I was attempting to watch TV with Britney the other day when something went wrong. I don’t even remember what it was. Though if I had to guess it was probably Paramount+ running a pre-roll ad for Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies while we were trying to watch the Covid season of Bar Rescue and we were both annoyed at the constant rehashing of intellectual properties better left alone and the obstacle of having to watch an ad for said IP rehash. Like a fat cat dropping a dead Birdie on your television. Anyway— as whatever it was went wrong I blurted out “We live in such a weird hell!”
I guess an ad for a bad TV show isn’t exactly hell the same way war or eternal damnation is, but it’s bad enough to warrant an outburst. The mental aftertaste of that moment –the feeling that far outlived the half-remembered event itself-- is feeling myself get older. That first twinge in the back of my brain that says all this shit used to be better. It is the first step on the dead-end road to nostalgia. The base insistence that you just happened to live at a cultural zenith which has since passed. There’s no room for curiosity with that sort of thinking.
The worst thing about writing for a long time is that you can watch your mind change. No one should have to cringe that much. Personal growth isn’t worth it. Over a decade ago I wrote against a Kurt Anderson piece in Vanity Fair about culture stalling out in the 90s. Then, a 25-year-old-me wrote, “To Anderson, we have only changed the methods of producing cultural objects, ‘not how they look and feel and sound, not what they are.’ Anderson is ignoring the new prosumptive capacities enabled by technology that define the cultural style of the 21st century.” I regret everyone I hurt by using the word “prosumptive” but my cause was just: culture hadn’t stalled, it had moved to different sectors of the economy where production and consumption of media was much closer together. At the time this felt genuinely new and I think that’s what I was trying to express but no one I was talking to at the time seemed to expect it would get so old so fast.
For example, the season 7 premier of The Office is a “Lip Dub.” A performative meme that had been popular with graduating high school and college seniors where lots of people take turns lip synching a song in one continuous shot. The more bombastic the better. YouTube was only a few years old and going viral was still something that seemed like harmless fun. Writer Danny Chun had been watching them and thought “What I’d love to see is one that’s kind of full of mistakes.” Five shots and $50,000 later and NBC had done something very weird: they’d taken a very popular show—which was already operating under the conceit of a mockumentary—and reproduced a thing that had to date been done exclusively by amateurs on the internet. Three layers of contrivances felt disturbingly like reality.
This is all media now. I guess Frederic Jameson called this turn toward pastiche and collage “postmodernism” but we don’t have to bring him into this. You know it better, more instinctually, as trash television: is a series of elaborate contrivances that eventually lead you back to a sense of uncanny reality. We are entertained, ostensibly, by the recontextualization of old characters, the representation of the mundane by the wealthy and famous, and the sense of recognition that comes with media representation.
Walter Benjamin said that, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving [the] masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” Now, am I saying The Office season 7 lip dub is fascist? No, but that would be really fucking funny. For now let’s just say we’re on a long road to a really weird place.