How a Hollywood Strike Gets at the Heart of the Imago Dei
The Writers Guild of America and the state of the modern soul
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Jessie Epstein
My dentist in my Midwestern hometown is concerned about the writer’s strike happening in Los Angeles and New York. During a crown replacement, he asks my mother, “What are these writers on about, anyway? Will this affect Jess?”
As an actor, yes, the Writers Guild of America’s current union strike does affect Jess. Though, to be fair, it affects you, too.
For those unaware, two significant issues are finally at a boiling point in the entertainment industry. They have been stewing and brewing for the past several years, causing the writer’s guild to go on strike for the first time in 16 years. The first issue at hand is the unfair compensation of artists surrounding residual payments in the era of streaming vs. network television. The second is an attempt to get regulation and clarity surrounding the potential future use of AI in all areas of entertainment. In sum: The writers are not getting paid enough, and studio heads might hire robots that they don’t have to pay at all to replace them.
So, yeah, they walked out.
Writing is the least glamorous of the entertainment branches, at the best of times. Anyone who writes is intimately acquainted with the scene of yourself, your aging laptop, and your stimulant of choice duking it out until a draft is dragged out of you. (Unless of course, you’re in a writers’ room, which is often an equally unglamorous montage of writing through the night without pause—only to scarf down the allotted takeout that magically appears at “dinner time,” or 3:00 am). As anyone who writes anything will tell you, the craft is often thankless, solitary work. Thousands of words can be written in pursuit of writing a hundred good ones.
But it is often in that confinement, that solitude, that the good stuff emerges. From nothing, miraculously, comes something.
Work is, as we all know, increasingly becoming more and more intertwined with a person’s identity. In certain realms, this has a deleterious effect, but in the arts, it is different. One’s soul cannot help but be involved—the act of creation is holy, precious, and costly. I don’t know anyone employed in the arts for whom their work isn’t really their Work.
I think that a writer, when truly doing their Work, cannot help but spill a little bit of their soul into whatever it is that they write. And that’s the very thing you react to when you watch a movie or a TV show that actually arrests, compels, implicates you—the soul lurking in it. It’s “the deep crying out to deep,” if you wish. It’s the sheen of meaning. Yes, performers are bringing the material to life, and directors are orchestrating the narrative to be in its most cohesive and dynamic presentation—but it’s the story itself that you’re responding to. It comes down to the words.
One of my favorite TV lines in recent memory was said in the season 3 finale of Succession, arguably the best-written television show of the 21st century. When faced with a “deal with the devil,” one of the show’s more neutral, sympathetic characters (#GregTheEgg) considers the alternative for only a moment before answering, “What am I gonna do with a soul, anyway?”
That is the question at the heart of this strike. It is the question driving the collective looming strikes of the Directors and Screen Actors Guild of America. It is the culmination of a cultural moment that we are all living through, where the indeterminate answer to a seemingly basic question is much more troubling than a delayed third season of your favorite show. What are we gonna do with our souls, anyway?
It begs the question—if we cannot recognize the value or importance of the soul we’re in charge of, how does that affect our ability to do so for those we are not? AI will never replace a soul—that thing you respond to in the work you love most. It can’t create, it can only approximate. It’s the difference between looking into someone’s eyes and looking at a picture of them.
If the writers’ (and all those who follow) demands are not met, we will be looking at photos instead of eyes. When it comes down to it, all of their delightfully clever signs say the same thing: “See us as souls. See souls as worth something.”
Should their demands not be met, our souls, looking for mirrors, will find something else instead—and they will learn how to respond in kind. Perhaps we won’t notice the difference at first. But we’ll certainly pay for it more than any studio ever could.
Jessie Epstein
Actor & Writer
Jessie is an actor whose work has taken her to film festivals, off-Broadway, international theater expos, Zoom rooms, cornfields, and strangers' apartments. She studied in a tightly-knit ensemble in Chicago, where she trained in Shakespeare, the Patsy Rodenburg method, movement, and acting in the legacy of Michael Howard. After wrapping up her time in Chicago with continued study in Shakespeare and Chekhov, she packed her bags and headed west to Los Angeles. Find her here: https://www.jessiegepstein.com/
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The Succession quote was the epitome of satisfying. These never miss.
Great take. Insightful.