Life — July 21, 1921 — page 12: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Hymn of Hate" by Dorothy Parker This page presents Parker's satirical poem attacking Hollywood cinema of the era. The poem mocks: **The industry's pretensions**: Expensive productions charging high ticket prices ($3) while delivering poor quality and contrived plots. **Formulaic filmmaking**: Scripts that interrupt dramatic moments with scene changes to exotic locations (Hong Kong, storm clouds) whenever tension builds—a common editing technique to maintain audience interest. **Production absurdities**: Vast resources spent on casting entire California populations for battle scenes, yet the result still showcases bad taste and predictable storytelling. **The "News of the Week" segment**: A filler feature with deliberately bland content ("no news is good news"), meant to pad the program. The two cartoons below use visual humor to mock outdated ideas: a grandfather losing control of a motorized wheelchair, and a fishing scene referencing Isaac Walton's classical fishing theories applied absurdly to modern situations.