I’ll imitate George Orwell’s famous opening line in his essay “Politics and the English Language” for this one: Most people today would agree that the world of entertainment is in a bad way.

It’s in a bad way for reasons we’ve heard before: The blatant lack of originality. The movie world is still squeezing every cents’ worth possible from characters and storylines built by creatives and visionaries in the last century. Amazon’s Rings of Power is undoubtedly the most egregious example of a recent adaptation gone wrong. Its strained dialogue, vague stakes, and uninspiring spate of over-serious characters have much of the Tolkien readership and fanbase in uproar. With a story like The Lord of the Rings, it almost feels like making such evident mistakes in the adaptation is not just a mistake but a violation of creative integrity. It’s not just a show, we say. How you represent Middle-earth actually matters. It matters because Tolkien’s worldview was inundated with a notion of the sacred. Today’s Hollywood, though, don’t seem to care. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that, in the latest episode of this show, Elrond leans in for the kiss with Galadriel!

Alas, I digress. Autumn 2024 is set to see a couple of block-busting remakes and rehashes as well. Most notably is Joker: Folie À Deux, which hits theaters this Friday. The Joker is obviously the most iconic of the Batman villains, but in this franchise, Joker has his own “universe” at his disposal. Batman, we learn, is just a child in these films, years away from fulfilling his destiny as the Dark Knight of Vengeance. And then later this month comes Venom: The Last Dance, which, based on the latest trailer, seems like it will be just as ridiculous as the first two in the series. Again, we have an adaptation of a villain in the Spider-Man universe without reference to the web-slinger himself.

On the one hand, these movies are massive hits and rake in a ton of money. But it seems like the constant referral back to these old characters is stripping them of some of their mystique. I also wonder what we lose when we strip these villains from their opposing heroes. Who is Joker apart from the Batman? Is he to be admired? Is he, in the end, intended to be seen as a kind of hero himself? What explains our fascination with the mindset, not of the heroic, but of the demagogue, the despot, the dark-minded psychopath?

Cultural critic Ted Gioia has some thoughts about why pop culture in general is taking a turn towards the tragic and depressed. Or, in the case of Venom, simply absurd. Gioia argues that pop culture is the best index for understanding the psychological pulse of a society. What we see in books, movies, music, and visual art reflects the values and conditions of the surrounding culture. He writes,

Popular culture always reflects the larger social reality. I’ll even go further, and claim that pop culture is our single best source of information about the psychological state of society. In some odd way, the revolution is televised — it emerges in songs, films, and other forms of entertainment long before the political leaders even notice.

In other words, culture often predicts political trends instead of the other way around. It’s the TV shows, the music, the broader culture that sways public assumptions more than a cut-and-dry public policy.

And like Orwell wrote in “Politics,” a stale culture leads to stale writing, which in turn leads to an even staler culture than before. It’s the same with cultural trends and creative output. He continues,

Don’t expect more positivity in popular culture until we reverse these trends. But we might have already created a vicious circle where a bleak society leads to gloomy songs and stories, which further amplify the depression and desolation.

In other words, the culture is not just an effect — it’s also a cause.

It’s up to today’s artists to be honest about the state of our anxious culture but also present a vision that transcends this moment of irony, nihilism, and grimness. I don’t think this means offering stories and music that deny the darkness, but which manage, as all the great works of art have done, to transform tragedy and loss into meaning, and ultimately, hope.