The blockbuster mentality and the invisible audience

Incidentally, the “MBAs replace artists” phenomenon isn’t limited to Hollywood. It happens often enough in the electronic gaming industry that I’d started to think of it as “the Electronic Arts Effect”— a company is founded by visionaries who just want to make really great games, it establishes itself with a popular franchise or two, and then its leadership is gradually replaced by business wonks who worry more about the bottom line than about making a fun toy. Gradually the visionaries leave as the corporate culture becomes hostile to ars gratia artis, and they’re replaced by uninspired clock-punchers more willing to conform to the business wonks’ policies. Eventually the company is reduced to a line of increasingly derivative works (Madden 200X, anybody?) while the upper management wonders why all their devoted fans and positive press seem to have disappeared.

It seems to me this promotes sexism in the video game industry as much as it does in the film industry. Game developers struck by the Electronic Arts Effect create games where women are trophies to be won with the male lead’s skills and prowess (“rescue the princess” is the most cliche example of this, but far from the only example) or, possibly worse, the simple state of being a woman is somehow depicted as strange and exotic. (Jennifer Brandes and Chris Hepler described this sort of character as “Woman Man” in their article Saving Throw for Half Cooties. Google it right now if you haven’t read it. No, seriously, right this instant.) Developers focused on merely creating a good game with a fun story aren’t immune from creating games with dumb stereotypes about women, but they are more likely to create games like Portal or Mass Effect.

I’m not sure about the legal issues, or whether a document that was once freely available on the web is okay to redistribute, but I can send you the PDF, if you like. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want a copy.

I think this website belongs to one of the authors:

http://www.strange-child.com/

You might be able to contact the author there. Me, I’m thinking about adding yet another blog feed… as if I didn’t have enough already…

Robin: I just finished watching all of She-ra (and it was good, and I feel my life has been muchly enriched) and while there are certainly some sexist elements, I’m not sure what you’re getting at there. Yes, the Fright Zone is filled with stupid male robots while Whispering Woods has several female characters with special powers. It’s commentary on environmentalism vs. industrialism. If we’re talking about Hordak, Hordak’s demeaning to everybody. The only thing that sticks out to me are the people whose costumes have gender codes and often it looked like there were more men than women, but there are several women in power throughout the show. It’s hard to say unless I know what episode you’re talking about. I know I found a couple of episodes very sexist, even while I was tittering with hilarity.

Back to the topic – This whole corporate mentality isn’t just hitting Hollywood either. I remember when I was in university, the fact that many large companies supported the school financially loomed large in the forms of the business school being nicer and shinier, the football field getting upgrades (while students had to deal with an increase in fees to subsidize it), and a general feel that the institution wasn’t for learning anymore.

It’s like mob rule. And, as we know, “a mob is only as clever as its stupidest member”. And stupid people tend to be cruel.

BTW, this does not negate your point that it might eventually help if people would stop watching crap. I’m just saying that before that CAN help, the MBAs will need a wake-up call in order to even begin to guess what’s being rejected.

I’m saying that as long as the American viewing public (and by that I mean not just women and feminists, I mean people of both genders and the non-feminists, that is, the same people who are rewarding the MBAs now) are willing to watch crap even though they want not-crap, or if they enjoy crap, then any wake-up call efforts are doomed to failure.

In behavioral science, primary reinforcers are things that have an effect all of themselves, like sex, pain, and food. Secondary reinforcers are things that mean something else is coming, like sirens or a promotion. Primary reinforcers trump secondary reinforcers every time.

To use an example, let’s take parents yelling at their kids. Parents are told by experts that good parents don’t yell at their kids because yelling at kids is bad for them. Other people look askance at parents who yell. Both of those are social consquences, which are secondary reinforcers. They don’t stop parents from yelling at their kids most of the time because a negative reinforcement loop is a primary reinforcer: the child is doing something painful or distressing to the parent, the parent yells, the child stops; the child habituates to yelling, so the parent yells louder, and the child stops. The tangible satisfaction wins. Only when yelling stops working (either because the child has completely habituated, or because the constant activation of the RAGE system caused by constant yelling becomes in itself painful to the parent) does the parent stop yelling and start listening to other training options held forth by the experts they were ignoring earlier. Sometimes that point is never reached and the loop continues until the child leaves the house.

The MBAs are being primarily reinforced for producing blockbusters — like the parents yelling at their kids, they’re stuck in a loop. They provide crappy entertainment, the public watches and habituates, the MBAs provide even more crappy (or crappier) entertainment, the public still watches and habituates, and so on and so on.

As long as the loop is working and the reward persists, they have no incentive to listen to an alternative viewpoint. The secondary reinforcer of feminist ire and losing the feminist market they already don’t have will not trump the primary reinforcer of millions of dollars from the viewing public as a whole. Telling MBAs they need to change now and expecting it to work is working against human nature.

Instead, it would be more effective and more likely not to backslide as soon as your back is turned to convince the American viewing public first that they have the power to train the MBAs (which most people don’t feel is true; they think they just have to accept what is produced or else abandon TV/film entirely), and to convince them that better-quality programming is worth boycotting in the short term. That will make the reinforcement loop stop working, which will give the MBAs a primary reinforcer reason to listen to the feminist viewpoint.

The change-the-market-first approach would take a lot of time, of course, but behavioral science is like engineering: you can make it cheap, fast, or right, but not all three. ^^

DragonLady

The whole reinforcing by going to blockbusters etc. Made me think of an example from my life.

My boyfriend loves comic books, and loves movies based off comic books. He really wants to see “Watchmen”. I’m really tired of all the comic book movies about ambiguous morality and “world of darkness”. This is like the 5th movie out this year about the same basic premsis IMO. Not going. Period. I play the roleplaying games where you are amibiguous morality superhero and I live in a world where it seems like working hard is not getting people anywhere. I’m on stike until we get what the public really needs: splashy 1930s era musicals that make the publc feel good.

I think it’s actually possible the industry would fail before MBAs would ever consider the possibility that people other than weird academics were tired of stereotypes.

I disagree.

Ed Bernero’s “Criminal Minds” is full of vivid, realistic, powerful women both behind badges, as civillians, and as victims. Every character regardless of gender, including the walk-ons, is a three dimensional being with a soul. The show has incredibly deep thematic elements, as well as evoking every possible emotional response from the viewer in turns. CBS let Ed make his show his way, they haven’t cancelled it, and it’s sitting beautifully in the Neilsens making them beaucoup bucks.

“Babylon 5″ also had vivid, realisitic female characters who were the equals of their male counterparts. Delenn was a powerhouse (like John Sheridan), then there was courageous, hilarious, but damaged Susan (and Michael Garibaldi), Talia who had the courage to turn everything she believed on its head when she had to (as G’Kar did), and Lyta who had the power to face down gods and did so. Dodger was a soldier who lived for the day and killed efficiently just like her male GROPOS counterparts without apology. The TNT execs put B5 on the air and on DVD, and as a “cult hit” it has made them money.

The MBAs have the capacity to fund smart entertainment. They have in the past. In an America with a picky viewing public, only those shows would still be making money. That would provide proof (and positive reinforcement) to the feminist viewpoint.

Even if those particular MBAs didn’t listen, other MBAs would come along who would listen. Capitalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum — if one person refuses to make money off something, someone else will step in. Just look at Dr. Temple Grandin’s work. No one in the meat industry thought you could make money being humane or make money off behavioral science, and she’s been doing it and teaching others to do it for decades.

DragonLady

For some reason the quote function didn’t stop at the end your quote. My comment is the final paragraph.

This phenomenon isn’t just limited to H’wood, nor to appealing-to-female-audiences: I’ve seen it in a number of retail fields, where bosses who in theory, and who *think* that they are in fact, committed to The Bottom Line and Making Money First And Foremost, simply *insist* on courting market segments that they personally are invested in (usually their own demographic, but not always) or attempting to do so in ways that are idiosyncratic because they have some fixation on a particular type of advertising vehicle or model – only advertising on AM radio because that’s the only thing they listen to personally, or having this touching childlike faith in those newspaper inserts for some inexplicable reason, nevermind what the marketing studies show, or common sense, or polling customers, or *anything.*

Sometimes they will try to find data that “proves” what they already believe, over the heads of the marketing departments or the department analysts, calling loudly on the names of Objectivity and Show Me The Numbers! – but when we come back with the counter-data, then they swear by their guts instead.

Then, when nobody responds to the given gimmick, when for some reason not enough Heavy Metal Station or Easy Listening/Oldies listeners want to buy certain expensive products with a limited target audience to pay for the ads let alone bring in a profit – well, it’s all The Economy, or Incomprehensible Market Forces. (–This is quite apart from the sorts of issues that discourage customers/repeat business, and assuming all things being equal. There are many many ways for businesses to shoot themselves in the foot, though I keep thinking I’ve Seen Them All By Now, I am perpetually surprised.) Not that we should have advertised in one of the trade journals targeted to people whose job involves using our products, oh no! Not that we should have concentrated on selling our best features, instead of spending the budget on the 3-D animation or the really expensive mailer sent out to people who have never bought from us before from the mailing list that the owner thinks is “a classy one” printed on the heavy stock with the high-gloss varnish and die-cut because that’s what the owner thinks is WAY COOL!!!1! even though he won’t allow a cheap test ad run in a likely market full of previous and repeat customers, says it’s a “waste of money on a gamble”…

I’m deliberately being vaguer here than I could be, to protect the innocent and guilty alike. But the “we will pretend that SCIENCE!!! is responsible for our going along with our biases” is very human, and H’wood is no more immune to it than anywhere else. I remember also the feature on NPR some years ago, when the question of female voices as narrators of movie trailers came up, and all these dusty old cranky studio honchos kept saying that Men Don’t Like To Hear Women Telling Them What To Do (in this case, “Go see this movie, you’ll love it, it’s right up your alley!”) even when the statistics showed that the (extremely rare) films with female-narrated trailers did no worse at all…

DragonLadyK, how do examples of movies that don’t suck prove that MBAs are open-minded enough (or even just asking the right questions) to be “trainable”?

You can’t train a horse to track mountain lions and tree them. A horse doesn’t have predatorial instincts, it doesn’t have parallax-depth perception, it doesn’t have a “tracking” sense of smell, and it does have thousands of years of prey-animal instincts telling it to run away from mountain lions. A horse is not a dog and it will never be a dog. It does not have the capacity. No amount of training can ever make a horse track & train a mountain lion like a hunting dog does.

Movie and TV execs have made well-written movies featuring strong female characters that didn’t stick slavishly to stereotypical gender roles or behaviors. They have the capacity to do what we want them to do, just like the dog in my previous illustration has the capacity not to bark at the neighbors or parents have the capacity not to yell at their children.

Training is about expanding on that, about taking the behavior you do want that the training subject is already doing and rewarding it; and then punishing or failing to reward the behavior you don’t like.

Right now the American public is rewarding sexist crap and non-sexist crap. Both crap and not-crap are doing well at the box office and making the execs money.

When a feminist rolls along and says “we need to make more movies about realistic female characters” the MBAs have no incentive to believe: what they are doing now is getting them what they want, just like the dog barking at the neighbors is getting bones. If that particular exec had a non-stereotypical movie bomb for whatever reason, then that has negatively reinforced him to try to change because his worse fear (bombing) was connected with the idea “non-stereotypical crap.”

However, if the American public stopped rewarding the bad behavior and stopped watching crappy films and only the non-sexist films that already exist — though rare — did well, then that would break the reinforcement loop. The MBAs would then have reason to change their behaivor just like a dog stops barking at the neighbors when quietly sitting starts bringing the bones (and/or barking starts brining mild shocks).

Furthermore, if they didn’t change their behavior than those particular execs would go bankrupt or be fired and some other individuals who are flexible would take their place. Those MBA execs are answerable to stockholders and corporate boards, and those are entities that do not take losing money well. And even if all coroporate moguls are really misogynists who would drive their companies into the ground rather than write stories about real women, other companies would start up who didn’t have that problem out of sheer capitalist market pressure.

Either way, the American viewing public is what has the power to make the change by bringing forth primar reinforcement punishments, if it is determined enough to follow through. Feminists should then be appealing to them, not to the execs stuck in a reinforcement loop.

DragonLady