Everyone, everywhere indeed. Whether the fires are literal, or even “merely” figurative, everyone now has been reminded, in the starkest terms, of John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Although the picking apart certainly seems to be prevailing over the hitching together here across the pond, almost making a monthly column seem like a quaint throwback to an earlier era of presumed geo-political stability. How much will things have changed in a month? This is being written over the weekend of announced tariffs by the current administration on countries that had been – up until a week or so ago – two of America’s closest allies.
There are whole columns that could be written just about those levies – and the possible retaliations (particularly from Canada, where a lot of filming and post-production still takes place, and China, where U.S.-based studios had, at least until recently, also relied upon box revenues from audiences there). And while, by the Monday after, much of the now-belayed policy looked like it may have been performative after all (there was a reason the surcharges were announced two days before the markets reopened here) should these tariff wars spread to the EU, as threatened, what happens with accessing all those formerly “cheap” – again, from a U.S. studio perspective – production facilities in eastern and central Europe? Or will those be feint-and-parry policies too, leaving little but broken trust in their wake?
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