Turn on, tune in, feel nothing. Has pop culture finally eaten itself? Charles Shaar Murray reports
‘Bloodbath,” whispers the voice on the phone from Manhattan. “It’s a killing field out there. And they’re dropping like flies.”
Not junkies, crackheads, gangstas in the projects; not Aids sufferers; not even Ethiopian immigrants who’ve fallen foul of the New York Police Department’s trigger-happy cops.
It’s the United States TV season’s crop of new shows. The single exception has already been rewarded by a United Kingdom sale to Channel 5: a Jerry Bruckheimer production called CSI, focusing on a police medical examiner’s team and summarised by my informant as “Quincy with sex”. Every other televisual debutant has been pulled off the air within weeks of its launch.
To make matters worse for the programmers, this is a cross-genre phenomenon. Cop shows, sitcoms, whatever: everything’s going down the same dumper. No one’s interested in any of it. Not even Big Apple, a show starring the estimable Michael Madsen as a mafioso Sopranos Lite, anyone? can withstand this particular attack of Bad Numbers.
Why? Have the US networks lost touch with their audiences so profoundly that they’re collectively unable to come up with a single new concept in which any significant number of viewers is interested?
Is viewer apathy the cultural equivalent of voter apathy? More to the point, is what we see reflected in the mirror of popular culture a representation of who we really are these days, or just an image of who they think we are, or require us to be?
Riddle me this, therefore: if you were an extraterrestrial, stranded on Earth and urgently requiring a crash course in the contemporary realities of your unwillingly acquired new home, would you pile up a whole bunch of TVs and try to watch them all at once?
That was the option selected about 25 years ago by Thomas Jerome Newton, the character portrayed by David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Not surprisingly, Newton ended up in a foetal position, shrieking: “Get out of my mind!”
Less than a decade later Adrian Veidt aka Oxymandias, the superhero-turned-ber-capitalist in Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen adopted a similar technique, to understand the world per se, so much as to manipulate it more effectively.
Firing up his bank of screens (“random channel change every 100 seconds”), he then proceeds with his instant cultural diagnosis: “First impressions: oiled muscleman with machine gun … cut to pastel bears, Valentine hearts. Juxtaposition of wish-fulfilment violence and infantile imagery, desire to regress, be free of responsibility … this all says ‘war’. We should buy accordingly.”
Those were more innocent times. Both Roeg’s Newton and Moore’s Veidt operated in eras when it was legitimate to assume that TV and film, music and literature offered some authentic reflection of the collective consciousness. The notion that culture was a two-way process far more profound than the contemporary faux interactivity of simply hitting a button to select a pop video from a menu or choosing the week’s evictee from the Big Brother house.
And though the last thing the world needs is yet another deconstruction of Big Brother or The Weakest Link, the fact remains that both shows encourage the viewer to identify with the predator or with those members of the herd who are quickest to scent blood: to scratch-mix the metaphor, the first to chuck the runt of the litter off the back of the sleigh in order to slow down the pursuing wolf-pack.
If this truly represents a valid metaphor for the current state of our collective psyche, then we’re in much deeper trouble than we thought. When existence is reduced to mere survival, then culture the arena in which we most profoundly explore who we are and the world in which we live is pruned back to mere diversion.
We’ve heard a lot of talk about the “dumbing down” of our culture. Or let’s make that our “cultures” high and low, classical and pop, bourgeois and proletarian and the relationships between them. These used to be healthy, productive, mutually beneficial: when high or bourgeois culture became too airless and rarefied, popular culture could reinvigorate it with a blast of energy.
When popular culture fell victim to lumpen stodginess, inquisitive souls would raise its game by importing ideas and devices from the classics, the avant-garde and the world outside the Anglophone consensus.
The energy level of pop culture is at an all-time low (except in Japan, where movies and comics long ago blasted into warp space), but there’s no excuse for those whom Will Self has felicitously dubbed the “lumpen bourgeoisie” to feel smug, either.
The news from the galleries, theatres, concert halls and literary novels is no better. And it isn’t just the intellectual temperature that is dropping so rapidly: the emotional temperature is in a similar and linked free fall. Dumbing down substitution of cliches for ideas isn’t nearly as much of a problem as numbing down restriction of feeling, contraction of our collective emotional bandwidth.
At the movies, Pearl Harbor follows Titanic as avatar of the equal-opportunity schlockbuster, combining the principal tenets of “men’s rubbish” (plenty explosions, mucho carnage) and “women’s rubbish” (pretty stars, soppy romance).
In my teens I never wanted the 1960s to end. Everywhere you looked, new energies political, social, cultural were exploding, barriers were falling and what Patti Smith called the “sea of possibilities” seemed to stretch to the farthest horizon.
Now, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair blabbering on about the need for schoolkids to study business and entrepreneurship in the future while the arts are forced to retreat to the fringes of the curriculum, what seems more and more apparent is the extent to which we are living through the 21st year of the 1980s, with no immediate end in sight.
We’ve succeeded in ditching some of the era’s more embarrassing cultural and fashion tics (except during their periodic “ironic” revivals), but the philosophy of the bottom line still rules. It’s easy to laugh at braying stockbrokers awash in champagne and gimlet-eyed accountants downsizing everything that moves, but just because they’ve discovered feng shui and organic food doesn’t mean they’re not still calling the same old shots.
The results are visible, audible and legible everywhere: pop, TV, the movies, book and periodical publishing. We have a culture that feeds only on itself and its own waste products. The creative equivalent of BSE.
“I think maybe Mr Newton has had enough,” comments Rip Torn as Bowie gives up the ghost over his final gin and tonic.
I think, in many ways, a lot of us have.