Politics & Power Quote by Yahoo Serious

It lands like a punchline and a lament at the same time: America has the machinery, the spectacle, the “things,” but not the narrative soul; Australia (or the outsider’s imagination) has stories, yet keeps pouring them into pre-molded shapes. Coming from Yahoo Serious, a filmmaker who broke out by spoofing Hollywood scale with scrappy antipodean cheek (Young Einstein), the line reads as both critique and self-implication. He’s not just sneering at Los Angeles; he’s describing the gravitational pull it exerts on everyone who wants a global audience.

The phrasing matters. “Formula” shows up twice, like a diagnosis that won’t go away. First it’s America’s problem: content built around recognizable beats, engineered to travel, designed to be consumed more than remembered. Then it flips into a harsher confession: “we have all the stories to tell” is an artist’s boast, immediately undercut by “but they’re all formula.” That’s the subtext: even when you come from a culture with fresh angles, you’re pressured to translate them into familiar genres, tidy arcs, and market-friendly character types. Story becomes packaging.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th-century shadow of Hollywood dominance, when smaller national cinemas fought to be seen without becoming derivative. Serious is pointing at a cultural trade: America exports scale; everyone else exports specificity, then sands it down to fit the American template. The line works because it refuses purity. It’s a complaint about empire that also admits complicity.