The scourge of science fiction/fantasy/horror franchises and geek culture?

[Pharpetron]

Quote Originally Posted by Professor Nobody

As for the degree to which it's farcical nonsense, agree to disagree. For my part, it's an idea. By people. About our condition. That does nothing to alter it (as nothing can). Spending your life railing about it in the International Journal of Existentialism for Horror Afficionados: Online will do nothing to change that condition. It might be a fundamental truth verifiable through of all our first personal experience in a Husserlian epoche, but that doesn't mean it's anything other than Keeping up with the Kardashians for intellectuals.

You seem to think that I'm sitting at my computer red-faced and seething with philosophical fury as I read and respond to your posts on a forum dedicated to aficionados of pulp fiction. I'm actually just sitting in the sun enjoying the day. I'm not actually railing about ecstatic temporality or the 'soul'. I'm actually just stating my opinion on the matter.

Quote Originally Posted by Professor Nobody

[S]he might be more authentic by virtue of recognizing that her pastimes are just that, while you cling to the sense of your position.

Are our pastimes really "just that", mere exercises in passing the time? When my 13 year-old niece sits down and watches Keeping Up With The Kardashians does she experience it as mere farcical nonsense, or does she take it seriously in some way? I get the feeling that she and a large number of people who watch it take it quite seriously. For them, it doesn't simply serve as a purely empty spectacle that helps alleviate the tediousness of the passage of time, it serves all sorts of quite serious existential functions. It provides a kind of education in many different things. It teaches my niece certain norms of desire. Fully, sexy lips are desirable. Expensive dresses and meals at fancy restaurants are glamorous and desirable. It teaches her that life is about having full, sexy lips, expensive dresses, and expensive meals at expensive restaurants. It teaches her to envy and admire those who have full, sexy lips, expensive dresses, and expensive meals at expensive restaurants.
It teaches her what it is to be a female, what it is to be a male, what love is, what matters in life, and countless other thing as well. This is all pretty serious stuff, quite far from mere 'farcical nonsense'.

There's even a very serious dimension to seeing everything as 'farcical nonsense' and as mere entertainment to pass the time. You're concerned enough about your existence that you've spent time thinking about it and have come to the existentially serious conclusion that everything is just 'farcical nonsense'. This concern about your existence and this concern to know the meaning of your existence is more than a mere concern to pass the time. Instead of merely attempting to pass the time that you are, you try to understand the time that you are. My niece seeks to understand and care for herself by means of the education provided by Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Inasmuch as taking the pedagogical programme of Keeping Up With The Kardashians seriously can lead to enormous amounts of misery, the show deserves to be taken seriously. I don't find anorexia, bulimia, depression, anxiety, self-hatred for not having full, sexy lips, or self-hatred for not being rich or famous, to be farcical or nonsensical. I don't think human suffering is a joke.

Do you ever feel depressed or sad or anxious, Professor Nobody? If you do, then you yourself aren't in a position to declare that "none of it matters, really." If you truly experienced everything as truly insignificant you would feel no dread or sadness in the face of things. At the most basic, personal level, things always matter. The theoretical you can scream "nothing matters" all you want, yet the non-theoretical person that you are, will always disagree, and you will always be haunted, at the level of your nervous system, by your real self's sense that your being and the being of others really do matter. You suggested in your last post that my failure to experience everything as "farcical nonsense" was a sign of inauthenticity. I'd suggest that your failure to notice that you yourself, in your daily non-theoretical living of your life, are always experiencing things as more than simple "farcical nonsense", and I'd suggest that this failure is itself a form of inauthenticity.

Quote Originally Posted by Professor Nobody

I...suspect we're rather more alike than different-- though that may breed the fiercest of animosities, of course.

I share your suspicion, Professor Nobody.

[Justin Isis]

The idea of “cultural elitism” is usually what maintains the status quo and prevents anything interesting from being made. The narrative usually goes something like:

“There’s really no difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, or if there is, the idea of this distinction itself is a symptom of cultural elitism and ingrained class hierarchies of taste."

But this narrative is itself so firmly embedded in capitalism by this point that it functions as a kind of soporific, allowing people to feel good about consuming the media that is marketed to them most aggressively. 

To give an example, I spent a large part of my childhood enjoying everything from Transformers cartoons to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Which was fine, since I was a small child with no critical faculties - but if an adult seriously spoke to me about the artistic merits of He-Man cartoons, I’d consider him/her mentally defective, in the same way as if he expected his parents to keep buying his clothes. But now franchises intended for children are marketed to adult audiences to capitalize on nostalgia value, and I think there comes a point where you have to recognize that your childhood was in large part constructed by media conglomerates, and that most of this content is fairly worthless on an artistic level. “Anti-elitism” is itself part of the recuperation program of capitalism, in that it diverts attention to childish power fantasies and product placement-filled marketing schemes allegedly based on “reality” - in fact nothing could be less real than the filmed, edited and constructed situations we see on television. Corporate film studios and book publishers have impoverished our culture by reducing expression to a series of formulas, and “anti-elitists” have supported them the whole way. But the real elites in our society ARE these corporate entities. 

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I mostly agree with that but I don't think it's crazy to talk about the artistic aspects of trashy cartoons or whatever (or recalling some genuinely good jokes from average sitcoms). Most of them are a real slog to watch but there's still flashes of real imagination and humour in some of them because sadly a lot of very talented people fall into a career of contributing to these formulaic stories. That's what most of the great comic artists have spent their lives doing unfortunately. That's a big part of my argument against franchises and this sort of capitalism. I want artists to be able to push themselves consistently and not need to fall back on making a living in someone else's tunnel.

I'd say a huge amount of my inspiration came from the gems embedded in deeply flawed comics, cartoons, toys, videogames, films etc.
There's quite a number of artists who get most of their inspiration and style from "cultural detritus" and build it all into something more satisfying than most of the things they were inspired by. I think it's unfair to dismiss the "detritus" just because someone taken the best parts and improved on it.

But my mother still buys my clothes because the idea of spending money on clothes never enters my brain.

[Justin Isis]

It's not crazy to talk about the artistic aspects, but the problem is that there's no longer any balance whatsoever and as such it no longer makes sense to talk about "trash culture” as any kind of cultural detritus - what we’re actually talking about is a monolithic mainstream culture that wields a near total hegemony. Collapsing distinctions and Bourdieu-style critiques made sense 30 or 40 years ago, but we now live in the dominion of the detritus, and something like the New Yorker running a think piece on the politics of Iron Man is no longer any kind of subversive gesture, it’s just normal. At the same time, other forms of expression have been marginalised to the fringes of academia or even historical interest - it’d be one thing if people liked reading Marvel comics and playing with toys as an adjunct to appreciating a wide range of things, but they don’t. As James Sucellus said in an earlier post, next to no one reads ANYTHING anymore, much less Beckett, much less outside of some kind of academic context which treats it as an object of study instead of something living to be engaged with. As for the “cultural capital” of “tastemakers” - the last thing they want is to be perceived as elitist, which means they play right into the status quo. 

A widespread ignorance of art history and any kind of expanded possibility for expression eventually means that people are no longer able to think or feel in certain ways, which reinforces their limited tastes, which reinforces their inability to think or feel in certain ways.

Relevant installments of Harlan Ellison's Watching on the (former) Sci-Fi Channel. Sorry for dumping so many videos in one post, in advance.

Harlan Ellisons Watching 55 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 61 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 52 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 44 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 32 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 19 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 17 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 13 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 8 - YouTube

Harlan Ellisons Watching 5 - YouTube

[symbolique]

nil

An excellent track by Dälek about the commercialization (and bastardization) of hip-hop music; a social commentary, in my opinion, on par with N. W. A.'s "#### tha Police."

Dalek Culture for Dollars - YouTube

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Justin- Great post. I hear those complaints a lot, I'm not saying it's not true but it's odd how a lot of commentators also talk about how people have more specialist knowledge on a wider variety of subjects than ever.
Is it just that arts/culture maniacs are learning more but everyone else is narrowing?

I thought reading books was on the increase? Not in the context of decades but is it not more than the 90s at least? Is there any up to date reliable stats on this?

It would be odd and sad if there was a general decline in reading and cultural variety because we have more opportunity now with the internet and I think basic level literacy is higher than ever because phones and computers have made it more of a necessity.

Nirvana In Karma- I recently checked up on those non-English authors from episode 13 and I think most of them still hadn't had any translations since then.

I used to love trading cards and lots of mini monster toys that were traded and collected in a similar way. The idea still excites me but at the same time I don't think I can support the concept because of the money and time involved.

Those superhero cards made the characters/stories seem more exciting than they really were. For me, a perfect example of trashy stuff that could be turned into something wonderful is foil, embossed, chromium and hologram art.

On the question of the state of franchises under socialism--a question which could be applied to artistic expression in general--this 1884 lecture given to the Leicester Secular Society by William Morris may provide some insight.

William Morris - Art and Socialism

This stuff is even a problem with public domain works. I hate how the Cthulhu Mythos seems to be taking over the small press of dark supernatural fiction. I'm always too timid to submit anything anyway, but I see it as a direct corollary of the modern obsession with franchises and shared universes as the ultimate in storytelling.

Continuity is the most overrated commodity in popular thought. The sexists reacting to the new Ghostbusters annoyed me less than those throwing a hissy fit because this film wasn't set in the same continuity as the prior film they liked. The obsession with continuity means people only think of works relating to one another on the most superficial level possible.

My real life has terrible continuity. I am in no way living in the same reality I was 10 years ago.