You Say You Want a Devolution?

[Bu🤠ns]

Sometimes I get to thinking about how often the media seems to be obsessed with the past lately.   I was specifically wondering what the deal is with all these movie remakes, lately.

Then my old man sends me this:

For most of the last century, America's cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

Why? Well....

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it's an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we're experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we're maxed out.

Is that it, do you think?  Do you think that our toys are just getting more awesome with all of these technological, social,  even sexual interconnections that it's taking precedent over the old?  Are old movies being remade simply because it's actually possible now to make them BIGGER and Better than they were? Are things like Autotune and George Lucas' recent faux pas indicators of this cultural perspective?

It concludes:

We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation. I've been a big believer in historical pendulum swings—American sociopolitical cycles that tend to last, according to historians, about 30 years. So maybe we are coming to the end of this cultural era of the Same Old Same Old. As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.

I dunno, folks, what do you think?

[LMNO]

I'm of the mind that the baby boomers are now CEOs of entertainment companies, and want to go back to the way things used to be.

As an example:

[Kai]

So, what happens when the baby boomers are all gone? Are we going to repeat the cycle because /we/ all heard the same songs in our childhoods because they were played through the 70s, 80s and 90s?

[LMNO]

It's worse than that.

It will be ALL SILVERCHAIR, ALL THE TIME.

[AFK]

[Cramulus]

Here's my hypothesis:

I think it's a consequence of increased globalization.

Let's look at movies, for example -- ironically, the larger the movie industry gets, the harder it is for it to change. We're in a sort of youtube renaissance, there's an incredible amount of creativity on display right now, but those cats aren't getting jobs at big production houses. So I don't think we're in a cultural loop, I think the industries that facilitate our culture are stuck in a loop.

There's so much money in the movie industry! You can't just pitch a good idea and get it produced, there has to be a lot of market research behind it. Focus groups (and humans in general) will respond better to something they recognize (something with a lot of mental associations and other baggage) than something novel.

ARE we stuck?

Another way of looking at it is that the CURRENT fashion is re-appropriation. Maybe in retrospect, this will be the period where we crystallized and refined the cultural myths and icons and currents of every era that came before us, before we move onto something new.

[Cramulus]

And part of me wonders if we're in the middle of creating something like the Italian Commedia dell'arte.

Here is a rich cultural tradition that basically emerged from people riffing on each other's stories and jokes, repeatedly recontexutalizing things until the truth comes out.

Each of the characters of the commedia represents some guy that everybody knows - the stingy merchant, the pedant, the lecherous old man. In the old days, you might put on one of these masks and walk around the street, hamming it up with other people in masks. The lecherous old man passes the innocent little girl and he pretends to pinch her ass and everybody laughs.

The characters of the Commedia are collaborative efforts - everybody that puts on the mask of Dottore Gratiano (the pedant from Bologna) brings his own experiences into the character. They're just playing, but they're talking about Italy.


The reason I bring this up -------

Batman's been around forever, and has existed in a variety of tones, themes, and mediums. It seems like every time we see Batman in a new incarnation, it's telling us something about our world.

At the end of the Clinton Era, we got Joel Shumacher's Batman and Robin, the campy one with Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. The villains were over the top, slapstick. Contrast that with the recent Dark Knight incarnation of Batman -- which is clearly "Batman in a post 9-11 world." Things are gritty, the villains are more complex, and there's no clear heroic path to victory. It got so popular (in part) because it expresses something that we're all feeling.

On a lighter note, you've got Adult Swim. For a while, Adult Swim was only producing remixes of old Hannah Barbara properties, all with the same idea - you take characters that only exist in a dramatic narrative, and put them in mundane everyday situations. That was the exact concept of Sealab 2021, Harvey Birdman, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, etc. (This is my favorite expression of that concept).

So I think that while the IMAGES we're seeing are repeating themselves, the MEANING of those images is changing... we're not static, we're revisiting these things and seeing them from a different angle, a different context. That's the style we're in right now.

[Pæs]

I really like that comparison to Commedia dell'arte and agree with the rest of that post.
Don't have much else to add at the moment, though.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

I'm of the mind that the baby boomers are now CEOs of entertainment companies, and want to go back to the way things used to be.

Frank Zappa explains this perfectly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GowCEiZkU70

[Telarus]

Nice one Cram. Chewing on those thoughts now....

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

So, what happens when the baby boomers are all gone? Are we going to repeat the cycle because /we/ all heard the same songs in our childhoods because they were played through the 70s, 80s and 90s?

I would doubt it. I don't know about the rest of the roundabouts my age folks but I'm still as itchingly gotta find some new shit to read/listen to/get charged with, as I ever was. But then I think a large number of our lifestyle choices may be determined not so much by our wishes as by what layers of the landfill are ripe for scavenging that week.

[Cramulus]

from #discord-----

Cram   Whenever I ask an artist what "period" of art we're in, they usually give some answer along the lines of reappropriation
Cram   youtube mashups, remixes, collage, internet as art ... that's where we're at
and in that light, the repeat-cycle of contemporary cinema makes a little more sense (to me at least)
Cram   I wonder if -- if you were in Venice in 1700 watching ANOTHER punch-and-judy style puppet play, if you'd be like "GODDD, why can't we italians come up with anything original?"
Cram   but centuries later, it looks like this nuanced artistic tradition which was slowly built over time by repeating successes
Cram   ---and referencing things that people recognized in a slightly more relevant way than the guy who came before

Burns   LOL
Burns   commedia del'arte is like the rennaissance's Family Guy

[Telarus]

 

[EK WAFFLR]

from #discord-----

Cram   Whenever I ask an artist what "period" of art we're in, they usually give some answer along the lines of reappropriation
Cram   youtube mashups, remixes, collage, internet as art ... that's where we're at
and in that light, the repeat-cycle of contemporary cinema makes a little more sense (to me at least)
Cram   I wonder if -- if you were in Venice in 1700 watching ANOTHER punch-and-judy style puppet play, if you'd be like "GODDD, why can't we italians come up with anything original?"
Cram   but centuries later, it looks like this nuanced artistic tradition which was slowly built over time by repeating successes
Cram   ---and referencing things that people recognized in a slightly more relevant way than the guy who came before

Burns   LOL
Burns   commedia del'arte is like the rennaissance's Family Guy

HAHAHAHAHA.