Film and television critics have recently argued that Hollywood’s shifting financial incentives in the era of streaming have given rise to an austere visual aesthetic in moving image media that echoes the general “cheapification” of daily life after the 2008 financial crisis. If you search “Why does Netflix look like that?” on Google, you don’t even need A.I. to custom tailor your search query; multiple articles essentially rephrasing your precise phrasing span numerous pages (it’s almost obnoxious that one can cite this, this, this, this, this, this, or this and only scratch the surface). These streaming programs can symptomatically be read as formal expressions of the economic trends transforming aesthetic production under a crisis-ridden liberal economy. But might we also see broader impacts of that crisis expressed in shifting narrative logics of miniseries and feature films of the era?
If it was the 2008 financial crisis and resulting 0% interest rate economy that so changed how moving images look, it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the ensuing political crises that posed a challenge to liberalism’s understanding of historical development and narrative logics, both at the level of political reality but symptomatically, I argue, in popular media of the time. As many have argued, Trump’s victory took most of the country by surprise, even his own voters. In the early years of his administration a flurry of interest in Francis Fukuyama’s idea that the end of the Cold War and dominance of Western-style liberal capitalist democracies was going to be the endpoint of humanity’s institutional and political development returned to public consciousness. Fukuyama’s thesis immediately faced pushback following the 1989 publication of his article “The End of History?” for The National Interest, and later events like 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis led to occasional retrospective critiques amongst thinkers of geopolitics. But as an encompassing theory of global political and economic development that emerged from the last time the entire world system pivoted on its axis, the core of Fukuyama’s argument—that despite these various historical events, no one has any idea how to organize societies differently than liberal, capitalist democracy—still seemed sound.
If it was the 2008 financial crisis and resulting 0% interest rate economy that so changed how moving images look, it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the ensuing political crises that posed a challenge to liberalism’s understanding of historical development and narrative logics.
But what the mid-2010s showed was that this system was in crisis. The twin results of Trump’s first election and that summer’s Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom seemed to drive a stake right through an optimistic liberalism’s still beating heart, mostly located in the chests of the intelligentsia and political elite. Those on the center and left seemed to be asking: Is Trump’s victory a historical aberration? Perhaps one last gasp of illiberal tendencies in the electorate? Or is it a sign of backsliding to an earlier political form, or evidence of a fault in Fukuyama’s concept itself?
My argument is that this general epistemic crisis had a far deeper effect on aesthetic forms than is typically noted, an epistemic crisis within liberalism’s understanding of History itself running from our culture’s shared political imaginary all the way to its forms of commodified art and cultural production. While the financial crisis had a much more visible material impact on film and televisual form on viewers’ screens—shrinking budgets limiting the visual field, a re-monopolized streaming industry relegating mid-budget dramas to television—this crisis of historical thinking took longer to work itself out in the cultural imaginary than it did for on-set resource distribution. Much like their next-morning hangover resulting from Trump’s unexpected electoral victory, it seems as if viewers only began noticing too late that something was “wrong” with our moving image forms. These responses, I argue, are both symptoms of the same crisis of historical thinking emerging out of liberalism’s crisis of legitimacy.
This epistemic crisis had a deep effect on aesthetic forms, an epistemic crisis within liberalism’s understanding of History itself running from our culture’s shared political imaginary all the way to its forms of commodified art and cultural production.
But what is “wrong” with contemporary film and streaming narratives? What we typically take to be the structure of a “good” film is a form that emerged due to specific economic, historical, and ideological conditions in Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. Ask filmgoers today what they think of a four-hour historical epic like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), and you might hear things like “the second half lagged,” or an articulation of a narrative logic detailing how a “good” story handles character development for their protagonists. But while some have claimed these storytelling norms are transhistorical elements of human culture as such, there is no real reason why they eventually resulted in Hollywood’s key product as film’s dominant form: the two-hour movie, typically focusing on a single protagonist, plotted on the page to efficiently reach a narrative resolution, shot in such a way that the camera is meant to be invisible and create an enclosed fictional world, and so on. When people typically refer to “pacing” in their critique of a movie, what they are really talking about is how much said film adheres to industry norms taught in screenwriting books or demanded by producers.
While some film scholars such as David Bordwell have argued Hollywood’s narrative and visual “rules” adhere to classical narrative logics that run through Ancient Greek theater to the present, others, such as Noël Burch, have argued that narrative film’s formal “rules” of construction can be seen as the products of an emerging late nineteenth to early twentieth century liberal, capitalist industrial society mediating an ideologically coherent world for an Americanizing labor force that included large numbers of European immigrants from countries with their own film industries. We typically imagine Hollywood narrative films to have psychologically defined individual protagonists who offer us something like a helping hand into the narrative world of the film, and that this protagonist’s “looks” are mediated through the camera’s own—which must act as a “silent, invisible observer.” What to do, then, when audiences made up of diverse immigrant laborers in New York City were watching prints that had come to America from Italy, identifying with that film’s “Old World” address and not integrating their social and psychological lives into industrial modernity’s emerging American labor force? One tactic was to work to ban foreign imports, as Richard Abel has outlined, which served to “universalize” the address of the films that made up Hollywood’s emerging monopoly over the cinema industry (of course with all the problems that selective universalization entailed).
Our culture is one dominated by social media screens and targeted advertisements instead of the novelistic and theatrical narratives that came out of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, and our art reflects this.
But today this political economic system is in crisis. We no longer live in its earlier period of industrial growth with an emergent new media technology such as cinema; privatization, precarity, and digital technologies have replaced those earlier historical phenomena as a means by which to continue the ever-declining profit machine. But this is not merely an economic shift. Our culture is one dominated by social media screens and targeted advertisements instead of the novelistic and theatrical narratives that came out of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, and our art reflects this. Rather than asking if these films “know” what they are doing with their confused narratives, constant extension with sequels and inconclusive “endings,” maybe we could read them as reflections of similar transformations underway in our post-industrial societies?
One case study might be found in a media form that exists precisely in this strange in-between mode of cinema’s transformation in the shifting digital economy: that of the streaming miniseries. While classical broadcast television narrative was typically structured in either serial or series form—its open-endedness the result of financial incentives to keep the show on the air—the early 2000s saw a number of programs colloquially described as making up the “Golden Age of Television” on television networks from HBO to FX. But as broadcast television gave way to streaming subscriptions following Netflix’s model, that open-ended broadcast narrative logic found itself in crisis: Netflix famously refuses to greenlight shows after their second season due to projections for their internal (and proprietary) viewership metrics—but as a televisual form that borrows from cinematic visual techniques (quality), many of these one-off or shortened season programs build towards what are effectively missing goals. If Classical Hollywood narrative demanded its plots be goal-oriented and organized through causal logic, streaming miniseries are often plots to nowhere—David Fincher’s Mindhunter (2017-2019) for instance just “ended” after Netflix refused to finance a third season. But if Fincher was unable to complete his planned narrative, other programs, produced in a situation where creators are aware the rug could be pulled out at any given moment, seem to stumble towards ends that neither reach any goal or conclude its various fractured narratives. And while this intentional refusal has long been a tradition of art cinema, its re-emergence in streaming series are instead a sign of a crisis in both our liberal society’s ability to produce narratives as well as a conceptual crisis over what to do when the party is over? Is this not the same conceptual crisis liberals faced during the first Trump administration, arguably continuing to today?
Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate history novel, The Plot Against America, imagines a pre-World War Two America in which American aviator and fascist-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR in the 1940 election, ushering in a brief period of far-right control over the United States. Roth’s imaginary Lindbergh administration serves as a kind of who’s who of 1930s American society, were the New Deal briefly abolished and opposing business interests given an opportunity to wrest power from the liberal state as the world marched to war. The novel concludes with a society in disarray, emulating Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and leading to an emergency coalition to return FDR to power and re-right the ship of History before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor set everything back on the track we are all familiar with.
When the novel was adapted for television by HBO in 2020, released to coincide with the looming Presidential election, showrunners David Simon and Ed Burns (of The Wire fame) decided to end its narrative before Lindbergh’s electoral victory. The effect was to reframe Roth’s story away from a historical thought experiment about the nature of social and political transformation and towards a warning about the state of the nation in the twenty-first century, but a warning of a future eternally delayed in order to give liberalism seemingly more time to avert The Big One. Is Trump our Lindbergh? What if we are actually in Roth’s novel, albeit with a second act that took a century to unfold?
Less thought-out here was the fact that Trump had already won in 2016, and was at the moment of the miniseries’ release, the actual President of the United States. While the miniseries’ open-ended narrative was also structured by the formal qualities of television as a medium, in which the imperative to keep airing episodes encourages an avoidance of narrative conclusion in order to delay the end of viewer attention, we may also read its refusal to resolve itself as an expression of liberalism’s understanding of its place in history. Where History was once raw material that political projects on both the right and the left could capture and steer in their desired directions, liberalism in its post-historical, late era took the end of the Cold War as the conclusion of the story, almost confused that the show had to keep airing, returning to the writer’s room to find new justifications for the story to continue. It’s ironic then, that just as television and cinema are both in the process of being eclipsed in their medium specificity by “streaming,” the very shape of our culture’s dominant narrative structures seems trapped not in predetermined resolutions or even cyclical returns but rather a confusion set in a perpetual and unchanging present. But isn’t this just how late liberalism understands its own place in history? As a post-historical political project Francis Fukuyama once warned provides no more heroes or struggles to make sense of our place in History? A “realism” that can’t see outside the demands of capitalism, as imagined by Mark Fisher?
Where History was once raw material that political projects on both the right and the left could capture and steer in their desired directions, liberalism in its post-historical, late era took the end of the Cold War as the conclusion of the story, almost confused that the show had to keep airing, returning to the writer’s room to find new justifications for the story to continue.
HBO’s Plot is effectively a show that replaces the actual plot within Roth’s novel—a plot within the narrative, against liberalism—with a formal plot of individual scene development that narrative television and cinema require for their construction, here leading to nowhere. If this echoes the crisis of late liberalism’s understanding of itself in history, I want to argue it also echoes the way in which liberalism abandoned its stories about “plots” in society as such, an absence that has cleared the way for conspiracy to gain purchase over more and more of our political culture on both the right and the left. Late liberalism is a political project that in its crisis form tells us there are no more plots, only endless reiterations of its basic principles that need to be worked out to avoid the show being taken off the air. We don’t know if Plot’s Lindberg won the election or not, but we do know now that Trump did, again, eight years later, and the work to figure out what comes next in the story is not going to go away even if we can’t imagine it.
Matthew Ellis is a Senior Instructor of Literature and Film at Portland State University, where he teaches courses on film and media theory. His writing has appeared in publications such as Jump Cut, Parapraxis, Synoptique, and MUBI’s Notebook, amongst others. Currently, he is at work on a book titled Against the History Machine: Popular American Culture After Accumulation, which recontextualizes post-Classical Hollywood history through its ongoing post-cinematic era using Marxist periodizing accounts of capitalism’s recurring cycles of accumulation. You can encounter his work online through his Substack, Histories of the Present, as well as in your ears as one-half of the Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast.
