Smart

H.L. Mencken is often quoted as saying, “No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” In reality, what he said was much more convoluted, but the message was largely the same: if you want to win over a big crowd, keep things dumb. And certainly there have been many, many, many instances where keeping things dumb paved the road to success, fame, political triumph, and more. But is this notion as universal as many believe? Is it really true that no one loses money when they make us out to be simpletons? Please.

I’m going to stay in my lane here. I’m not going to argue consumer goods or fashion or government or any number of things about which I might have an opinion but not a deep working knowledge. Instead, I’m going to stick to story. And here I would argue that those who bring stories to the American people are taking a substantial risk if they underestimate the intelligence of those people.

Let’s look at books. According to BookScan, the #1 bestselling fiction hardcover of the year to date is Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Number 3 is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Number 4 is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, #5 is Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, #6 is Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, #7 is The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, and #10 is Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. Do you know what all these books have in common? They’re smart. Seventy percent of the top ten hardcover novels of the year to date are not formulaic, predictable stories for “the masses,” but rather nuanced, challenging, precisely written works of fiction that encourage readers to think, engage, and imagine. The other three could be most accurately described as “entertainments,” but even two of those three make admirable attempts to surprise and move readers.

Is there a place in the book world for dumb? Oh, yeah. But would you be losing money if you believed that dumb was the only option? It certainly does appear that way.

This argument is perhaps somewhat harder to make in the areas of feature film and television, but anyone who would suggest that dumb was the only option would be leaving a lot of money on the table. Sure, the list of box office leaders for 2023 to date include lots of straight-up action and empty dazzle, but it also includes the cerebral Avatar: The Way of Water, the endlessly clever Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and two movies released this weekend — Barbie andOppenheimer — that definitively prove that “smart” and “blockbuster” are not contradictory terms.

Similarly, while the most watched television of 2023 includes a fair amount of unchallenging work, the top 15 also includes The Last of Us, Season 3 of Stranger Things, Season 1 of Bridgerton, Season 2 of Bridgerton (and, yes, I do realize that lots of people watch Bridgerton because of the sex, but the writing is extremely smart) and, at #2 (as of this writing), the consistently surprising Wednesday.

Conventional wisdom in storytelling suggests that creators need to stoop to reach a large audience. That’s the kind of reductive thinking that also leads to sentiments like, “Americans only eat hot dogs” and “Men aren’t in touch with their feelings” (for a refutation of both, please visit any of my novels). The evidence decidedly suggests otherwise. And just imagine how false the notion would be if there weren’t so many gatekeepers in the worlds of commercial storytelling who weren’t perpetuating it.