A few years ago, Thomas Hibbs wrote a terrific book called Shows About Nothing. Its theme was Hollywood's love affair with nihilism, and how it translated to both movies and TV shows. (Two guesses as to which TV show its title referred to.) Mark Steyn begins his review of Steven Spielberg's version of The War of the Worlds by arguing that making "films about nothing" is what's killing Hollywood at the box office this summer:

Hollywood is in the middle of its worst box-office slump in decades. Well, they hope it’s the middle, if not halfway through the seventh reel. And no one can quite figure out why this should be. The non-blockbusters are no better or worse than their equivalents of a few years’ back. What’s gone wrong?

Here’s one thought. The other day, before the new Bewitched (don’t ask), I sat through a trailer for Stealth. This is a high-tech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane. That’s right: an unmanned computerised plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is — stop me if this rings a vague bell — a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.

This is the pitiful state Hollywood’s been reduced to. The Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears was about Islamic terrorists, so naturally the film version made them neo-Nazis. The Nicole Kidman snoozer The Interpreter was about Islamic terrorists attacking New York, so naturally they were rewritten into terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo. But doubtless some studio exec panicked that, what with all this Live8 business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let’s make the plane the bad guy. In the Eighties and Nineties, upscale Brits like Jeremy Irons and Gary Oldman made a nice living playing the exotic foreign evildoer in Hollywood, but, unless Jeremy’s been practising going brm-brm and taxi-ing down the garden path with outstretched arms, I don’t think he’s going to be getting many roles as the psycho aeroplane. That’s my theory on why the box-office is down: in ‘interesting times’, Hollywood is making films about nothing.

In the 1930s, Hollywood made plenty of films about nothing. Fred Astaire's movies were the purist of pure fluff: Fred puts on his tux or tails, pursues Ginger Rogers (with eunuch-like Edward Everett Horton as his buddy or rival), dances with her, and gets the girl.

But by God, that was enjoyable fluff. (As was the TV series that inspired Thomas Hibbs' book.)

No doubt, the men who created the Hollywood product of the 1930s and '40s were cynical about their audiences, but they also knew that they had to entertain them if they were to get them into the theaters and keep them coming back--especially as this was an era before residuals from PPV TV, premium cable TV, basic cable TV, network TV, VHS, DVD and most of the other myriad types of ancillary product sales that keep the modern movie industry afloat.

If anything, today's Hollywood is infinitely more cynical about its audiences--at least its American audiences. It only took forty years, but perhaps that audience has responded to that cynicism with appropriate disdain.

...Or, maybe we can just blame it all on texting cell phones, like Hollywood did in 2003.