Politics & Power Quote by Elmer Bernstein

A film composer complaining about “the dumbing down of America” lands differently than, say, a critic’s broadside. Bernstein isn’t theorizing culture from the balcony; he’s describing the weather he has to work in. The “generally pessimistic” opener is telling: he’s not shocked by a single bad season, he’s resigned to an ecosystem where simplicity is rewarded and complexity is treated as a risk.

The sting is in “especially with summer movies.” Summer is when Hollywood cashes its biggest checks, and that commercial gravity shapes everything upstream: scripts streamlined for global box offices, emotions simplified for quick recognition, spectacle engineered to play the same in any language. Bernstein, who wrote for films that trusted mood and moral ambiguity (from The Ten Commandments to To Kill a Mockingbird), is implicitly mourning a kind of craftsmanship that depends on attention span. A sophisticated score can complicate a scene, add irony, deepen character; but if the movie itself is designed as a ride, music gets demoted to propulsion system.

There’s also a professional grievance hiding in plain sight. The more movies chase noise and velocity, the less they “need” musical intelligence - leitmotifs, restraint, thematic development. Bernstein’s pessimism doubles as a warning about cultural feedback loops: when the biggest movies assume audiences can’t handle nuance, audiences get trained not to expect it.

Context matters: he’s speaking from late-20th-century Hollywood, watching the blockbuster model harden into habit. It’s not nostalgia so much as a diagnosis of incentives - and a composer’s quiet panic about what those incentives do to the art form that once let him speak in more than exclamation points.