Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend.
The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.
> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.
> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.
Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.
I find this article rather underwhelming because it spends so much time calling out bad examples and so little time highlighting examples of subtlety (in any era). Without positive examples, I don’t think they make the case that this is a new phenomenon or even a phenomenon at all: all the author has done is identify a lens to criticize through.
It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other commentators disagree), but without providing detail on what movies the author feels avoid this pattern, they make their argument impossible to refute or engage with. (It also insulates the author’s tastes from criticism, which I suspect is part of the motivation)
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away.
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
- HL Mencken
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
Calling the literalism "new" implies it wasn't present in older pics. You can go back to 1997 when Good Will Hunting won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
I'm convinced it has to do with the increased importance of the overseas markets, these movies now must make it past Chinese censors and make sense for people that don't natively speak English or understands its nuances. Showing a flashback scene and swapping in the government approved voice over is a better business decision than not releasing the movie in insert country here.
Unrelated movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe.
This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.
I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.
I think what this means is that the movies now care whether the least-common-denominator viewers get their "point."
Because of this, they have to have a single easily articulated point, and they have to beat the audience over the head with it.
Prior to this, I doubt whether directors, writers, or studios much cared if an unsophisticated viewer walked out of a movie with the "wrong" idea of what it "meant." The ability to attach multiple meanings, even multiple conflicting meanings, was seen as an inevitable aspect of art that should be embraced and engaged with. It was accepted that people would see a different movie depending on their background, their personal history, and their awareness of cinematic language. Supporting multiple readings was seen as a sign of depth and complexity, not necessarily a weakness.
Now the movies take a pragmatic, engineered approach to delivering a message. Ambiguity must be squashed. Viewer differences must be made irrelevant. The message takes precedence over art.
I think the interesting question is, why does the message now take precedence over everything else? What has changed? I see two possible answers.
First possibility, the audience demands a message. If the least-common-denominator viewer demands a message, and you are in the business of servicing that demand, you have to make sure you avoid any possible mishaps or misunderstandings in the delivery.
Second possibility, the makers of movies derive some personal satisfaction or social gain from broadcasting a message to the masses. They see the movies as propaganda rather than art. (Or perhaps a less active motivation: the makers of movies are afraid that there might be blowback from viewers attaching an unsavory meaning to a movie. They want to make sure that their movie doesn't become like Fight Club, a proudly embraced symbol of what it was meant to critique.)
Either of these would explain why movies are now engineered to deliver a single, unmistakable message at the expense of art and enjoyability. Or maybe there's another explanation. I'm just spitballing. I'd love to read more by somebody close enough to actually know what they're talking about.
The Wachowski's once commented that the Red Pill movement was a message to them telling them to never be subtle again.
Another data point. Most people seem to think that replicants are detected because they are unemotional.
I would prefer filmmakers not assume the least of their audiences, but I would also rather that audiences not give them reason to.
I have definitely noticed the same occurring in North American cinema, but I do not think this is a new phenomenon. Rather, it's just a symptom of the increased commercialization of indie cinema - commercialization requiring film for all to understand.
If one is to broaden their horizons, overseas cinema is still devoid of this literalism. European cinema, Korean cinema, and the famously show not tell Japanese cinema still produce ambiguous stories that compete for awards - just look at recent pictures in Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Drive my Car, Decision to Leave.
There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
I've spent 20 years working in Hollywood. This is definitely not anything new, but we are in an up-cycle. Ambiguity is hard to tolerate, in life, in general. Ambiguity is also where personal meaning can arise. However in hard times (economically, culturally, politically, existentially... we're currently in all 4), market forces drive things away from ambiguity and toward one-pointedness. This is reflected in the world of trailers even more clearly than in the world of films - the trailers often specifically highlight exactly the kinds of moments this writer is critiquing, as if the purpose of film is to trade in such moments; the underlying conceit is something like "populist memes are a commodity."
This is what is currently driving pop culture; the commodification of the meme. Movies aspire to be memes - the dominant means of expression and the atomic unit of culture in the present moment.
They used to aspire to be themselves (movies, for their own sake). IMO that ended around 2008. The Dark Knight was the end and Iron Man was the beginning of a new Hollywood cycle; defined by the movie's ability to trade in this currency - memes - which stand alone, isolated, traded out of context of an entire narrative.
Further reading for whoever is interested: Society of the Spectacle by Debord (re: the degradation of being into having, having into mere appearing, as a universal and ubiquitous byproduct of the core function of capital which is commodification)... and Man and His Symbols (re: the difference between a symbol, which is universal and carries a wealth of meaning, and a sign, which is contextual/temporary and carries a fixed meaning).
This phenomenon isn't exclusive to film or even fiction.
A year or two ago, YouTube flicked a short at me where a Gen-Z fan of some personality shared their feelings of heartbreak after he announced his departure from the platform.
A montage of the channel's videos had the fan's voiceover (I'm paraphrasing): "This YouTube channel has been a part of my life, my childhood, since I was like a little kid, and I never imagined one day it would end."
And then, jarringly: "This is me right now." And a still photo of their tear-streaked face. "This is me right now," not in the emotional or confused tone of someone navigating a personal tragedy, but the straight conveyance of a sentiment that has social currency. A sentence they knew others would know how to digest. Because they've seen others use it enough times to be literate in whatever transaction it represents.
I understand their choice to include their emotional reaction, and that shows some real vulnerability that I truly appreciate, but what is "This is me right now"? Maybe it springs from the social media they grew up in— where the vast majority of posts and comments are either a status or a reaction, and discourse has been strained and reduced into signals of acknowledgement.
That's what I think this "literalism" is. It's the misshapen MICR-font metadata stamped in cultural things, so that they can be parsed by a machine— and the machine is the set of heuristics younger generations have adopted to sift through mountains of low signal-to-noise content that platforms are pushing on them.
Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.
I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.
Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
I agree, its for the same reason that trailers now have little trailers in the beginning. I mean really, a trailer for a trailer? Apparently its required to keep retention up because even adults are now children that need to be spoon fed.
I had not seen a recent movie in quite some time. Recently I went to watch Sinners (2025, critically acclaimed). The movie starts with a voiceover saying:
"There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death; conjuring spirits from the past and the future..."
Not even an hour passes, and the same exact voiceover repeats word for word that music can conjure spirits from the past and the future, while the scene on screen literally shows music conjuring spirits from the past and the future. It threw me off a little.
Many commenters in this thread point out that on-the-nose-ness in Hollywood movies isn’t new. Personally, I can’t recall a voiceover being repeated verbatim, especially not during the very scene it originally seemed to foreshadow.
There are a lot of things that bother me in recent movies. I feel like there's a "yay, we're making a movie!" attitude, where people are more concerned with proving that they're part of a culture rather than simply doing their job to the best of their ability.
The most egregious example is the amount of Wilhelm Screams I've heard, absolutely crammed into media. It's a proclamation of, "I'm a sound editor, and I'm in on the joke!" but all it does is pull me out of the story completely.
Another sound editor example is the amount of ice clinking in glasses and sloshing sounds of drinks, as if the protagonist's long-neck beer bottle is a half-empty jug being jerked around.
Impressive stunts are virtually non-existent now. Instead, they drive a custom-built, tubular-frame car, swerving wildly, while the camera jerks around on a crane. Everything is reskinned using CGI, and the end result is the desired car being driven by an apparent maniac who chooses a profoundly sub-optimal path through traffic.
Writers have to point out their cleverness in order to announce to the audience how clever they're being. It reminds me of eye-rollingly clever newspaper headlines.
Everything has been turned up to 11, but in the lamest way possible.
Given these three things:
- There really isn't anything like a united "popular culture" anymore except in the very ephemeral sense of the latest memes on social networks. The cycle here is faster than anything before. Strong meme fads can coalesce and dissipate within weeks or days.
- Media production of all types continues to become cheaper, as far as the actual process of production. Visual effects, photography, and editing are all easier with modern tech and I would say cheaper as well.
- Economic factors: The disposable income of average people continues to become less over time, and property rents where theaters and such exist continue to increase over time.
it's not surprising that new movies and other corporate entertainment have to follow a quicker cycle, including making things easier to consume. Entertainment media is more disposable than it has ever been at any point.
It will be interesting to see if social media bans for minors will have an impact on this and maybe slow it down a bit, but I don't think it'll alter the underlying economic factors mentioned above, so it'll be interesting.
I don't know if theaters still receive hard drives of the movies they are playing, but it seems like something that could probably be replaced by a local storage solution and an Internet connection by now, so maybe in the next 10 years we'll see theaters show movies produced and released on quicker but lower-quality schedules. Something like TV shows - a new one each week for a low price. But at that point why even leave your house?
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
I read the first three paragraphs and thought it was an homage to McSweeny's Internet Tendency. But apparently those are real scenes. While writing this reply I kept coming up with examples from decades past, but realized I was confusing obvious subtext with literalism. Hard to avoid. I'm willing to embrace this as a new art form challenge: how LITTLE metaphor can a writer use until the final composition it inverts itself and becomes something completely new? Like Dogme95 but for the text: no tense, no adjectives, no indirect objetcts. I mean, the writing is the equivalent of first-grade reading texts (See Jane Run), but can that many artists really avoid generating something meaningful behind the text? I'm drunkenly optimistic this evening.
Quite a bad piece, the end note is ironic: the author doesn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention for a film critic apparently interested in litteralicity.
> An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”
I cannot see any common denominator in the multiple examples that the author gives and cannot relate to them (what point is there to put on an equal footing a micro analysis of a dialogue in Megalopolis -voluntarily grotesque- and the choice of film format in The Architect?).
Maybe there’s an intuition here, but I feel it is not well illustrated. The author probably hopes that she will be remembered for coining this wishy washy concept.
I found the thesis of this article difficult to nail down, the examples were all over the place.
I wonder how much of the problem is the massive influx of streaming platform money to occupy talented directors, writers, and other people who make films. Why risk a Hollywood release when you can get prepaid for your work?
> There is a meme going around from a “Family Guy” episode in which Peter, the animated comedy’s paterfamilias, confesses to his family that he never cared for “The Godfather.” Why not? “It insists upon itself,” he says with a shrug. A lot of recent productions deserve this scorn—literally. It’s gotten so bad that, lately, the highest compliment I can muster for even the best of them is: “Well, at least it’s a movie.”
man never thought I'd see that meme continue to live on, or get cited in the New Yorker
I appreciate nuance and depth in art, but I've also become addicted to YouTube explainer channels like Heavy Spoilers. I've concurrently watched multiple explainer channels for all the memorable TV shows I've watched lately, and... I really enjoy this new media age.
I still silently and slowly read novels, but as of now, that's a different media experience. Its slow pace is also enjoyable in a different way.
I just wish they'd cease using the two-strip Technicolor orange-and-blue.
Somewhat related, there have been cases where Netflix executives chastised their movie and show writers for "not being second screen enough [0]; that is, since many people put on a show as essentially white noise in the background while they scroll on their phones, the content cannot be too cerebral and require dedicated attention.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
I agree with some of the sentiment in TFA, but I think the author goes way overboard and ends up disliking some of the movies "just because".
I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.
As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.
Would the void of physical medium like VHS and DVD be part of the issue?
Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.
With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.
It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore. The last time I remember watching a movie and thinking "That was pretty good" was the Dune films. Before that I can't even remember. I watched Thunderbolts and remember I thought it was the first Marvel movie that wasn't just terrible since End Game and that was primarily due to the Russian guy as a comedy source.
The kind of criticism this author is imposing, I honestly feel like it could be applied to every movie ever if you were nitpicky enough.
Gonna take this opportunity to recommend Sovereign.
Imho it's the best of the movie of the year, and one big reason is because it is NOT this.
That article felt eerily like AI writing. Lots of words and few ideas, and the ideas they had were poorly explained...
Bizarre.
Audiences are increasingly distracted when watching movies and TV shows: the scripts have to be literal.
Eh, People on their phones can’t be bothered with following plot lines everything has to be telegraphed
Is this "new" literalism, or just storytelling as it has always been in movies? I've been on a Billy Wilder kick lately, and there are still a lot of scenes in these 70 year old movies where the subtext gets spoken out loud.
New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct? Rich people agree with them.
Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.
> Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content. Fashion capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks: we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth. Image generators churn out ersatz versions of da Vinci and van Gogh. And, in every case, banal commentary is slowly occluding the art, seeping into it in boldface titles or explainers that speak over the sound or cover the image.
It's the degradation of our media, in the sense that it's factory-produced, which is in stark contrast to the media folks were consuming 40 years ago. I'm not dogmatic that it's fundamentally worse (despite my framing), but it does lack the depth of older media, IMO.
You don't really need a critic to see that it has spread everywhere. People not just adore, they demand to be given a three paragraph summary and a moral of the story for everything, no matter which era, which genre, or how much magnificent embroidery was presented to them. So-called Web 2.0 review platforms have succumbed under the weight of people complaining about not being given clear instructions by the authors, and people trying to invent those clear instructions on “understanding” the work themselves. It seems that the simple truth that the whole point of work of art is how it starts processes in your very own head is a secret which is well hidden from those who expect that others can do thinking in their stead, and just state the “results”.
Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).
A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.
Somewhere in the 2000s a lot was lost, after all the best selling movies at the time were literally children's tales.
Most movies are pretty bad. Always have been. I feel like I got scammed for paying to see 28 Years Later.
There are movie critics that go on a rollercoaster ride and then complain about a lack of subtext
This article is not professionally written. Somebody get this writer an editor
PSA: Beginning of the article contains spoilers.
It’s kind of disingenuous to lead with an example from Megalopolis like it represents something about the culture.
> Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.
Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?
I think there's a combination of causes for this: People looking at their phones and only half-watching most of the movie, "streamlining" the English in movies to make translator's lives easier, a big smile from Mr. 10tril AUM for making it accessible, and of course good-old "enshittification" (if everyone becomes accustomed to lazy plots, they won't notice as they get even lazier)
Here’s the thing. For all the movies that have tired tropes and blatant literalism, there’s a new movie watcher that hasn’t experienced it before. They have the same right to watching a new movie with a tired trop — because to them, it’s not yet tired.
Special case of bad writing, which is what really plagues today's movies. I often blame comic book films but I'm not sure that's the explanation. I don't know what the explanation is.
Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.
I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.
This is nothing new. Critics wanna be challenged. Audiences don’t.
Ah, a New Yorker article on media. I think I got bingo!
- Identify some problem pervading modern pop media? Check
- Cherry pick examples? Check
- Misrepresent or misunderstand an example that actually supports the opposite claim? Check
- Paint a vague picture of how much better it was before [trend], without making any real statement? Check
- Don't use any actual data or evidence? Check
- Draw a line from dumb blockbuster trends to Trump/Nazis/[insert hot-button political issue]? Check
The industry should be so lucky as to be plagued with something as well-defined as "literalism". Right now the industry is plagued with writers who would fail Writing 101. Which I mean fully literally. Failing grade, please retake the class, no credit.
And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.
That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.
But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.
It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.
Pretty sure for all the examples given at the beginning, these can easily be explained as natural parts of the writing process.
The Gladiator II example is just lampshading. If you just wrote "the prisoner grabbed the weapon the guard brought in to the cell, and then killed the guard with it" the very first thing someone's going to ask is "well why did the guard bring a weapon in?" and then the writer says "oh well he didn't consider it a usable weapon" and then "but clearly it is, so that doesn't really solve anything" and rather than coming up with a better escape method the writer just leans into the absurdity of it - the on the nose dispensing of folksy wisdom establishes that the guard is just an idiot rather than leaving the audience to contemplate the contrived situation.
For Megalopolis, “What do you think of this boner I got?” [he shoots her] isn't exactly a compelling scene when reading it. It makes a lot of sense to punctuate the scene with some emotion to make it make some sort of sense. Can this emotion be shown on film without dialogue? Possibly, but the writer can't be sure how it'll actually look, and they need to convey to both the actor and director what emotion needs to be conveyed. It sounds like placeholder dialogue which could be cut or changed as needed.
For the Apprentice, again the writer likely doesn't know exactly how the scene is going to turn out. Is "Trump Tower" going to be clearly legible on the model as the scene is shot? Do you even want to spoil it by showing the name on the model? The point is this is supposed to be a reveal.
In all three cases, these lines very well could be great with proper setup and delivery, or perhaps could have been reworked into great lines. The issue is just these are mediocre films. None made any serious attempt to polish their scripts. It's not a deliberate tactic to dumb down movies or deal with poor attention spans, it's just the makers of the movie saying "eh, good enough."
As someone forced to sit through "substance" while the recommender was "yass queening" the whole time, I can confirm that the movie thinks you have an IQ of 75. "Oooh ooh! Men bad! Male gaze only reason women try look sexy! Yes queen slay, Grug owe you attention for living! Western pedo town all problem caused by men look no further"
Pretentious nonsense is plaguing the newyorker.
Most of this writers points are ideas recently circulating around twitter.
Oh nooooooo sincerity bad. Got it.
(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)
https://archive.ph/ZVQvK