Commenter Hermetic Seal writes:
As someone who started college in the mid-2000s, a big part of my experience was how all of my communal activities, and the entertainment I was into, moved from shared cultural experiences, to subcultural ones. I think a lot of that emerged naturally, or subconsciously, in reaction to the jarring experiences of Gen Y’s coming of age you illustrate here.
The “hipster” subculture which I was into back then can be retroactively identified as a reaction to what was happening. At least at first, it consisted entirely of Gen Y and older constructing a mishmash identity out of fashions, music, books, and so on from times past. You probably wouldn’t really have an 80s punk in skinny jeans reading mid-century lit-fic and watching French new wave films and working as a barista, and this sort of thing got roundly criticized, but it was all a product of reacting to the culture that had dumped Gen Y in the trash, desperately grasping for something real and authentic in the midst of an ever-fakening culture. Organic sandwich shops, craft chocolate, weird experimental music; these disparate hipster lifestyle markers were a reaction to something that the mainstream didn’t know, or just didn’t care, was happening. But now I think we’re sufficiently distant from the hipster movement to actually analyze it in the proper context and identify it as a Gen Y existential crisis.
More specifically, this also reflect a connected but distinct phenomenon of shared cultural experiences being sliced into subcultural ones. I had shared experiences with people who like the same Japanese indie bands, or watched Battlestar Galactica or played Dragon Quest games, but the average person had no familiarity with those things. While if it had been the 90s, I’d be talking about last week’s X-Files episode with various different types of people. My shared experiences were shared with an ever-shrinking spectrum of peers. The very last time I was “into” something with a mass market appeal would probably be LOST.
And meanwhile, the older entertainment things I was into – like Star Wars – left *me* and morphed into something unrecognizable from the 90s when I bought Micro Machines and Action Fleet toys, played Dark Forces and Rebel Assault, and had the Essential Guide To Vehicles And Vessels on my bookcase. My very identity as some sort of nerd was under assault, and culturally strip-mined by soulless gigacorporations for money. Nothing highlighted this better than the proliferation of the execrable Big Bang Theory sitcom, which turned being a nerd into an acceptable, marketable lifestyle brand.
Now in my mid-30s I’m an absolute cultural exile. When I’m at my Orthodox parish I’m around people with a very similar outlook and interests; but outside the Church, my interests and entire way of looking at the world is utterly alien to the mainstream and I live in blissful, near-total ignorance of popular music, movies, social media stars, and so on. To be honest, I don’t really miss pop culture or being able to listen to the radio and not immediately be seized by the desire to vomit, but I can also recognize that a hyper-atomized culture where nobody shares anything in common with those who aren’t exactly like them… is a deeply unhealthy culture on the verge of collapse.
Part of that is probably my natural gravitation towards things outside the mainstream, but I think the ongoing division of culture into subculture, both as a reaction to the mainstream and a natural effect of isolating technologies like the Internet, played a massive role as well.
My comment:
The odd phenomenon of once-niche properties going mainstream while scenes splintered along ever-narrower lines is an underexplored aspect of Current Year culture.
As Hermetic Seal alluded to, back in the 90s at any given high school on any given Monday, the latest X-Files episode would be the talk of the chess club and the baseball team. Yet getting caught by the jocks with a comic book would get you stuffed in a locker. Now movies based on rehashed versions of those comics are all anyone is allowed to talk about.
Author JD Cowan follows up with …
This is similar to how I felt about the non-popularity of Scott Pilgrim. It felt like the things I loved growing up were being hoarded away and repackaged as a diluted brand, divorced from its original intention. It was the first instance of pop eating itself in a way that irritated me, because it felt like it was intentionally taking things meant for everyone and making it into a secret club locked away from the wider world. Even now, anyone who raves about the property raves about things that normal people do not connect with, or things stolen from other properties. It always rubbed me wrong, and still does to this day.
As someone who has always liked art and entertainment, and has never been a pro-clique person, I’ve really detested the way the things I love were turned into a makeshift religion for vapid people. The nostalgia movement that never seems to die does both a disservice to these old things as well as the concept of nostalgia itself. It’s all so tiring.
There is a way out of the nostalgia trap.
Let me show you the way.
I understand why people like Scott Pilgrim and still hold in high esteem. It is very well made, too. Art style is unique.
But I loathe everything about it. Every attitude it fostered, every trend it started, every person who sees it as their whole Ryan Gosling identity, every hackneyed joke and stock character, and every way it devalued pop culture into memberberries that broke everything off from a wider culture for its personal selfish hedonism. Sure it is more indicative of a wider trend a bunch of hipsters created to give them identity, but it is the summation of every thing I hated about the 2000s that made it so much worse than the decades before it. The obsession with taking things from the wider culture, what is meant to connect us, and then breaking them off at the branch, and then skinsuiting it into your entire identity, was epitomized in this property from this very era.
Until it is looked back at with as much mockery as Nu Metal and ’90s bubblegum pop is, nothing is going to change, because the attitude that allowed it to exist and thrive in the first place is still around. It is what is holding everything back from actually moving on or advancing to anything meaningful.
Again, it isn’t even that it started the trend, but it most definitely epitomized and defined it.
J.D.
I saw it but I never understood the movie’s appeal. I remember the esthetics but I was underwhelmed. I dunno if it’s because of my cultural background, interests or some other factor but it’s never resonated with me.
xavier
One of the things I really appreciate about the discussion community around here is that I get alternate perspectives on stuff like Scott Pilgrim, which make perfect sense, yet which I never picked up on myself and never heard mentioned anywhere else.
I feel like these kinds of discussions really help me sharpen my perception of where the culture’s been and where it’s going – and help me think critically about entertainment, which has a surprising degree of concrete value considering that I have to be responsible for parsing what my kids watch, read, listen to, etc.