Thursday, July 23, 2009
Schlock and Awe
I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday and found myself agreeing with everything he said in his sometimes heavy handed "New Rules" segment.
He jeered at the absurdity of calling Sarah Palin - a person whose prominence in the news media, and presence in the political playground are tantamount to absurdity - a renegade. This has nothing to do with partisan politics because I cannot pigeonhole myself as either left or right wing. But it's hard to respect a party which revels in, and plays to the worst traits of the American people: ignorance, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, Christian fundamentalism, and this illusion that Jimbob the hick will some day be as rich as Bill Gates, when they would be lucky if they could end up like Lenny "Nails" Dykstra? It's hard to comprehend how they can deadpan their stance on small-government conservatism when Bush-era Republicans left America at its most Orwellian. Yet now they bellow freedom from big government as if they are in leather jackets and fatigues. And as for Sarah Palin, it's hard to take anyone so anti-intellectual and unprofessional seriously. She spent a portion of her time in office bantering with a 19 hear old punk, and a late night comedian. This is someone who dreams of some day dealing with world leaders? I digress.
Back to Bill Maher. He had the fortitude to do what almost nobody in the mainstream media would and to make off colour jokes about Michael Jackson. He lamented the media's obsession with Michael Jackson's death coverage, and that they are holding him in such high regard. I myself haven't watched much of the American news networks all month, because every time I've tuned in, I've seen seemingly serious journalists with headlines beneath them reading "BREAKING NEWS: Michael Jackson's Gardener Speaks Out!"
What resonated with me the most was his juxtaposition of America and Michael Jackson, namely its childish nature. He said what's been sitting at the tip of my tongue and fingers for a long time.
"Childish: Well we think Harry Potter is literature and Batman movies are profound meditations on the human condition... And 64% of the people believe that Noah's Ark actually happened."
Indeed, indeed. I have complained about The Dark Shite taking itself too seriously on here before, and hate sounding like a broken record. However, I am disturbed by how much and how many people take it seriously. They call it deep and dark, but it is a film about a man parading around in a bat costume thwarting the plans of a nihilistic clown goth. There isn't much substance to it, though it would have people believe there is by featuring a suffocating amount of incomprehensible violence and an antagonist which cannot be contained and become harder to contain with every effort to stop them. It was only an excuse to increase the amount of action sequences and sensationalism to the movie. It all paved room for explosions, shootouts, fist fights, and Patrick Bateman gliding around with bat wings. The ham-handed "experiment" served no true purpose but to highlight the film's climax. A difficult feat, since the whole movie was a climax. As well, it had the subtlty and complexity of a Play-do penis sculpture.
I did enjoy the Burton Batman films, but I never thought of them as being true to life, or anything close to that. I enjoyed them for their surrealism and whimsical humour. There was a theme of loneliness and duality in it which I appreciated, but the movies are mostly popcorn entertainment.
Harry Potter's a successful franchise, but Transformers 2 is a successful movie. Success does not equal greatness. I won't say that the Harry Potter franchise is pure dreck the way Michael Bay's Transformer movies are, but the books are purely for entertainment. Yet there are people who believe in the books with religious fervour. I reckon they were written to be read with the amount of focus required when reading in an airplane, beach, or (for those who do it) in the bathroom. That's fine. But it annoys me when I talk to people, grown ups, normally women, and they say, "Oh I read Harry Potter." It's entertainment, not literature. And of course now, there's Twilight, which doesn't even have the redeeming qualities of the Harry Potter series.
The Harry Potter series at least has lore, a diverse amount of characters, an epic battle between good and evil *yawn*, and characters coming of age. Twilight is about po-faced vampires staring into each other's eyes.
Being for children or people of all ages does not necessarily equal nonsense. Let me be clear about that. I do enjoy a healthy amount of children's fiction. Roald Dahl still cracks me up, and The Brothers Grimm fairy tales are earl gray tea for my soul. I enjoy the Pixar animated movies, and I to this day watch Looney Tunes, and Tex Avery cartoons. Some things for children, I dare say are actually more mature and substantial than their counterparts for adults.
Not too long ago, my eyes tangled up in this article which was printed in The Cornell Daily Sun. More of my thoughts were covered.
...[T]here have been some astonishing literary phenomena in recent years that probably represent the largest shared experiences of reading in history. The obvious example is the Harry Potter series, which has sold over 400 million copies in 67 languages. More recently, the Twilight books have gotten a boost from the related movie and are now seen in every teenage girl's hands. And the seemingly unending hubbub over faux-memoirs and the accountability of authors would seem to suggest that people still care deeply about literature.But the literature under consideration is of a deeply impoverished sort. Harry Potter and Twilight are good for a quick thrill and an occasional, broad-stroked lesson, but there's no comparison to true art. At the risk of sounding too high-brow (and my hesitation indicates the extent to which cultural elitism has been discredited), the majority of what people read today is schlock. There's something to be said for the pleasure of reading Tom Clancy or Dan Brown, I suppose, but their prevalence pushes aside the great authors.
...
And so we find ourselves in a cultural desert. People read, but they don't read what's valuable; or they read what's valuable, but they just skim the surface. In what is either an indignant protest or an attempt at compensation, our best writers produce long, complex tomes like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or Roberto Bolanos 2666. And now, there's barely even a place left to complain about it: book reviews have been sequestered to the Web, which, quite clearly, is not the ideal place for patient, reasoned criticism.
My sentiments exactly. People are too content with not being challenged, or thinking too deeply about anything. Entertainment comes in the form of comfort food. Light reads which are entertaining at face value and nothing else. That's why in my store, the 80% of the magazine racks stock pedestrian fluff. Muscle magazines, hip hop, rock, and soft core porno mags like Maxim for the guys. Gossip, sex guide, fashion, and interior design Magazines for women. Teeny Bopper Magazines with of all the hot teen actors and actresses vomited all over their covers for the young ones. There's only one rack in my store which has the magazines for geeks. The magazines covering politics, skepticism, science, history, business, art. The books people buy are usually of the James Patterson, John Grisham, Janet Evanovich, Danielle Steel variety.
I love my pure schlock too. Mostly with movies, I will watch some of the trashiest b-movies for pure entertainment purposes. I'll watch the dumb comedies, and I'll watch some of the fluffy movies if I just don't feel like thinking. But there's more to life than that. Most people only fill their minds with the drivel. They read to decompress. Which is fair. Most people wind up letting their lives suck the life out of them. They spend all day working, they come home to worry about finances, they deal with interpersonal bullshit. So when they finally get access to spare time, it's spent getting away from the mundane by embracing the slightly less mundane.
Wallace Stevens once said, "In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination." That's true, but it seems to be the case that in prolonged consciousness the imagination eventually vacates the mind. This forces the definitions of consciousness and extraordinary actuality to go down a slippery slope.
Though it has been argued that imagination is a form of intelligence, the diminish of imagination has little to do with the hoi polloi's fear of depth, and childish attitude toward reading material, and even toward film. It just seems that the social conscience and intelligence of western civilization has been stunted in terms of depth. It reflects in people being less reflective, and in them being a lot more self-absorbed, and ignorant of the fact that there is a world outside of their own.
Well I went on for longer than planned. I think now is a good time for me to just pull my hands away from this keyboard.
See everyone in hell!
