Going on thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece titled “Beat on the Brat” for the Village Voice, in which I discussed Peter Pan Syndrome, hipster parents, and the collapse of the dominant marketing strategy of postwar consumer society: the generation gap. The published version spared NQWR riders over a thousand words of tangential doom and gloom on facile popular entertainment. My target was the X-Men film franchise, which has since been supplanted by the world-conquering Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of the more frightening refinements of industrialized spectacle.
My unoriginal take was that the X-Men films traded violence for “action” — a combination of acrobatics and melodrama — in a bid to capture the widest audience. Lately, the unyielding success of superhero super-spectacles has urged a number of dominant voices, within and around the industry, to bemoan this outcome. In 2015, Simon Pegg summarized the broad strokes for the Radio Times:
“Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection: gritty, amoral art movies. Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle, and everything changed.
Part of me looks at society as it is now and thinks we’ve been infantilized by our own taste. We’re essentially all consuming very childish things: comic books, superheroes… Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!”
In the years since my Voice piece ran, a volley of academic and aggrieved essays have been filed on the infantilization of popular culture. The overall concern is the “dumbing down” of storytelling, which is ultimately a marketing strategy. Any business strategy that increases profits is going to be copied, and when it generates the kind of revenue the Avengers films have for the last decade, said strategy will dictate every aspect of the gestation and production of a film. This tension is now so ingrained in Hollywood — and the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself — that Captain America’s swear jar became the comedic through line of Age of Ultron.
There’s also a completely unnecessary scene in Ultron where Thor steps on some LEGO bricks and kicks them under a couch. This can only be interpreted as a shot at The LEGO Movie, which had just launched its own MCU-styled spate of films. The LEGO Movie is a long-coming inversion of the Star Wars phenomenon Pegg invoked, in that it markets toys via film, versus the other way round. This was common practice for cartoons (Transformers, G.I. Joe), but the marketing saturation with, say, LEGO Batman was so brutally efficient, even kids felt carsick, and stayed away. This contributed to a spectacular downturn in LEGO’s fortunes, heavy layoffs, and a CEO death spiral.
X-Men 2 urged my first thoughts about violence versus action. In the opening, Nightcrawler (and a lot of still-solid CGI) kicks the shit out of the President’s security detail, flipping them around the room with his tail and transporting them in and out of space and time and onto the floor in a pile. The scene is balletic, but torturous in its sterility. There is no blood. The physics are pointedly unreal. When gunshots are heard, they’re muffled and clearly misdirected, used to underscore near-comic chaos and tension, rather than the prospect of people dying. In the end, the only character struck by a bullet is Nightcrawler, who is a mutant. Taken outside the context of the X-Men, mutants are superheros, so there is no real violence against a human in this scene. Humans bump into each other, fall down, and groan.
Wolverine’s battle with Lady Deathstrike is what really got me thinking, as it’s the only truly violent moment in X-Men 2. An earlier scene with Pyro, during which Logan is shot in the head — after our fifth reminder that he has an indestructible “adamantium” skeleton just under the skin — is basically an after school special about the responsible use of mutant superpowers. The Deathstrike fight goes past wire harness augmentation and gets in close: she draws actual blood from Wolverine with a succession of clawed strikes, and rather than die, or collapse, he starts…coming down with the flu (this is repeated in and forms the basis of Logan, which I reviewed here). The topper is that in order to actually kill his opponent, Wolverine has to inject her with non-threatening magic purple goo, which in an appeal to visual flair, drips out of her mouth and eyes like Play-Doh pasta.
Superhero films are anodyne, cynical spectacles of the Debord kind, but I’m fairly certain Game of Thrones has been the dominant mass culture fixation for the last five years. While I’ve never watched it, I’m assured it is at points extremely salacious and graphically violent. I’m currently enjoying Fleabag on Netflix, which deserves a place in the lineage of raunchy adult dramas. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t watched any of Apatow’s stoner bro comedies or Bridesmaids with my parents.
What I think people are upset about, ultimately, is a feedback loop: the overwhelming attention paid to profitability in the attention age. The sympathetic magnetism of all actors in the creative, promotional, and critical spheres today is so well orchestrated, effective and transparent as to engender revulsion. This is why we have fads: some people are wired to suggest, others to interpret, others to follow. That process takes time and investment, which are anathema to marketers, who must ensure consumers are freed up from unprofitable attachments to the past. Fad culture is choked out like the weed/virus it is, by the Monsanto-fertilized blue-green front lawn of mainstream entertainment. We see it across all mediums, and it’s nothing new.
Pegg is right that at one point in the past, we cheered and dollar-voted for raw fare like Taxi Driver, but it’s no accident that we demanded darker entertainment during the Vietnam War and Watergate, America’s closest brush with civil war in a century. This held true in the amoral, spendthrift 1980s: one of the major generation gap alarms I’ve heard is the unaccommodating reappraisal of Ferris from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as a repellent white privilege avatar. Each generation gets the pop culture it demands, and repudiates the preceding one as unsophisticated and unkind.
The differentiator in the digital age is an uptick in corporate agility: the speed and specificity with which they are able to react to early warnings of shifts in consumer sentiment. In my early teens there was a sitcom called Out of this World, which ran from 1987 — the pinnacle of the “day glo” ‘80s — to 1991. A forerunner of the much more successful Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Out of this World is about a teenage girl whose father is a space alien, imbuing her with some of his special powers. In a later episode, she is given tickets to see the Cure, and flips out, proclaiming they are her favorite band. This, as far as I know, is the first time the Cure were mentioned on an American sitcom. I saw it, because I had a crush on Maureen Flannigan (later of Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde; witness that fit 🤤). Ten years later, the Cure released an improbably great ballad called “Out of this World,” so good luck trying to uncover a clip of the episode.
My point is that it took ten years for the Cure to become a sitcom proxy for cool, yet their first single from 1979 was featured on the 1980 soundtrack for Times Square. Historically, “art” or “indie” films are where you would push boundaries and pledge allegiance to new expressions of self, community, etc. I’m thinking of Penelope Spheeris, Alex Cox, the Coen brothers, and Jim Jarmusch’s arch trilogy Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law and Mystery Train: the best ‘80s indies reified the cultural bravery that inspired them. The fatuous mumblecore imitations of these films, and of the halcyon Miramax-led ‘90s — mid90s, Booksmart, Eighth Grade — return me to the early 2000s, when in many respects the last subversive, ugly, unsettling films were made (Monster, Bully, Thirteen, etc.).
Streaming could be the dominant mode for this sort of expression, but for the moment, the economics are upside-down, and so they continue to swing for the fences every time out, hoping to find global traction in the age of FOMO TV. If there was a Golden Age of Television, I don’t know how you’d frame that, because the only measurable change is the onset of social media in the mid-2000s. FOMO TV began with Lost, exploded during the first season of True Detective, and today is so pervasive in its peer-pressure to participate — to pay attention — that the only sensible choice is to turn away. I could be missing the best stories ever filmed, but the cost of having something artificially in-common with people I haven’t screened for compatible moral, political and aesthetic vantages compels me to step back. Awareness of these shows has become a component in getting ahead, in life and in your career; this is openly discussed in corporate “networking” training, and fucked-up self-improvement cults like Toastmasters International.
While that last point is a bit Groucho re: clubs and ordering behavior, there’s a line in Robert Altman’s The Player that gets nearer to embodying my suspicion and cynicism. It’s an aside between two Hollywood executives.
Larry Levy: I'll be there right after my AA meeting.
Griffin Mill: (condescending) Oh Larry, I didn't realize you had a drinking problem.
Larry Levy: Well…I don't really, but, that's where all the deals are being made these days.