We Don't Really Need To Live In Our Own Individual TRUMAN SHOWS...
and EVERYTHING does NOT need to be turned into "content"!
For the first 125 years of the movie business, cultural relevancy was something that you couldn’t program for; you could only occasionally get lucky and fall into it. Back then, EVERYONE knew it took too long to develop the material — not to mention to also produce and market it — to actually think you could aim for the zeitgeist. The gulf between thought and expression was wider than anyone’s egos spanned, or at least production and release schedules helped keep the narcism a wee bit in check.
But those days are now dead. Dead dead dead. Just add water and yesterday’s news is now tomorrow’s content. Zeitgeist is now spelled c-u-r-r-e-n-t and has the simple taste of recent vintage. The sparkle and fizzle have sizzled away. Every scandal, every headline, every business, everything we experience ends up on a screen seemingly with a year of its initial occurrence. You may only live once, but you get to experience it over and over until you can’t tell whether you lived it or watched it — because you did both, and in quick succession too. We are all now each inside of our own private The Truman Show. No fun.
Don’t get me wrong. It could be worse.
Back when projects took five years or more to develop, greenlights were determined on the past success of the director, stars, and genre. Such practices worked as walls to keep the underrepresented from entering the castle of creation regardless of what side of the camera they aspired to. “Comps” for the most part were a barrier to entry. Instead, favoring cultural relevancy invites a wide range of perspectives to enter the conversation.
Yet, let’s not confuse the need to have diverse stories, stars, creators and executives, with the notion that everything that ever was, deserves their own fresh take. Our creative output should continually be raising the bar in terms of whether it actually elevates or alters the cultural (or social or political) conversation in some intriguing way, and is not just stuffing the pipes with more of the same crap. But we keep picking door #2 instead.
What we make could actually elevate the conversation on virtually every movie. And eventually will. Particularly now that we have recognized that cultural relevancy is a competitive advantage if not an outright business necessity. But let’s end this era of instantaneous cultural reproduction in its infancy please — because it could ruin things before we get started with the real work. Or are you all just dying to see the new film about Google Plus? I can’t wait. I hope they do a clothing tie-in.
Perhaps it is a symptom of what we will later recognize as part of The Great IP War. Since the global companies committed to peak content production are not going to actually invest the time & labor necessary to market what they make, the only way they see to make folks aware of the shit they are selling is to push what they already know on to them yet again. Once you’ve grabbed every remake that might be relevant to a new generation, mine the bookshelves for something that sounds familiar. Exhausted that supply too? What’s next? How about board games? Done that? Try on every crime, scam, cult, and bloodletting that happened in your lifetime or the one before that. Still hungry? Tales of enterprise or celebrity! It’s not just an app, but have you seen the movie on how it was built? You loved their song or how they looked in hip hugging bell bottoms, so you are sure to love their life story condensed to 100 minutes or perhaps six episodes. Mind if we squeeze in two more so we can increase our production fees? Thanks!
Maybe it is the elevation of social media as our favorite pasttime. In 2021, Americans averaged 1300 hours of social media time. That’s about 3.5 hours a day I believe. THEY say television is our top activity, but they also say that we average 3.1hours of that, so go figure. Even I don’t spend that much time watching movies on the average! Maybe it’s that the same folks who decided everything we think, eat, wear, or witness is worthy of broadcast, but that’s what happened with social media. And once we started accepting that, I guess the execs decided to a star and a production budget made that same stuff worthy of being a show or film. But really? Can't We Get THEM To Stop?
Isn’t it a bit like conspicuous consumption? We have enough. Why do we want more? Other than solving for cultural relevancy I honestly can’t think of why we need most of what we make. We have a wonderful history of cinema. I get it. We call it an empathy machine but the shoes of the other we asked everyone to walk in for the first 125 years have been that of white heterosexual western men of a good looking and able bodied disposition generally speaking. So can’t we expand the menu and elevate the food at the same time? Wouldn’t that be better than serving the same thing only in a different wrapper?
We stoke the fires, but we are doing it only because we can. It is neither a need or even a want. Resist. We can do better.
Yesterday, I didn’t send anything to your inbox, but I did post. I am planning on doing more of that so I don’t overwhelm you with all I have to say. My usual Monday Morning Musings, although evidently quite popular as direct to inbox newsletter, I am going to try as an online only this next week. If you want to read it, you’ll know where to find it — but it won’t be in your inbox.
Read yesterday’s online only post on The NEW Name For What We Are All Engaged In.
Sid Vicious died in February of 1979. If you were following the incendiary rise of the Sex Pistols, as I was, brilliantly engineered by Malcolm McLaren, and based on Situationist International theory, you might have picked up their 2nd 45 single “God Save The Queen” in May of 1977. Or perhaps, after being bombarded by constant tabloid stories and photos of this new enfante terrible band of outsiders seeking and provoking anarchy on British soil, you got on their bullet train by purchasing their first LP, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols upon release in October 1977? I mean, how could any young self respecting music fan not take a risk for $7.99 and at least check out this new Punk sound? The point here is, McLaren, an independent outsider and thinker, knew how to surgically manipulate peek interest with the media tools barely at his disposal into something that one month earlier was unknown to John Q. Public. But, the key difference here is that he wasn’t selling bullshit. The Pistols were the real deal, and delivered a visual, Sonic, cultural, and political spectacle (like a great film) beyond anyone’s wildest imagination for a brief one and a half years until they imploded in San Francisco in January 1978. Any contemporary film distributor that hasn’t studied the story of McLaren and his application of Situationist International theory, in order to apply modern tools in marketing their own occasionally great films, is doing their films they release (and the public) a great disservice. But back to the point of your post... The movie of the tumultuous Sex Pistols saga, Sid & Nancy, directed by Alex Cox, was released in theaters in November 1986. This was not even six years after Nancy Spungen’s and Sid Vicious’s tragic deaths, after Sid’s quixotic solo career played out in the tabloids uninterrupted from the riveting Pistols adventure and their tumultuous break up date. So, the point is, if you had followed the story and music closely, as they were intertwined, seeing the movie in the theater six years later, felt, at least to me, like I was experiencing a story that I already knew. This was a strange and new feeling. In theory, I was the perfect audience for this story, yet, as I tried to get lost in the cinema, I couldn’t get past the Actors playing these roles, and the costumes, and the storytelling, which had no new twists and turns or revelations that would be new to me or anyone who paid attention in real time. Part of the magic of great cinema is not knowing where the film will take you. So unfortunately, for me, a knowledgeable fan of the story, I was not able to connect. I walked away thinking that nonfiction stories are like fine wine, they need time to ferment and deepen, and that this Pistols tale was way too soon to re-create on film. I felt this way about Sid and Nancy for the next thirty something years until I watched it again recently with my teen son, Kember, with fresh eyes and distance. And with this distance and passage of time, it was like watching a totally new film. I loved it. I loved everything about it. Everything that had gotten in the way from knowing the story previously was relegated to distant memory and now the entire production looked and sounded perfect. Sid and Nancy, in fact, may be the last great biopic, a genre that I loved, and at its best, was wildly inventive (Raging Bull and Lenny are both biopics) but has gotten so dumb-downed, that it’s almost impossible to care about who the corporations have chosen to profile next. So, I agree with Ted, insta-movies, one year later from the real life stories people have fresh in their consciousness, are just lazy cynical bad ideas.
Amen to this quote of yours: "Particularly now that we have recognized that cultural relevancy is a competitive advantage if not an outright business necessity."
Have the gatekeepers and the Kings of the FKATFB have realized this? I guess it's how you define cultural relevancy. We seem to get a lot of what David Foster Wallace referred to as "Infinite Jest," which the audience is all too ready to consume.
I think the recent Noah Baumbach film, "White Noise" nailed it as all the "White" noise that is diverting our attention from the looming "Black" cloud of death that we should be paying attention to: whether that's global warming, inequality, mental health, etc -- or our own limited time on this planet. The downers of our own destruction aren't good for business; hence, more TikTok.
So how do you rise above all the noise, be culturally relevant in your work, and also be heard? ... Ah, there's the rub.
Thank you for your post!