Eindexamen Engels vwo 2026, tijdvak 1: vragen en antwoorden

The Dec. 16 Metro section had a headline reading, “Development delays plague program.” Reminded me of the famous headline that appeared in a paper in Britain in 1982: “British left waffles on Falklands.” The late Post copy chief Bill Walsh would have loved it.

Edward Blanton, Arlington

I was taken aback reading the Dec. 16 Metro headline about a “plague program” in D.C. What?

It took a second reading to realize that the ambiguity is twofold: “delays” could be a noun or a verb, and “plague” could be an adjective or a verb.

One reading: Development delays plague program (“plague” as the verb); the other: Development delays plague program (“delays” as the verb).

Thanks for the morning chuckle (unintended, I’m assuming!).

Nancy Shapiro, Potomac

Washington Post, 2023

Sir, Keeping older cars running need not be too much of a worry. The owner of the old Volvo (letter, Aug 4) needs to join an owners’ group that will advise. We find it is also useful to have a metal turning lathe, handbooks and lots of tools. As a result our old car runs beautifully. Mind you, since she was built in 1933 and has an ash frame we do also have to check occasionally for woodworm.

June and Simon Keeble
Storrington, W Sussex

Sir, When I was 60 I visited a Volvo garage. I mentioned to the salesman the Volvo’s reputation for not rusting. He eyed me up and down before saying: “Yes, sir, this will see you out.” I bought a Mercedes.

Dr James Beales (aged 99)
Henley on Thames, Oxon

The Times of Scotland, 2023

‘“Yes, sir, this will see you out.”’ (brief 2)

Tramway, Glasgow, Friday 29 September — Monday 28 January

by Rachel Ashenden

(1) Billie Zangewa is a Malawian artist based in South Africa whose specialist medium is textiles. Sewing from the heart, her figurative silk collages have gained her international acclaim. Telling autobiographical stories of growth through change, her choice of material purposefully ___ (4) this: silk is a by-product of animal transformation. She has exhibited widely across Europe and America (from Paris Art Fair to the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC) but A Quiet Fire at Tramway marks the first time her art can be seen on display in Scotland.

(2) Preoccupied with the domestic realm and the underappreciated labour which goes into its maintenance, Zangewa’s collage tapestries express what she describes as daily feminism. Motherhood figures repeatedly in her practice as she depicts routines such as walking a child to school or assisting with homework at the kitchen table. Zangewa’s kitchen table transforms into her ‘kitchen studio’ where she assembles her hand-sewn silk fragments into tapestries. In interviews, she speaks tenderly about her soul-enriching relationship with her son and how his presence helped her pursue the ‘personal as political’ narrative of her art.

(3) ‘The ordinary Black woman needs support from society,’ Zangewa once declared. She depicts herself juggling tasks, reading, gardening, washing, drinking and meditating. ___ (6) the ancient tradition of tapestry-making, she sews a woman surfing the internet on an Apple Mac (a repeated symbol in her practice). By creating artworks which depict Black women’s everyday experiences, she seeks to affirm their existence and ‘elevate their place in the world.’

The List, september 2023

‘the ‘personal as political’ narrative of her art’ (alinea 2)

Let op: lees voor vraag 7 de volgende alinea uit ‘chapter 4: Artists and patrons’ van het boek Femina by Janina Ramirez, 2024:

Over the past two centuries women have both pushed against and leaned into the connection of femininity with embroidery. The idea that a woman stitching is a virtuous act has a long history, for while she is still, silent and submissive, she cannot be challenging or corrupted. In the eighteenth century, tenacious women like Mary Wollstonecraft saw the process of embroidering as restrictive. In her Vindication of the Rights of Women, she wrote how it ‘confines their thoughts to their person’, and rejected it in favour of less sedentary activities like gardening, experimental philosophy and literature. But there have also been moves to reclaim fabric as a medium for celebrating female contributions to art. Tracy Emin’s famous embroidered tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995) included 102 appliquéd names stitched around the inside. The quote at the centre — ‘With myself, always myself, never forgetting’ — not only suggests the piece focuses on Emin’s personal battles, but also reiterates Wollstonecraft’s suggestion that the process of embroidering is personal, private and performs a role in memorializing.

by Michelle Goldberg

(1) Many years ago, I went to a nail salon at an upscale mall in Kampala, Uganda, and was surprised that almost everyone working there was male. When I asked one of the employees why this was, he explained that doing nails was men’s work because it was financially rewarding. The salon wasn’t unique; as one local newspaper put it, “There is no visitor that comes to Uganda and won’t notice and comment about the young men carrying a basket in their hand with a manicure set.”

(2) I thought of those male manicurists while reading Richard V. Reeves’s much-discussed new book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It.” Reeves writes about the myriad ways boys and men, particularly in America, are flailing: Many are falling behind in school, disconnected from family, vulnerable to opioid abuse and to deaths of despair. He believes, I think rightly, that it is important to recruit more men into fast-growing industries now dominated by women, particularly health and education.

(3) But though Reeves, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, recognizes material causes of men’s suffering, he’s hesitant to offer redistributive solutions. He emphasizes clever technocratic interventions, like having boys start school later than girls in order to account for their slower development, over far-reaching reforms, like increasing unionization and ending public subsidies for job-displacing automation.

(4) The result is a book that, while often useful and interesting, also reveals the limits of wonky moderation. (I wasn’t surprised to learn that Reeves once served as director of strategy for the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat and self-described “radical” centrist.) Dismissive of partisanship, Reeves elides the political and economic decisions that have made American life brutal, in different but overlapping ways, for women and men both.

(5) In his preface, Reeves says that he was reluctant to write “Of Boys and Men,” and that many people advised him against it because of the “current political climate.” He needn’t have worried. There’s been little left-wing backlash to the book, which is good, because the issues it raises are important. Like many parents, I’ve seen how school is harder for my son than my daughter. “Boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading and science,” writes Reeves. Things don’t get easier when boys grow up. Men’s rates of work force participation have fallen and their suicide rates have risen. It’s possible to believe that sexism remains a major impediment to women’s flourishing and also believe that for many boys and men life is much harder than it should be.

(6) Even if you’re not inclined to care much about men’s welfare, their growing moral confusion and resentment is everyone’s problem, fueling right-wing populist movements around the world. People who feel unmoored and demeaned are going to be receptive to the idea that the natural order of things has been upended, the core claim of reactionary politics.

(7) Some of men’s ___ (12-1) is an inevitable product of modernization, which, by making physical brawn less economically important, blurs men and women’s social roles. It is not just America, after all, where more women than men earn college degrees. There are also more female than male college students in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, which suggests, at least to me, that girls may be more innately disposed to ___ (12-2).

(8) But male problems can be either exacerbated or ameliorated by political choices. Reeves makes the case that girls are more resilient than boys, writing that “economic and social disadvantage hurts boys more than girls.” Presumably, it would follow that disinvestment in public schools — including growing class sizes and the reduction of recess and gym in favor of test prep — is also hitting boys particularly hard. Yet Reeves spends more time bemoaning the left’s use of the phrase “toxic masculinity” than discussing how schools are funded or, for that matter, the school-to-prison pipeline.

(9) Similarly, Reeves makes a convincing case that boys benefit from male teachers, and that Black boys benefit from Black male teachers. He calls for a “massive, urgent recruitment effort,” which is a fine idea, but one that’s likely to be futile unless we stop demonizing teachers and start paying them fairly. Old-fashioned sexism means that lower-paid and lower-status jobs are dominated by women. Reeves is in favor of raising teaching salaries, but it’s something he mentions in an almost offhand way. He spends more time discussing the need for marketing campaigns to sell men on traditionally female jobs.

(10) Reeves has his own marketing to do, so his emphases make sense: Demanding more money for schools is boring; his plan to give boys an extra year of preschool is novel and provocative. But as he writes, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.” If that’s true, we also need deep structural changes to heal it.

nytimes.com, 2022

‘doing nails was men’s work because it was financially rewarding’ (alinea 1)

‘Boys and Men in Crisis’ (titel)

by Leo Kim

(1) In 2006, at an industry conference, then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt introduced a now ubiquitous term: “the cloud.” Here was a grand technological shift, Schmidt explained, that would let information exist simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Naming it “the cloud” made the change sound almost natural. Your information is not in a massive bank of servers in Nevada; it is, as he put it, “in a ‘cloud’ somewhere.” Data as a nimbus floating above.

(2) ___ (16-1) These appropriations span the gamut: Firefox, OpenSea, OnStar, Airbnb, Apple (Yosemite, Monterey, Big Sur), internet surfing, neural networks, mouses, viruses. Sue Thomas — a writer and scholar of digital culture — argues that bringing nature into the lexicon lets technologists position their domain as “a real and integrated extension to human experience.” ___ (16-2) As researchers have noted, the phrase “data mining” does not exactly clarify the privacy concerns at play when Meta sorts through your personal information.

(3) The historian Paul N. Edwards sees this naturalization — technology becoming as ordinary “as trees, daylight, and dirt” — as a defining characteristic of modern life, a process whereby a company’s tools self-camouflage. Media scholar L. Parks calls this “infrastructural concealment,” and for many modern apparatuses, environmental neologisms prove critical. If the cloud is really as natural as the fluffy wisps that drift across the sky on a pleasant afternoon, then it follows that its presence is similarly harmless — never mind the environmental burden all this data storage imposes. “The cloud” is out of reach, floating indifferently above the realm of human affairs.

(4) But of course this isn’t true. These technologies are not ephemeral abstractions, nor are they elemental processes out of our control. Unlike clouds or tornadoes or wildfires or earthquakes, they are products owned by companies that society can fine, restrict, and regulate — a fact most corporations would prefer governments forget. But no matter how closely companies try to align their wares with the elements, ___ (17). We are not helpless bystanders staring at the sky.

(5) Remembering that power seems important now. The past decades have witnessed profound shifts in how we inhabit the world. Natural and created environments are both evolving quickly. Technophiles continue to roll out designs that weave themselves into every aspect of our reality — the Internet of Things, the metaverse, AR goggles, haptic wearables — even as scientists warn of the “Anthropocene” and urge us to witness the destructive impact of human industry.

(6) As social theorist John Durham Peters has argued, we’ve always understood our relationship to the environment through our technologies (and vice versa). Before Google Maps, star maps guided us; before algorithmic pathways, charts of wind and currents shaped the flow of trade; before the addictive scroll of TikTok, the hypnotic flicker of fire captured our gaze. Metaphors like “the cloud” draw upon these ancient roots, interweaving ___ (19) with the feeling of timeless relevance. In his speech, Schmidt was highlighting the commercial potential of this “new cloud model where people are living … more and more online” — a captive audience for advertisers.

(7) Yet the age-old entanglement between our tools and the environment reveals that there’s a way to think about this relationship beyond the narrow lens of profit. Employing “the cloud” shows we can expand beyond what seems humanly possible; we can normalize a new world. As the doyenne of eco-philosophy Donna Haraway reminds us, if a vast societal reconfiguration is required amid climatic upheaval, it matters “what thoughts think thoughts.” The only question that remains is how we will deploy our nature metaphors: To sell iPhones? Or to survive the ongoing sixth mass extinction?

motherjones.com, 2023

‘Data as a nimbus floating above.’ (alinea 1)

‘it matters “what thoughts think thoughts”’ (paragraph 7)

Het volgende fragment is het begin van hoofdstuk 2 van de roman Shylock is my name, geschreven door Howard Jacobsen.

(1) There lived once in a big old house equidistant from Mottram St Andrew, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow — at the very heart of what is still known to estate agents as the Golden Triangle — a dope-smoking media don who disapproved of dope and media, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who favoured the redistribution of all wealth but his own, a utopist who mistrusted the principle of social amelioration, a lover of Gregorian chant who fantasised about being a rock legend, a whimsical conservationist who bought his sons fast cars with which they tore up the very country roads he wanted conserving. If he sounds like many people it’s because many people were wrapped up in him. But he was just one man, a single fretting bundle of idealistic envy. ‘Sometimes,’ he told his students at the business school in Stockport of which he was the dean, ‘even the fortunate and gifted can feel their lives are mortgaged to a perplexing sadness.’

(2) ‘You don’t say,’ his students said behind his back.

(3) For Peter Shalcross MBE, one day had become the same as every other. A live morning radio interview on any subject, an afternoon lecture to his students on Mercantilism and Alienation — on alternate weeks he changed the title to Money and Estrangement — and then the drive home in the early evening to the heart of the Golden Triangle where a neat Scotch and a scarlet smoking jacket awaited him, where he could fulminate in comfort against the faux manses and manor houses of

(4) which the Strulovitches and their kind had taken possession. Every evening at the same time he fulminated, saying the same things and feeling the same burning sensation in his chest. But habit took nothing from the fervour of his animus. Only someone who enjoyed the benefits of great wealth himself could have been made so angry by the great wealth of others — the difference being that he hadn’t had to earn his, the fact of which also made him obscurely angry.

‘Can you smell anything?’ he would ask visitors, throwing open the doors to his grounds, and when they had exhausted the possibilities — someone burning off leaves in the next country, horse manure, faulty plumbing, dust from the Sahara — he would rub the tips of his fingers together and say, ‘No none of those, what I smell is more like lucre … The filthy sort.’

Though he was concerned about the effect that the propinquity of lucre might have on the air quality, the hedgerows and his only daughter, Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine — Christine being the name of the flighty society model he had ill-advisedly married and whose influence on him extended all the way down to his candy-striped socks and fashionably pointed, high crepe-soled shoes — Shalcross was known to boast to his academic colleagues about the millionaire pop stars and footballers who were his neighbours. This was not to be confused with ___ (25). A man can boast and still deplore.

“‘You don’t say,’ his students said behind his back.” (see 2)

Abominations: Selected Essays From a Career of Courting Self-Destruction by Lionel Shriver

article by Rachel Cooke

(1) Of all the many hundreds of people I’ve interviewed down the years, only a handful have ever liked to refer to themselves in the third person, a habit I usually take as a sign of borderline insanity. About Lionel Shriver, however, I see no current cause for alarm. OK, so she does call herself Shriver in the introduction to her latest book (“Shriver supported Brexit,” she writes, at the beginning of a sizeable list of the crimes she has committed in the eyes of the progressive and the pious). But her sanity, it seems to me, is not (or not yet) in doubt. Offer her a glass of fizzing, liberal-left Kool-Aid and her response will be to run, at speed, to the nearest tap in search of a generous gallon of cold water.

(2) In Abominations, a collection mostly of her journalism, Shriver splashes this icy water all over and it’s very bracing; as I read, I thought of those scientists who tell us that a daily cold shower can help to boost the human immune system. It feels ever more vital to me — a matter of simple good health — that people try sometimes to read writers with whom they disagree (though I don’t always disagree with her); to do so is akin to filling the lungs with oxygen. It’s not only that we can’t know what we really think unless we’ve something to push against; it should be possible, just occasionally, for us to change our minds. Almost nothing worries me more about our present culture than the fact that the words “I was wrong” are now almost entirely absent from public discourse.

(3) Among the subjects Shriver tackles in Abominations are free speech, identity politics and the language of gender ideology, though if this sounds hard going — another culture wars slog — the mix is leavened with pieces about her addiction to exercise, what it feels like to break up with a friend and a droll skit on all the things she didn’t do during the first lockdown (learn Russian, read Proust, take a virtual tour of the British Museum). Nevertheless, a good place to begin might be with her 2016 speech to the Brisbane Writers festival in which she spoke — rightly, in my view — against the notion of ___ (29)

Novelists, she said, must be allowed to inhabit characters unlike themselves and to relate experiences alien from their own. “Writers are paid to step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats,” is how she put it. As you may recall, not only did someone walk out; afterwards, the festival, which had signed off on the subject of Shriver’s address long before she arrived in Australia, panicked and, with utmost cowardice, organised a “right of reply” event.

(4) ___ (30)

(5) According to Shriver, there have been three attempts so far to cancel her, of which this was the first (the second, and potentially most deleterious, occurred in 2018 when she ridiculed the language of diversity as it appeared in a questionnaire sent by Penguin Random House to its authors). The failure of such campaigns involves a certain satisfaction for both sides, I think. If Shriver is glad still to be in business — like anyone, she has bills to pay — her critics are able to regard the existence of a book such as Abominations as proof that cancel culture, supposedly an invention of the right, doesn’t really exist. But it’s not as simple as this, of course. Even if there are currently no forces actively moving against her at her publisher, I find it hard to imagine Shriver being invited, in 2022, to several of the festivals that commissioned pieces in this book. Whatever the reading public may feel, the organisers just don’t like her any more, whether or not they care to admit it.

(6) Even five years ago I would have mocked the idea that a writer in a country such as Britain could be considered “brave”; save your tears for those living under totalitarian regimes, I would have said, waving my PEN¹ membership. No longer. Merely to ask questions — in some circles, about some subjects — is now thought to be a grievous, violent thing, a situation even the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie has, it’s already obvious, done nothing to change. I want to be clear. While I reserve the right, as Shriver does, not to use the term cis to describe myself, I disagree with her when it comes to immigration, Brexit and (to a degree) the bulldozing of statues. But I do like to read her on these subjects, and not only because — ha! — she confirms me in my own rightness. In rooms everywhere — at publishers and newspapers, at our national broadcaster and in meetings where literary prizes are judged — a certain silence has fallen. If people such as her don’t make noise ___ (32) we’re going to end up in the kind of barbarous intellectual prison where bad jokes about sombreros are positively to be longed for.

noot 1 PEN: a worldwide association of writers that, among others acts as voice on behalf of writers who are harassed or worse for their views

guardian.com, 2022

‘“Drinking the Kool-Aid” is to accept dogmatic teachings without question’ (definition from Collins Dictionary)

De volgende drie fragmenten vormen samen alinea 4, maar staan niet in de juiste volgorde:

a And yet, were Shriver to make the same speech today, the furore would be 10 times as bad, a cycle that would begin with a baying mob on Twitter¹ and end with the Society of Authors issuing yet another of its feeble “please play nicely, children” statements.

b From mere folly to utter derangement in a mere six years. Well done, everyone!

c To read this speech now is unnerving. As she notes elsewhere, her words are mild, her tone almost jokey; at the time, no one would have cared about the sole audience member – yes, there was only one – who could not tolerate her heinous references to sombreros and dialects had a newspaper not picked up this woman’s indignant blog the next day.

from Unruly, A History of England’s Kings and Queens by David Mitchell

1. King Arthur

(1) He didn’t exist. That’s the headline. It’s a disappointing start, I know, but it’s an early sign of how tricky history can be. England’s (though more usually Britain’s, but often Wales’s and Cornwall’s, sometimes Brittany’s) most famous king turns out to be fictional. That’s putting it politely. Gandalf is fictional. King Arthur is a lie.

(2) Some people will still say he might have existed, but the sort of person they say he might have been is so far removed from King Arthur in any of the forms we understand him that it feels like they are saying, ‘Oh yeah, there was a real Superman except he didn’t have any actual superpowers and he dressed as a bat.’

(3) For the avoidance of doubt, and of a catastrophic collapse in readers’ confidence in the first chapter, let me make clear that I realize Batman also did not exist.

(4) Who do people say ‘the real’ King Arthur might have been? Perhaps a Roman officer who served in Britain, or a Romano-British chieftain, or a Welsh king — some senior figure who lived at any point from the third to the sixth century (the 200s to the 500s). Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl.

(5) Personally, I don’t think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees. What caused the Arthur pearl was the persistent longing of humans, of almost all eras and cultures, to hark back to something better. It’s a far more enduring psychological habit than a belief in progress. People found it much easier to believe in a rose-tinted view of the past than a utopian future. ___ (35): hence ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again.’

(6) For most of the period covered by this book, any claims or attempts by leaders to change or improve things are most persuasively labelled, to the people of the time, as restorations of some kind. Saying that something was totally new often played badly. The ultimate, most glorious restoration would be to the golden age of King Arthur.

(7) We get most of our sense of King Arthur from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who completed his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) in 1138, and from Sir Thomas Malory, whose fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur) was, in 1485, one of the first books to be printed in England. That gave the Arthur myth wider circulation. There’s now been so much talk about King Arthur over the centuries that many people feel, like they do with ghosts, that ‘there must be something in it.’ There is: it just happens to be deep-seated psychological need rather than historical reality.

(8) The story of Arthur reflects our longing, as a species, for the ancient, concealed and magical. Towards the end of Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory suggests the title ___ (38): ‘Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had gone by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and…many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus’ (Here lies Arthur, the once and future king).

‘Someone like…real bees.’ (last sentence paragraph 4 and first sentence of paragraph 5)

‘deep-seated psychological need’ (einde alinea 7)

Dear Editor: A new year is upon us. It’s a time when many of us self-evaluate and make new year’s resolutions.

Having grown cynical of the same self-centered resolution hodgepodge, stuck in a Groundhog Day movie, I saw the ghost of the new year’s future in Martin Luther King. And with a tad of self-righteousness, I now have a dream of easy resolutions we can all make to improve our world.

We can all be responsible social media users by researching the truth in our words before posting. Words can hurt people. Ignorance is not bliss. Purposeful ignorance is worse. It leads to rampant misinformation and closed minds. Stupidity soon follows.

Everyone should be less tolerant of intolerance. Intolerance is purposeful divisiveness. That leads to injustice. Remember, morality is hard to legislate, but behavior can always be moral.

Do something for others. Volunteer, practice sustainability, get the COVID vaccine, or the easiest, just commit random acts of kindness.

Is anything here too much to ask? At most it’s a gentle reminder of just doing the right thing.

Some, perhaps many, will decry this as woke. If this is woke, then being woke is for me.

Bill Walters
Fitchburg

captimes.com, 2022

De voornemens van Bill Walters zijn met drie kopjes samen te vatten.

Re “Under Scrutiny, Justices Adopt an Ethics Code” (Nov. 14):

In response to a public outcry, the Supreme Court has published a code of ethics. Unfortunately, this code presumably only looks forward rather than backward, and it doesn’t matter anyway, since there is no provision for investigation, and no prescription for penalties. No wonder Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were willing to sign on.

Several talking heads on the various news channels have given credit to the court for at least a good first step. The reality, however, is that there will not be any further steps, at least while Justices Alito and Thomas remain on the bench.

It’s as if the members of the court were saying to America: You forced us to adopt a code of ethics; here it is. We all know it’s worthless, but now just leave us alone.

Lawrence Levy, Los Angeles

For reasons beyond my understanding, this group of nine people who, in the course of their professions, parse and determine the exact intention of words, opted not to require adherence to their new ethics code, but rather to suggest that they should adhere to it.

I know I should pay my taxes. But if no one is going to check on whether I do or not, I might just decide, when I really, really need a vacation, that I’ll skip my taxes that year and use those funds instead to charter a private jet.

Shameful. Maybe they thought nobody would notice.

Cynthia Mowery, University Park, Md.

nytimes.com, 15 november 2023

‘No wonder Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were willing to sign on.’ (letter Lawrence Levy)

‘For reasons beyond my understanding’ (letter Cynthia Mowery)

Let op: lees eerst de opgave voordat je naar de tekst gaat.

How Jack Nicholson predicted the future of Hollywood

by Scott Campbell

(1) When Jack Nicholson first started making his way in the weird and wonderful world of cinema, the movement called ‘New Hollywood’, when the film director, rather than the studio, took on a key authorial role, hadn’t even started yet, but he would go on to become one of its biggest beneficiaries.

(2) After following in the footsteps of countless future legends by sitting under Roger Corman’s invaluable learning tree, Nicholson gained an understanding of the filmmaking process from multiple perspectives, which played a huge part in helping him navigate the constantly changing face of the industry.

(3) The film Easy Rider propelled him towards the mainstream, making Nicholson part of the unlikely leading men who would go on to define the 1970s. Once he sank his claws into the A-list, he refused to take them back out until he abandoned acting altogether on his own terms four decades later.

(4) He was one of the faces of a seismic shift at every level, but he didn’t lose a step when ‘New Hollywood’ ran its course. Instead, he emerged at the forefront of another trend that was soon to become commonplace, navigating a lucrative contract for himself that saw him take a lower salary in favour of back-end profits and merchandising royalties for playing the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman.

(5) Nicholson had an inkling that the blockbuster paradigm was about to change forever, and he made a conscious effort to put himself at the forefront of it, much like he’d once completely forsaken his screenwriting and directing aspirations when ‘New Hollywood’ let it be known he had a chance to make it to the very top as an actor.

(6) With that in mind, discovering that Nicholson predicted another massive shift in the landscape shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. Then again, he made his Nostradamus-like call in 1993 long before the internet was popularised, and well prior to the explosion of gossip websites, social media, and the rampant rumour-mongering celebrities have to contend with in the age of 24-hour news cycles that couldn’t care less about the moral pitfalls of sensationalism and misinformation.

(7) “These days, everyone wants to be in the know about the movie business,” he seethed to Utah based paper Deseret. “It’s amazing how resonant the smallest piece of insider gossip is.” Lo and behold, fast forward 30 years, and his proclamation continues to grow more relevant and prescient with each passing year.

(8) In the modern age, it can often feel as though folks are more interested in behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt and salacious speculation than the films themselves, and they’ve got the perfect conduit to indulge those interests via smartphone or computer. Anyone with a keyboard can be a critic, anyone with an internet connection can relay their opinion, and a lot of people pass themselves off as being a great deal more studious about celluloid than they actually are.

(9) Needless to say, Nicholson called that one, too. “People who are far removed from the moviemaking scene, you’d think they were as knowledgeable as legendary producer and studio executive Darryl Zanuck the way they talk,” he suggested. “The entrepreneur/impresario in me has always felt that it’s been a long, big mistake getting the public involved at this level of knowing how much a film cost and who’s doing what.”

(10) Not that he could have guessed in the early ‘90s, but he was spot-on once again. Thanks to the level of access everybody has to either world-famous names or high-profile productions — again, with social media at the forefront — it can be genuinely damaging to a movie’s reputation to arrive in cinemas carrying bad buzz, which affects not only the production’s bottom line but often those of the actors involved.

(11) Films can get trashed for costing too much money, actors can be placed in the crosshairs of cancel culture, the personal lives of A-listers are under a constant state of scrutiny, campaigns and petitions spring up with reckless abandon to try and force change that isn’t going to come, none of which were things Nicholson had to content with during his legendary career.

(12) And yet, he saw it coming long before his retirement, albeit on an incrementally smaller scale. Skip to the present day, and virtually everything he was wary of has come to pass.

faroutmagazine.co.uk, 28 juli 2024

‘Skip to the present day, and virtually everything he was wary of has come to pass.’ (alinea 12)