Now, I do think it's worth traveling back in time a bit to the world of this movie and maybe giving some thought to why this type of movie seems to have really burst through in the late 1990s, early 2000s.

You have a movie like this. You have the Truman Show. Would Pleasantville belong to this? these kind of movies about false realities.

The Matrix.

The Matrix is obviously a good example.

It does seem like there's a kind of a wider cultural anxiety, cultural obsession that is being worked through at all levels, really, in Hollywood about surveillance culture, about the

democratization of media, about the way that celebrity is transforming, which I actually think is perhaps the real concern of this movie and the real thing it has on its mind.

I don't have my own thoughts on this fully formed, but it seems to me that there's something going on in the 1990s where you have, I don't know, just to pull some obvious examples, you have things like the O.J. Simpson trial, you have the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and the impeachment trial, which is televised. You have changes in technology and media where TV becomes a 24-hour thing, so more content is needed. You need to be able to make it quickly, and if possible, cheaply, I think that's one of the

niches reality TV comes to fill. But I also think, and you really do see this being worked

through in this 1999 Ron Howard joint romcom, because there's this new kind of public visibility,

you know, because, for example, there are people that become public characters

because they were, you know, a prosecutor or were a member of the jury or something in the O.J.

Simpson trial, which is televised.

I think people become more and more aware that fame increasingly means something different.

Celebrity means something different.

Traditional celebrity, you just have a star

system and celebrities, generally speaking, are famous individuals that people like. And the world of

celebrity is very tightly controlled and gate-keaped and stage-managed. Then along come these new

forms of media that are more democratized, that morphed the mold of uh you know that wonderful turn of

phrase of frederick jameson's aesthetic populism and one of the things that this film both seems to

militate against and endorse is the idea that this is bad because the old star system was

meritocratic and now they'll just put anyone on TV, and that's not a good thing.

And because this movie is a rom-com, and because it's Ron Howard, and because it's very 1990s

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