Encounterculture

Yes, I Am Going To Ramble Like An Lefty Emotard

I am starting to wonder if pop culture has run its course. There's a lot of shit that came with the baggage of the elevation of low culture in the mid/late 70s, but at the heart of it was something truly special: the unparalelled access it permitted to those wishing to participate. This wasn't Beatnik culture (where you allegedly had to have talent) or the Hippie culture (where you allegedly had to believe in shit); this was pure mercantile culture, where anyone could participate as long as they had the green. Crass? Of course. But that same kind of crassness was what drew people to the movies of the 30s and early 40s, widely recognized as the golden moment in American cinema: the only requirement to partake in the genius of artistic forces like Preston Sturges or Frank Capra or Cary Grant or Jean Arthur was the ability to plunk down the money for the ticket.

Before you say it: no, this isn't Yet Another Dirge Against The Percieved Lack Of Artistry In The World Today. Frankly, I tend to think that people who say that aren't paying attention; in the movie world alone, you've got the prodigious talents of people like Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh and Michael Haneke and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and about nine hundred other directors ALONE that I could probably roll out. If anything, we've got a talent glut: too many talented artists making too many things to consume.

And therein lies the problem: we've reached the point where we can't keep moving forward without letting the old stuff die. In his introduction to Paolo Cherchi Usai's The Death of Cinema, Martin Scorsese notes two rarely-mentioned facts: one, that as recently as 1999, a half-billion hours of film were produced around the world, and two, that all of the restoration being done to classic films is inevitably for shit, since the chemical process that drives filmmaking inevitably breaks down. There simply isn't *anyone* in the world with the resources to encounter that much text - neither time nor money can permit it.

Pop culture, therefore, has lost its democratic side and is making rapid strides towards oligopoly. Unless you make a concerted effort to develop a taste in a certain aspect of pop culture, access to it is limited. My favorite movie of the year thus far is 11'09''01, and yet I only saw it because I'm such a giant dork that I bought a DVD player with region-free capabilities and imported the DVD from England. (It will, however, be opening domestically this fall in a few cities.) That's a pretty long way to have to go in order to gain access to a movie, and it's far from the only example I could cite. I would hardly expect, let alone ask, anyone else to go to the same lengths.

It's easy to argue here that the consumer base just got lazy, or that the studios grew bloated, or whatever. The problem with these characterizations, of course, is that they're inherently moral; in the context of the American consumer culture (which is the only one that I'm even remotely qualified to talk about), "laziness" runs perpendicular to the ingrained Protestant work ethic, and "bloated" implies a former ideal which simply never existed (you think they didn't have the equivalent of Renny Harlin in the 30s?). And given that if there's a lesson to be learned from the last fifty years, it's that there cannot be a consistent morality, critiquing things on that basis just seems like solipsism. Fun? Sure. Therapeutic? Of course. Productive? Not in the least.

We need to find a new common ground on which to approach pop culture. It's not like it's going to go away; pop culture exists to front people a sense of belonging, and given the increasingly aggressive self-serving mercantile nature of the world, that's not a need that people are going to ignore. I suppose that we could just recalibrate the common ground on which we approach pop culture; it's easy to make a political connection between the way we engage pop culture and the way we engage our own lives, and it seems like a fruitful exercise to use the one to change the other.

But ultimately, that's a zero-sum exercise; the search for meaning and catalysis has, thus far, led us to a point where we're creating more than we can consume and abandoning more than we know. Historically, the solution to this problem is to abandon that form of cultural expression (ask today's court jesters). But look around; look carefully. Is pop culture still adequately representing the world you live in? It does mine, and judging by the revenues generated from movies and music sales (not to mention the proliferation of file sharing, which is probably the single biggest democratic act in culture consumption in a good long while). It's not the culture itself that's breaking down, it's the model of consumption.

The question for culture activists, then, is one of how you change the model, and for that you need to study culture consumption instead of just the culture. The only constants we really have left are biological; aside from the fact that we all eat, sleep, and secrete, what goes for me doesn't go for you. How, then, do you change the model?

I would argue that one great way to start would be to drop the bedamned auteur theory (aka the methodology by which we read a text as the product of an author). I can't say that it always seemed retarded to make grand sweeping statements about an author's "intentions" or "meanings" - after all, looking for answers in cultural texts is the reason why we have texts to begin with - but the older I get, the more futile it seems to do that. The only way you can ever really discern an author's intent is to read interviews with the author - in other words, to avoid the work you're trying to characterize. And even then you've got to be very very careful, because authors have been known to be less than reliable at times when it comes to claiming authorship (viz. Welles, Orson).

But indulge me; try a specious little experiment for a second, and attempt to apply the auteur theory to science. Richard Feynman, for instance, was an enormously charismatic individual who made enormous contributions to science. Yet is he the author of that science? Would it exist if not for him - that is to say, are the impulses behind his discoveries predicated on his existence? I wouldn't say so. Science is the continued study of forces outside our control - just like the needs pop culture fills. So ask yourself the same about pop culture - can you trace all the ennui in the early 60s back to L'avventura?

The function of auteurist criticism is to recognize people especially skilled at recording the world as it is, not at continuing the evolution of the medium used to record. That function, of course, is better fuelled by abstraction, something auteurism is dangerously good at explaining away - since you're explaining the entire text in humanist terms anyway, can't you just end the discussion by saying "it's part of his schtick" or something? But that doesn't actually *say* anything at all about the medium or about how we consume it, only about how you interacted with the text. Fuck all that. Preston Sturges had a schtick, yes, and it's enormously fun. But it moved the medium of film forward because it was inexorably tied to the medium's properties; it wasn't just about presenting information, it was presenting information in a new way (the wild intuitive leaps, the faster-than-Capra dialogue, etc.). Just like Bowie's various characters did for music (setting the table nicely for the innovations of the Talking Heads and Marilyn Manson, among others), or Vermeer's colors did for painting. You can apply an auteurist model to any of their works, but it just doesn't hold up outside of the context of your own perspective.

It also seems to me like a shift has been occurring toward the medium-intensive artists in recent years anyway. I yield to nobody in my love for Michael Bay (well, at least as far as The Rock and Bad Boys 2 go), but I'll be the first to admit that he's damn near substanceless as far as content goes. Close to the only things made available as reactive agents are devices of the medium - big-ass booming explosions, gracefully choreographed fight scenes fractured by editing, things of that sort that you can't get from anywhere else. And yet he's given millions and millions of dollars to make movies, because they make money - meaning that there's a market for that kind of thing. People like form because there's meaning and pleasure to be found there.

I'm not saying that we should only evaluate things literally; I recognize that I enjoy it because I'm a giant weirdo, and that most people would be just as happy watching whatever's at the megaplex as I would be to pay a kajillion dollars to see the new Wong Kar-Wai movie a day early. Old methods aren't irrelevant. But if we don't start pushing media, soon they'll be outstripped. I want to be a movie critic more than anything in the world, and it's not so that I can impress friends or dazzle crowds of chicks at parties. I want to be a critic because I think movies have meaning, just like I'm sure that Nate considers music to have meaning or Brendan does with literature. Many people, of course, will think quite the opposite. But the point isn't to benefit everyone; most people these days can't speak for themselves, let alone everyone. The point is to push the medium and sustain its vitality. Just because culture is bigger than yourself doesn't mean that you can lapse in your duty to kick it in the ass if you think it's necessary.