Can Mel Gibson rescue Hollywood from AI?

Hollywood has been put on notice. Trump is sending in the goon squad. In an unusual move — the latest in a series of unusual moves — the hyperactive President has carved out ex nihilo a new ambassadorial jurisdiction, to which he has dispatched a clutch of A-listers. The country in question is Hollywood. 

Let’s extend our congratulations and all good wishes to their Excellencies Ambassadors Gibson, Stallone and Voight. These are the “President’s men”, Silver Screen royalty, sent on a mission to Tinseltown to put a bit of stick about and notify its liberal big players and studio chiefs that the conservatives are back running things.

There’s little to gain from asking what Trump’s play is here, as he’s made the familiar laws of political physics redundant. You might as well apply Newtonian categories to quantum mechanics. The Hollywood aristocracy hates all three of these guys not because they are Republicans but because they lack the decency to be quiet about it. So, at the very least the President is annoying the right people. That could be what the philosopher Kant called an “end in itself”.

Here’s my take: Trump looked at what’s going on in this corner of God’s world, with its Old Testament levels of dysfunctionality, and concluded that he wants to direct a sequel. A beautiful, talented sequel, the best sequel ever. Better than Godfather II. That’s what some people predict.

Hollywood has ditched its former subversive chic in favour of the tedious tyranny of woke conformism

Nostalgia is an occasionally forgivable form of self-deception. At least when the studios were peppered with communists, labour unionists and miscellaneous left activists it created a Hollywood-scene fizz. Nowadays it has become just another propaganda branch of the Deep State Washington perma-government. Thinking about it, even the reference to the deep state seems to harken back to gentler, halcyon times. Under the Biden pseudo-presidency, the securocrats were pretty much operating at surface level, feet on the Oval Office desk, while the presidential waxwork napped on the couch.

Hollywood has ditched its former subversive chic in favour of the tedious tyranny of woke conformism. The morally ambiguous traditions of the casting couch have succumbed to the (hopefully doomed) requirements of DEI. And the very human elements of the film production process — the hierarchies, resentments, affairs, on-set feuding — are giving way to the intrusions of AI, to which the presence of real people is a nuisance.

The last of these is the most pernicious, and it is to be welcomed that Trump’s named disruptors are not from Elon Musk’s extended tech brotherhood. Make believe has always been essential to the magic of the screen trade, but that’s very different from fakery, and there is nothing more fake than AI. The “artificial” is the only real bit in artificial intelligence, which is a misconceived attempt to re-imagine the human soul using the inadequate language of materialist science.

There are respected theologians who fear that the devil lurks inside the algorithms of AI. If so, it’s surely spiritually unwise to introduce those demons into the craft of making a film. Recently, at one of those things where famous actors give awards to each other, Nicolas Cage made this point in less metaphysical terms: “I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot express the human condition for us”. If the studios don’t address this technological dependency, he continued, then “all the integrity, truth, and purity in art will be replaced by financial interests”.

Ambassadors Gibson, Voight and Stallone are not routinely associated with the AI nonsense. They are relics of a Luddite past. This is a good thing. They will be like the dad who has no time for “what passes as music these days”, yet who invariably turns out to be sound in that judgement.

Nor have they led uncomplicated personal lives. There have been antics which arguably have not fallen within the parameters of ideal matrimony. Again, this is excellent. Some acquaintance with the ethical downsides of sexual infidelity is usefully formative, if one is expected to deal with the Tinseltown high value set and their Dionysian leisure time. 

The appointment of Mel Gibson is particularly inspired. I hope very much that he’ll be locked, loaded and ready to dispense a bit of Mad Max Road Warrior justice to the dystopian Gomorrah that Tinseltown has turned into. Gibson is a deeply flawed character, and therefore just the type of “earthen vessel” within which He usually decides to pour His treasure for reasons which are never quite clear at the time. The maker of The Passion of the Christ has a sincerity of faith which is confirmed by how much it troubles him. He has long whispered of the darker practices of the LA celebrity scene. Hopefully, he now has the presidential loud hailer.

The LA of today is distant, temporally and morally, from the City of Sin described in James Ellroy’s noir fiction and is not capable of functioning as an instrument of US cultural expansion or soft power. Trump gets this. His critics are doing their usual thing by treating this as just one more vanity project. 

But this President has a habit of imaginative synthesis, of seeing connections before the rest of us, and, as it were, weaving them into something new. He has a singular talent for political alchemy.

So, don’t be surprised if something comes of this. It may well be that this eccentric piece of diplomacy ends with a decent Hollywood sequel. Premiered in Gaza perhaps?