No one ever went broke, they say, underestimating the intelligence of the American public. But even underestimating is more complicated now than it used to be: The simple public is very knowing and doesn't like to be told how simple it is; it likes to have its smartness praised while you're hitting it over the head with the simplicities it really craves. Try a subtlety— or the kind of direct simplicity that appeals to purer hearts and more genuinely jaded palates— at your own risk. This situation makes the act of creating popular entertainment an unnaturally contorted hell, with too much of everything and not enough of any real satisfaction. Artists scuttle this way and that, reworking, subverting, rethinking. And nobody has a wholly good time— at best, we get a revised edition of somebody else's good... More >>>