Hollywood’s Not Complaining

Wall Street is ailing and so is Main Street, but business is good on whatever street it is that belongs to Hollywood.

Movie theater attendance is way up so far this year, despite the general downward-ness of just about everything else.

From the New York Times:

“While much of the economy is teetering between bust and bailout, the movie industry has been startled by a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era. Suddenly it seems as if everyone is going to the movies, with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion, according to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.”

As far as we can tell, this is good news – a rare glint of positivity in an otherwise doomed economy. Except that it turns out that, these days, good news is good only inasmuch as it reinforces the bad news.

By which we mean that the theater boom is being turned on its head, cited as further evidence of the recession.

People who get paid to ponder such things – like Martin Kaplan, University of Southern California entertainment theorist – attribute record movie attendance to, of all things, the poor economy.

“People want to forget their troubles,” says Kaplan.

No word from Kaplan on how further debt entrenchment brightens people’s outlook, though when it comes to spending money one doesn’t have, we should have asked the government.

The thing is that the economy has a serious PR problem. The “recession” ball is rolling, and momentum and inertia are on its side.

A bad economy is a great excuse, it turns out – a multipurpose, indiscriminate excuse.

Not since 9-11 has there been such unanimity among the American people. The economy’s a wreck, and any conflicting news will be, by spin and spurious correlation, morphed into proof of just how bad it is.

It’s illogical, it’s intellectually bankrupt, and, most significantly, it’s bad business.

When even big earnings are bad news, where else is the economy to go but further down?

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