I can’t guarantee this is an official comeback, or a weekly comeback, or anything of the sort, but it’s good to have a place for thoughts that have no other home, so here’s that space.
I’ve written in here previously about the flattening of culture, and in the Bay Area, I joke that every closed business will eventually just become a place selling expensive candles and rich people blankets, and every closed restaurant will come back another fusion place no one asked for hocking $25 lunches.
It’s all a little flat, isn’t it? And we’re listless and bored.
I watched Under the Silver Lake last night (I am writing this Monday morning; this will go out Sunday) and was transfixed by it, and after reading some articles about it, and I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s an undercurrent of listlessness and boredom in the movie that propels the plot along. Of wanting there to be hidden meanings and obscure glimpses into a sort of occult world. After all, that’s what propels along conspiracy theories, both in the movie and in real life. But isn’t there more?
I also, oddly, think of The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief album, which was remarkable for something: the B-side had two grooves, interwoven, where if the needle fell in a different place, you heard an entirely different album.
This is something rendered obsolete by the CD — which at least had the backwards track to find, which was something my friends and I relished in high school, that hidden snippet of a song or skit or anything else that you needed the rewind to hear. But it’s also rendered obsolete by streaming of music, which even replaced the MP3 player for being selective with the music experience. Now it’s everything all the time, and there’s so much to listen to that it’s hard to just buckle in for one album. We often know artists by snippets of songs, and maybe that’s good, because there are certainly artists who are better on a by-song basis, which honestly until the 1960s was how it went — LPs were stuffed with filler.
But there’s now no longer that sort of animated magic of discovery. Just a firehose of information blasting at us.
Our movies are frenetic IP, with some outstanding examples that squeak through. But at this point the Marvel machines are pumping to where they all feel ugly. The snippets I see are uninteresting because at times it’s just characters standing in a CGI hallway meeting their end. (I fell off with those movies rather quickly after seeing the mess that was Infinity War, an overstuffed action figure battle.)
A movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once survives by playing the game a little bit and subverting it. It’s an action movie, it’s a trauma movie, it’s a superhero movie, it’s science fiction, and it’s all bundled up in a tremendously affecting way. But you also have the success of Cocaine Bear showing that maybe people want things that are different, and this is the best they can offer. (To be clear: I want to see cocaine bear, because I love B-to-Z grade movies, and it is a B-movie plot with an A-movie budget.)
But Cocaine Bear is also a product of meme and viral culture, in a lot of ways, the other thing that motivates people on to watch mediocre Hulu or Netflix productions, often with stories so fresh that they can’t even be considered leftovers — they’re cooling before going into the fridge because the firehose is on but you need the little mark to get something produced or noticed.
And maybe the refuge is horror, which pushes forward with inventiveness, but was Barbarian good or was it different? Is a mark of good currently just being different and cohesive enough? Plenty of movies that aren’t IP feel charming and flat. A promising story doesn’t feel like it’s really doing anything new. It, like a superhero movie, feels like it needs to hit the notes for a streaming audience. A documentary needs to come out to serve the content gods, but I’m not sure the Miss Cleo documentary I watched a couple months back really stood out to me as needing to exist, just kind of pushing along the need for An HBO Documentary without really examining anything.
We are bored because there isn’t any mystery to discover anymore, and we are served pablum. We need UAPs because we need there to be something different but it’s a narrative that serves the alphabet agencies and the DoD to string along instead of just saying “Yeah it’s a balloon or a drone or whatever else.” And I mean, they’re never going to be aliens, but maybe we can get an ultraterrestrial. John Keel and Jacques Vallee would/will be proud. (I am not endorsing any of this. Stray thoughts =/= endorsements.) But why does every single person circling around the UAP mysteries seem like a limited hangout? Maybe it’s because all our narratives are the limited hangout, and we need the narrative to not be bored.
It’s all content though, isn’t it? Not stories. Content. Everyone jockeying with the same material, empty newsroom desks really just symbolizing that the days of having something nuanced to say are gone, because there’s too much of a traffic gambit in that. Gotta be flatter. Save the weird stuff for your Substack. There is no Awl anymore to feed your stray thoughts to, and at best, you might build out a thread on The Hell Site, where the Blood Emerald Heir metes out arbitrary rules and unrestrained ego, fire anyone who tries to check it. Seems like everyone is getting fired these days. The headlines are all the same, the body text interchangable. It’s not really stories or reports. It’s content. Out of the factory. Enjoy the content.
I’m not sure I have a real point here, so much as some thoughts, but anyway, maybe you’re happy to get this weird distant station rebroadcasting, however fleetingly. Or maybe you’re not mad, you’re just disappointed at how long it’s been.
So it goes.
This seems adjacent to a lot of the "Re-enchantment is resistance" stuff around Hookland: https://twitter.com/spaceweather9/status/1632041694685192193
https://mstdn.social/tags/Hookland
It also seems to overlap with Elizabeth Goodstein's work on boredom as a phenomenon of modernity (I'm friends with her brother). Basically, my understanding is, "boredom" as a concept - what you're identifying here as "flatness" - is a product of modernity, which also gave us the concept of "leisure time" or just the concept of time being useful or used at all. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1400
Her book title, _Experience Without Qualities_, seems related to what you're getting at here, although she's specifically modern and you seem to be post-post-modern. Roots of the boredom discourse in mechanization of experience.