American culture sucks right now. The culture is starving for new things, and all major cultural outlets are pumping out sequels and reboots, and even "new" things are banking on nostalgia for engagement. Things are so dire that Taylor Swift is a corporation more than a human being, who, as a victim of her own success, now exists merely to please her rabid fanbase and cannot afford to progress as an artist or explore new facets of creativity (Blank Space by W David Marx).
We went to see Project Hail Mary in the theaters two weeks ago, and while it's a nice, crowd-pleasing scifi movie, there was nothing new or noteworthy in it. Crystalline spaceships aren't even a novelty--The Expanse has them, and Megan E O'Keefe's Devoured Worlds trilogy both feature them. Worse, Andy Weir went on a podcast and straight-up said that he likes Star Trek for the shooty-shooty and hates it when fiction writing--including his own!--has an agenda or message. Of course, he apologized to the Star Trek people, but he certainly damaged my opinion of him and his work. Also, as an aside, Star Trek fans are generally gross and have been egregiously misinterpreting their favorite show for decades.
My own position on Star Trek is that it's a nostalgia trap that, like everything else, is being put through the Hollywood Meat Processor in order to squeeze every last bit of juice from long-rotting offal well beyond its expiry date. To be fair to Trek, however, this is not a problem exclusive to Trek; Wars has fared even worse, Scream is the latest craze, and even that heretofore cancelled Bebop copycat that everyone on the planet seems to love is being fed into ChatGPT for a resurrection attempt. Also, while we're here, shoutout to Adam Sandler for Happy Gilmore 2! Who the fuck asked for that?
If you read my end-of-the-year Best Of list, you know I'm not watching any of that shit. The real question to ask, though, is:
How did it get so bad?
This was a relatively slow process that occurred over a few decades and across media. Marx, in Blank Space, mostly covers music and fashion, singling out Pharrell Williams, the villain who infected the planet with "Happy," a pernicious anthem that every human on Earth listened to on repeat for about a year and drove me literally insane with its repetitive and THX-1138-inspired lyric (Because I'm happy! Clap along if you feel the beat!--The robot police brandish cattle prods: >He's not clapping along. >Dial up the emotional controls...say, to 40. >Roger...39....40. >>Deafening tinnitus, clapping).
Here's a bit about what happened to film and the Internet:
It is my belief that The Matrix 1999 was the last truly great Hollywood film. It wasn't based on anything, and it was loaded with interesting ideas inherited from other sources, such as Ghost in the Shell and Serial Experiments Lain. It had two sequels of diminishing quality, but it was a riveting hybrid of storytelling, ideas, and visual spectacle. It succeeded on every level.
But then, not long after that, when I was in college, the ground shifted. It started with Spider-Man and The Hulk. There were Star Wars sequels that were atrocious, but George Lucas hadn't yet sold his soul to Big Mouse. That would come a bit later.
I regard the annihilation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe as a pivotal moment, when the power of engagement with a property shifted from fans to corporations. The SWEU was a largely fan-driven project, whose only real guidelines were continuity. When Disney acquired it, they would set the terms of engagement, while at the same time engaging in all sorts of happytalk about "respecting the fans" or whatever, turning Lucas's darling into nothing more than a toy commercial. It's now even worse than what people said about Power Rangers or 80s-90s mecha anime being toy commercials, because the stories have no emotional stakes, there's an incredible oversaturation of associated media, and Disney exploits cute characters (BB-8, Grogu) to a degree that I have no qualms dubbing pornographic. For a useful comparison, watch K-Pop Demon Hunters and The Mandalorean back to back.
And I've said nothing about Marvel. Disney owns that, too. Everything I've said about Star Wars is true about Marvel, and I have even less respect for it.
As such, this trend has exacerbated, to the point where competing studios are trying to establish their own Cinematic Universe, with multimedia properties across streaming and theaters. Warner Bros even tried it with The Matrix 4, but Lana Wachowski heroically gave WB a suicide bomb of a film that made it almost impossible (hopefully!--jury's still out on this) to turn into franchise slop. Some are successful, many are not. But they still try, and the consequence of these trends--and I haven't even said a single word about corporate mergers and acquisitions (wait, yes, Disney, but also Amazon-MGM)!--is that
Hollywood films have no sauce.
Andy Weir said that fictional stories shouldn't have messages. That's a perfect film adaptation for Jeff "Pull the Harris Endorsement" Bezos's Amazon-MGM! Eat sparkly cotton candy for 2h40m--there's that Amazon smile on your face!
We are going to take a quick detour into video games for a second to discuss The Outer Worlds 2, which I haven't played, but PCGamer's discussion of its "toothless" politics is relevant here. While it criticizes capitalism, it is being produced by a large corporation that is both complicit in genocide and itself is devouring Activision-Blizzard. Brown writes:
None of this is evident in the silly, toothless satire presented by The Outer Worlds 2. There's no fury, there's barely even any cutting remarks. Instead, Auntie's Choice is comically villainous, completely detached from the real corporations that should be serving as its inspiration. Instead of tapping into something true, Obsidian gives us villains who are so removed from reality that they actually serve to soften the actions of their real-world counterparts.
Sure, it sucks that Microsoft is punishing workers for its own greed and bad business decisions, but hey, at least it isn't running horrific experiments on soldiers. It's just selling the US military AR devices to make soldiers better at killing! Microsoft is one of the good ones, guys.
There's a very good chance that if you're reading this, you're from a country that's currently dealing with the return of everyone's favourite baddies, the fascists. Here in the UK, we're stripping rights and dignity from our country's most vulnerable people, and the fastest-growing political party is a radical right wing outfit that loves to talk about cultural purity and how there are too many Black people on television. And in the US you've got Donald Trump.
This is the kind of bullshit we are getting in major studio media."Hey, capitalism and genocide are bad, but don't forget to Be Happy."
The Internet - Influencer Culture
A major point that Marx makes in his book is that, somehow, after Pearl Jam heroically refused to sell out and become famous, selling out became cool. Every middle schooler knows the refrain, "Mr Beast, gimme some monay!" The end goal of nearly all content created on the Internet--especially Youtube--is to make it big and get picked up for a rapturous contract. It is a big, brutal lottery where everyone wants a rich patron's attention.
As such, the opinions expressed by content creators are largely those that are amenable to corporate sponsors. This means, invariably, that they also have no sauce.
A Culture Devoid of Meaning
Our country has been ruled by a demagogue and his sycophants for a decade, boosted by a sham religion. All of the aristocrats that control our culture suppress our outrage. No one is making anything that meets the needs of the people because everything we see on our screens is stripped of meaning. Meaning is risk, and Jeff "Buy More and Be Happy" Bezos can't afford risk. The risk part is probably the impetus behind the rush to endlessly regurgitate expired meat, but it is also true that the fans demand it because nostalgia is as addictive as it is poisonous.
The culture is starving for new things. We need art with meaning, that challenges us to think in new ways, that inspires us to slough off this dying king and his lackeys, and rejoin the world stage.
