walks like that?”, it’s the background artist…It just instantly caught his eye. “I mean, what the fuck was that?”…”Nobody walks like that”. Now I, know what he’s talking about.
Damon: The background artist was told to go from point A to point B and they were not thinking about anything other than going from point A to point B.
Simmons: Like a zombie.
Damon: It just looked ridiculous…It just ruined the whole thing for him (Fincher).
Damon: As we’re talking a makeup artist comes on because Rosamund is still in the frame and she’s gonna like powder her forehead…She comes on and David goes, “now that’s how you walk”. Because she had a place to go, she had a reason to go there.
Well it turns out, those terrible extras, and the unyielding numbers they exist in, are people too.
People just like me and you.
People who deserve basic human rights.
And a lot of these people, right now, somewhere out there in America, are mad at a ref.
Michael Lewis Did It!
Like many important cultural insights, the idea that people today are really mad at refs has already been addressed and analyzed by Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side).
He is one of the defining voices of our time, and his brilliant podcast Against The Rules dives into many examples (basketball refs, grammar nazis, student loan sharks) of people being mad at refs.
In the heartbreaking 2nd episode – which has a real-life happy/ “why the fuck does it come to this” ending about a teacher who had 5 teeth removed due to grinding from the stress of being denied student loan forgiveness she was promised – Lewis says this,
It’s not just credit cards now, it’s all the Wall Street banks, the payday lenders, the sub-prime mortgage lenders, the car loan originators, the student loan services, and the vast shadowy network of companies supposedly keeping track of the credit worthiness of ordinary Americans. This is where trust in institutions has taken the biggest hit: when money people figured out how to inflict pain and suffering, even on middle class White people, without any consequence for themselves.
Listen to it, it’s arguably the most prescient podcast of our time.
My addition to this argument, and a direct angle Michael Lewis has the journalistic integrity not to make, is to posit that Americans are mad at our sports refs because economically our country is more unfair today than it’s been in 100 years.
We can feel this unfairness in our everyday life: when we finally start budgeting and saving money and then our car breaks down, when someone cuts us off in traffic and we have a brief flash of all the medical bills that would’ve piled up from a pile-up, when we work our ass off and Initech ships a couple more units but we don’t see a dime.
I’m not an economist, so here’s a bunch of gifs of players, coaches and fans reacting angrily (mostly) to refs, interspersed with graphs and charts about how unfair our economy currently is.
Gifs From the Internet and Graphs from Inequality.org Placed One After Another For Infotainment Purposes
Income concentration today is as extreme as it was during the “Roaring Twenties.” Yes, those Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression.
From Inequality.org,
“Income disparities have become so pronounced that America’s top 10 percent now average more than nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent.”
And that’s with the Top 1% defined as an avg. yearly income of at least $1,380,724.
More from Inequality.org:
“But that [income disparity] gap pales in comparison to the divide between the nation’s top 0.1 percent and everyone else. Americans at this lofty level are taking in over 188 times the income of the bottom 90 percent.”
“The portion of Americans aged 55 or older who are still working increased from 30 percent in 1989 to 40 percent in 2018″
“Over the past five decades, the top 1 percent of American earners have nearly doubled their share of national income.”
From The New York Times article titled “Study Shows Income Gap Between Rich and Poor Keeps Growing, With Deadly Effects”
But, Ms. Romig noted, “the poorest 40 percent of women actually have lower life expectancies than their mothers did.”
And The Young People Are Noticing
While I certainly can’t prove causation, I do believe we share something like a cultural subconscious, or a societal barometer.
We feel pressure to do well enough at our job to stay employed, to advance our career, to stay in shape, to get enough sleep, to make our own meals, to take care of our kids, to pay our loans, to have something resembling a social life, to run all those errands that pile up on our to-do list, to not go bankrupt because of a healthcare related debt, etc.
This pressure builds subconsciously to the point we either make memes about it, or, yell at refs.
Here are some examples of what the meme-makers are saying about today’s economy.
