In a scene near the beginning of the film Project Hail Mary, the hero, Ryland Grace, played with an abundance of charm by Ryan Gosling, awakening with only fragments of memory, scrawls Who am I? on a whiteboard.
That existential question is one the film spends some time interrogating. It’s also the question the film industry itself is currently wrestling with. It is a question I’ve found more and more people in the acting industry in general are asking. From experienced professionals with decades of experience to newcomers taking their first steps. From producers to writers, from agents to directors.
It suggests we may all be coming to the same conclusion: we are in an existential crisis.
Creative work relies heavily on instinct. We’re used to relying on our intuition, trusting our guts. Why then does it currently feel like the industry is less confident in its own instincts?
In periods of wider instability, industries begin to question their own organising principles. What we are experiencing may feel personal, but it is structural.
I’ve noticed a proliferation of social media posts comparing our present moment to the fall of Rome, to the end of the British Empire. There’s a feeling that something is ending and a fear that nothing coherent has shown up to replace it. Our systems are under strain: economic, political, cultural, technological. And while this may feel seismic on a global level, on an industry level, we’ve been here before.
Predictions of cultural extinction are not new. In the early twentieth century, film was widely believed to pose a fatal threat to live theatre. Trade papers such as Variety warned of theatres converting to cinemas and actors migrating en masse to the screen. When television entered the living room in the 1950s, doomsayers predicted the collapse of film, theatre and radio alike. Later, the growth of public subsidy provoked fears that commercial theatre would be squeezed out of existence. Musical theatre has been declared dead with remarkable regularity. Each technological innovation produces a similar cycle of anxiety. Motion capture, CGI, virtual reality and immersive performance have all emerged, at different times, as either the inevitable future of storytelling or the end of it.
Crises are not new. A technological crisis changes how work is made. An economic crisis changes how work is funded. A cultural crisis changes what audiences value. With each crisis, the industry has adapted. This moment feels more acute because we are now experiencing technological, economic and cultural crises simultaneously.
Clayton Christensen, the American academic, studied new technologies and coined the phrase ‘disruptive innovation’. He showed that when new technologies disrupt existing markets, incumbents often respond by reinforcing existing models rather than abandoning them. Under pressure, institutions rarely become more adventurous. They respond with a preference for recognisable structure, an aversion to risk and a narrower view of acceptable forms. In practice, that narrower view can feel like a narrowing of possibility.
These shifts have been observable over the last few years and were widely predicted during the pandemic lockdowns: a reliance on recognisable material and names, increased demand for existing IP, an emphasis on demonstrable audience support. But where some see these as an indicator of decline, it is more accurate to argue that they are markers of a period of transition. Eras of structural change lead to cultural anxiety and, in an effort to restore legibility we lean into nostalgia, to familiarity, to precedent. We become less tolerant of ambiguity, obsessed with clarity, determined to make art understandable and recognisable. And, often, culture stagnates because it cannot develop without risk and uncertainty. In attempting to save, or restore culture, we stifle it.
I have written previously about legibility in relation to personal identity. When using the term in this context, I mean work whose value can be readily interpreted within existing evaluative frameworks, rather than work that is merely easy to understand. Legibility describes cultural forms that can be easily classified, compared and benchmarked against precedent. It allows institutions to apply established criteria of judgement and thereby justify their decisions. Legibility reduces ambiguity. Legibility, both personally and structurally, functions as a form of risk management.
Historically, however, periods of cultural renewal often begin in states of relative illegibility. New Wave cinema emerged in opposition to established studio conventions. Experimental theatre developed in spaces with a high tolerance for uncertainty. Punk emerged from amateurs rather than virtuosi. Early blogging challenged the authority of established critics. YouTube disrupted broadcast gatekeeping structures. Streaming altered assumptions about how audiences consume narrative. Work that initially appears illegible exposes the limits of existing frameworks and can create the conditions for new forms to emerge.
Illegibility is not only unavoidable during periods of transition, it is essential. If new forms are immediately legible, they are usually variations of what already exists. Forms become legible only after they have stabilised, and stability is the result of experimentation.
When institutions become risk averse, when they pivot from proactive to reactive, artistic output often shifts with them. Cultural anxiety becomes artistic aesthetic. We can see this all around us. The most lucrative shows on Broadway are short runs with star names, theatre programming shows an increase in revivals and adaptations (particularly out-of-copyright texts), genre signalling has become overt, IP dominates stage, screen and audio, cast sizes are becoming smaller. Across all sectors there is significant financial support for the top of the scale and reduced financial exposure at the bottom. Meanwhile, the middle is increasingly compressed and it is the middle where most creatives reside.
There is no shortage of people. There is no shortage of talent. In fact, the routes to entry have never been as democratised as they are now. Technology has lowered the barriers, year-on-year, training pathways have increased and more and more people have access now than ever before. The number of people coming in to the industry is high, higher than ever before. What is different now is that, for perhaps the first time in history, we have no roadmap for where we are heading.
I am sorry if you came here looking for answers, if you read this far in hope I may offer a solution. I apologise if it is of little comfort to know that your existential crisis is part of a wider structural rupture and that I too am caught in the maelstrom.
On board the Hail Mary, when Ryland Grace wakes alone and confused, he asks Who am I? With no memory of what came before, Grace cannot rely on precedent. He acts anyway. So will we. Whether that constitutes navigation or falling forward remains, for now, an open question.