As the American film industry shifts under the pressures of technological change and new leisure habits, one might be tempted to see the Woolsey Fire as another allegory — this time for the smoldering end of the systems Vadim saw emerge from a previous Hollywood’s metaphorical ashes. Change is once again afoot in Hollywood, and some old models are surely fading away. But we need not be so imaginative as Vadim to link the changing “environment” of the motion picture industry with the warming of our world and its promise of stronger fires and greater destruction. Nor is the link simply metaphorical. The film industry has long had its own part to play in the climate-changing work of global warming and the terraforming transformations to a Southern California landscape that burns and burns and burns again. This is Hollywood self-immolation, and it’s been a long time coming.
In her new life of Henry VI, the pious and luckless last Lancastrian king of England, the historian Lauren Johnson aims to capture him as "an evolving individual struggling in an extraordinary situation". If, despite her efforts, Henry VI remains the "shadow king" of her title, this has not stopped Johnson from producing an involving account of a still undersung saga.
The photographs in Fred Sigman’s book Motel Vegas were commissioned in the mid-1990s in order to record the signage of once-thriving motels on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. Frame and brief were later expanded to include the motels themselves, many of which had fallen on — or were in the process of falling into — hard times. The pictures were exhibited in 1997 but the 22 years — almost a quarter century’s worth of future — between that show and the publication of this book have lent a neo-archaeological dimension to the undertaking. It’s consistent with the larger tendency whereby components of modernism become a source of lament.
“The World of Nineteen Eighty-Four ended in 1989,” historian Timothy Garton-Ash declared optimistically in 2001. Communism, fascism and European imperialism “were all either dead or mortally weakened. Forty years after his own painful and early death, Orwell had won.”
If only. Orwell’s portrait of a world in which the truth is irrelevant and the powerful rewrite the past is, regrettably, not at all out of date. “I hesitate to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more relevant than ever,” British journalist Dorian Lynskey writes in his alarming exegesis of the novel’s significance and enduring impact, “but it’s a damn sight more relevant than it should be.” Indeed, the most powerful pages of “The Ministry of Truth” quote Orwell in the 1940s describing a state of public affairs all too familiar today.