💰 #238 - What's a sellout, anyway?

Selling out. Going corporate. Working for The Man. Sometimes it’s about money. Sometimes it’s about making the art you want instead of the art you’re told to create.

There are plenty of stories about the fight over trading personal convictions for potential profit, but there are different ways to approach the topic, and plenty of ironies to consider.

Take the above clip from Wayne’s World. It both mocks the cheesiness of product placement and commercials, while also spending time reminding the audience of the existence of several major corporate brands. JM McNab collects examples of how Wayne’s World was a story about resisting corporate control, but that it partnered with many, many corporations to create disposable tie-in products. Or consider the filmography of director Penelope Spheeris, who discusses her earlier rock documentary work with The Decline of Western Civilization:

The focus on money is a bit stronger in Part II, compared to Part I and III.

Penelope Spheeris: Yeah, that one focuses on selling out, definitely.

Which is really interesting – the sense of ‘DIY’ or anti-capitalist politics seems so absent there compared to the kids in Part I

Penelope Spheeris: I think if I’d been on my own to direct the second film, it would have been a different movie, but it was financed by someone else, so I was getting instructions. The producers of that movie had a different idea about it than I did. If it was up to me, it would’ve been less glam, less hair metal, and more hardcore metal like Megadeth. But I wasn’t getting any jobs back then, and I hadn’t made Wayne’s World yet, so I kind of just had to do whatever they said. But in Decline II, I’m not trying to glorify their quest for fame or fortune at all. I’m trying to show how ridiculous it is.

The whole notion of compromising yourself or your ideals in service to someone holding the purse strings is a question about who gets to make decisions. Who gets the final word? What values are they putting forward?

Daniel Kremer takes a deep dive into Between the Lines, a film about a local Boston alternative newspaper that gets sold to a larger corporation and the indecision for the people working for the paper. It’s an ensemble story that helps to show the different attitudes toward going corporate, and how these characters navigate the vibe shift coming from the end of the 1960s.

John’s early film Go also uses an ensemble dealing with working for The Man and the compromises everyone makes. We see trade offs people make in their daily lives when every job feels like a pyramid scheme. Looking back on the making of the film, the cast, director Doug Liman, and John talk about the nods to guerrilla filmmaking and the overall antiestablishment spirit of the story:

[August] wanted to create something about young people who didn’t learn anything or weren’t severely affected by their mistakes. “Movies about this age are always like, ‘That’s the night that everything changed,’” he says. “I wanted to go against that trope.”

Anne Helen Peterson looks back at the making of Empire Records, and the inherent irony of its existence:

Empire Records, like Reality Bites before it, was the product of a major studio attempting to reach a subculture notoriously resistant to direct address. And just look at the plot of Empire Records: It’s a movie about resisting corporate takeover that’s developed and released by a major media conglomerate, a movie about quirky misfits with the daughter of the massively mainstream Aerosmith as the lead.

Ben F. Silverio points to the film and highlights something in common with many of these anti-selling out stories: The importance of found family. It takes a village to fight a corporation, so a key part of the idealistic underdog story involves characters finding their tribe. Jack from Gen X Flow with a thorough dissection of Empire Records and how it acts as a time capsule for the Gen X fight against corporatism:

The rooftop concert represents more than just a fundraiser; it symbolizes a generation’s struggle to maintain a sense of identity amidst a world pushing towards homogeneity. What seemed as a last resort transforms into a testament of the ingenuity inherent within the ethos of Generation X. The concert becomes a beacon of climax symbolism, showcasing a collective effort to preserve a bastion of culture—the indie record store—against the impending wave of corporate standardization.

But looking at this type of story through a modern lens can point out a disconnect with younger generations and our current understanding of corporate control. Rebecca Jennings looks at the experience of young artists expected to do self promotion who feel like they’re getting better at marketing while getting worse at the art they’re trying to sell. John Scalzi responds to this article to suggest that not understanding the financial workings of your art is less about a kind of purity of intent, and more about ignoring the systemic abuses toward artists:

[Selling out] is outdated and privileged, and in the US generally comes out of a very specific moment of post-war American prosperity when young people briefly set themselves in opposition to the capitalist system and shied away from anything that whiffed of its taint, before surrendering to it wholly under Reagan (yes, yes, hashtag NotAllBoomers). That ethos later got a boost via punk, which had offshoots well into the 00s (hello, emo!). It was a very durable shibboleth, manifesting mostly in music but also in writing and other fields.

Absolutely.

But more recent stories where we see conflict over selling out complicate the stakes by making it a problem that meets at an intersection of wealth, power, and identity.

Take Sorry to Bother You. In interviews with the cast, they talk about the sense of how every person is faced with moments that ask them how much of their integrity they’re willing to part with to get something else they want. Melanie McFarland combines scenes from Sorry to Bother You with moments from her lived experience to describe the shift in meaning when “selling out” isn’t just about individual integrity and bending the knee to a corporate entity:

But being called a “sellout” has an entirely different meaning to a white artist than it does when one person of color flings that insult at another. One is about integrity, the other is a deeply biting invective meant to de-legitimize a person’s identity or cultural experience.

Wicked also ties in to these themes. Makayla I. Gathers connects the trials of Elphaba with the experiences of Black women in predominantly non-Black spaces. Elphaba is asked, time and again, to make compromises to her integrity, or conform to a different mold, and only realizes her power after leaving behind the idea that fitting in to a corrupt system is more important than protecting her integrity. Jon Lefrandt breaks down key plot points of the musical that showcase the tension between conformity and integrity:

It’s a story that reflects the heartbreak and triumph of standing up for oneself, of choosing truth in a world that often values image over integrity. Elphaba’s journey reminds us all that real change doesn’t come from following someone else’s rules. It comes from defying the gravitational pull of convention, stepping away from what others think we should be, and choosing to live by our own truth.

Do you have a character or characters being asked to trade an essential part of themselves in exchange for a desire? How much will it hurt them to give in, and what could be the penalty for refusing the offer?

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In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link, KBD.news takes a closer look at Lumen’s terminals to see how you can create a replica workstation for your innie.1

• Marc Muszynski explains the ethical dilemma of programming moral, “properly aligned” AIs by pointing out what a little sociopathic con man R2-D2 is.

• J. Kenji López-Alt with a really good tomato sauce recipe. It simmers all day.

• Maxwell Neely-Cohen on the problem of creating a way to store data for 100 years.

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