Story saturation and fatigue: a new limit to pop culture?

Cafe Society
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This post is related to, and probably redundant with respect to, this post of mine:

Stories are hard, so movies are hard (to do well)

Feel free to tell me if it’s just me. Maybe it is. But I’m kind of sick of stories. You know, those untrue concoctions we “enjoy” in the movie theater, on the flat screen TV, and via the written word.

Let me just throw some random stuff out there:

• MAS*H is on TV for like 12 years, over 5x the length of the actual conflict that serves as its setting (the Korean War).

• Serial killers! Novels! Dexter! Endless shit! There have now been more stories written about serial killers than actual serial killers that have existed. I’m not even joking.

• Right now there is some idiot show on the Disney Channel my daughter is watching about some sort of spy family. This is like second- or third-generation story substance. You had actual spies, then that filtered through first-gen writers like Ian Fleming, then those tropes regurgitated as conventions, then those conventions regurgitated as the stupidest and most banal cliches.

• Game of Thrones. Genre cruft. Oooooh, characters! Characters to love, characters to hate!

Humans have a tendency to assume that the future will be like the past. But the fact of the matter is that, in terms of pop culture, even the youngest of us has been living through quite a unique time. Even if you started watching TV in the 90s or 00s, TV was still pretty new. Decent special effects were quite new. Respectable CGI was being developed right in front of your face. Recorded music and movies haven’t been around that long.

The background assumption for the past 50 years, I would say, is that we’re all so hungry for entertainment, hungry for stories, hungry for outstanding presentations, great acting, clever plots, maybe some full frontal in an R-rated flick, all that jazz. And we’re just going to keep collectively churning it out as a society, climbing ever higher, producing and consuming more more more story!

But what if that assumption is incorrect?

Things do die in the Land of Story. The Western is pretty much dead. All those cliches about the Old West, the dead horse beaten, revived, and beaten again. It appears from time to time, but there was a time when that was big business.

Can we really do the spy novel forever? In the year 2040, will there be some new Game-of-Thrones-y thing that everyone is yapping about? Or will chronic cultural fatigue finally set in?

Things do die. The straight play is pretty much dead as an art form. The musical lives on. Why? Because it’s got music! I enjoyed Pitch Perfect 2 quite a bit, but that movie had music and crude comedy, without which it would have been perfectly el zilcho as a story. Uh, someone has a dream and they’re like doing something about that. Brilliant.

My feeling about Age of Ultron recently was negative. More than just the experience of it as boring eye candy was the total been doneness of it all.

One sad aspect of having so much “story” in our world is that the bad fatigues the mind so that the good is less enjoyable. It’s like a good riff wasted in a bad pop song. So, in order for something to be excellent these days, it has to be mindblowingly excellent. For example, Ultron in the movie is supposed to be, you know, the clever-quipping villain. A character that you just lurve to hate! But to me the dialog just wasn’t there. The convention/cliche was summoned but didn’t arrive. Ultron didn’t do me clever, but he did wear me out that much more for the next clevurrrr villain.

Maybe I’m just worn out on this shit at age 43. I’m an old fucking loser, get off my lawn, etc. But what I’m suggesting is that, as a culture, we can’t go on forever. There will be an end point. It’s a matter of time.

Although there are very talented composers who are capable of writing a “great” symphony, we pretty much decided that we’d had enough of those by the end of the 19th century. Heck, we don’t even have enough bandwidth to keep all of Beethoven’s symphonies top of mind.

I also wrote in a recent thread about how poetry was closed as a art form (notice a trend here?). As I said above, the straight play is certainly deceased in terms of anything culturally relevant. Similarly, pop music and commercial TV (not cable, that is, and perhaps cable too) are in a very precarious position in terms of economic viability.

And maybe there will be more people like me: post-story people. I have watched very little TV since graduating HS in 1989, and most that I have watched has been contest shows like Top Chef. I have read very few novels or short stories. In theory I like movies, although I am very hard to please. Really, a lot of my entertainment has consisted of reading non-fiction and doing stuff like commenting on message boards. Listening to music.

So tell me I’m an idiot and outlier. Or maybe you agree with me somewhat. In any case, thanks in advance for your thoughts!

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Humans have been telling stories since pre-history. I don’t think they are going anywhere.

The formats will change – in particular, once/if Virtual Reality makes immersive entertainment a viable option, I think a huge amount will change about how we ‘do’ stories, but I think humans will keep on telling them as long as there are humans. I don’t really think it is possible to run out of stories.

It does seem to be the case that some people consume more stories per capita than others. I’m sure that has always been true too. “Literature” and leisure/down time have always gone together, for one thing.

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I agree. I think what is unusual about modern times is the degree of saturation of stories. If you were alive in 1850, there just wasn’t that much English literature in existence and no visual story entertainment outside of plays. You could consume all you could get your hands on that appeared interesting and still be hungry. It was a wide open field as well: just about anything that was written of any quality could seem fresh and original.

I was going to say something along these lines but ran out of words/breath. I think the future of humans in terms of entertainment is going to be altered mental states. Basically, put on a funky helmet and feel 1,000x the pleasure of doing heroin, enjoy mind-blowing hallucinations, explore 100% realistic virtual realities (be a hardboiled detective in 1948!), or sex sex sex sex sex. People of course will rate and recommend and create these things all day long. It will make anything the War on Drugs types imagined as dangerous look like tiddly winks. In such a world, I’m not sure stories as we enjoy them today will have much relevance at all.

Right. I dated someone recently who watched a lot of TV. At least by my standards. This was completely foreign and baffling to me. I was like, Why do you have that shit on? Show after show. One of many reasons it didn’t last…

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I think roleplay of the sort I’ve experienced in Second Life blows away any mere novel, TV show or story. I was just commenting on the current GoT ep thread that I thought GoT was better than any movie or TV show out there for sheer dramatic power. But I added the caveat about my video RP game because video games have a huge advantage over TV shows … the difference between “player” and reader/viewer. One is passive involvement, and one is active. Makes a huge difference. In the future, we will all write our own stories together, and in a sense live them. It will make our current media look like cave paintings.

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One more thing about this. From prehistoric times onward, probably the vast majority of stories people told were simply true stories, at least in their minds, though a lot we would classify as legends. Certainly they would talk a lot about what other people had done recently, funny stuff that had happened, brave deeds, etc.

We will never run out of true stories. In fact, the fact that they are true makes them interesting. A novel about a two-headed cat is boring, but if Aunt Mary’s cat gave birth to a two-headed kitten, then she’s going to tell everyone about that, and people will listen with interest.

I think we can run out of fictional stories, sort of. There will always be room for a work of fiction that is truly, truly excellent, but the oversaturated supply and general fatigue will make it harder for them to be heard.

Plus, there is simply the bandwidth issue. Among the Cafe threads, I see Doctor Who threads, Tolkien threads… You can’t maintain strong communities spending time and mental energy on very many such things. The old serves to keep out the new. Meanwhile, the old can’t be sustained forever either. I think it would be rather sad to have Doctor Who still going strong in 2050, yet it would also be sad to have it completely forgotten as well…

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I think this is interesting, for a couple of reasons. It’s a bit of a misconception, I think, that all things told as ‘myths’ and ‘legends’ (or even as ‘scripture’ but that’s much more complicated) were initially ‘believed’ to be true in the way we think of a true story today. For example, the Greek ‘myths’ were really a collection of different, sometimes very different, stories about divine beings and their interactions with humanity – but these same myths could have very different plots, characterizations, ‘morals’, all of these, and could exist simultaneously, even in an above-averagely literature culture like ancient Greece. There’s even an (interesting, but not completely convincing book called ‘Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?’ (by Paul Veyne) which addresses some of this.

One great example is the question of Helen of Troy: the Greeks told and retold her story (and we still are! it’s still interesting!) – but they couldn’t agree on whether Helen was an adulterous slut or a kidnap victim, or even, in some versions, if the ‘abduction’ was even real at all, or an illusion fostered to cause the Trojan War. The Greeks believed the Trojan War really happened but that didn’t mean they believed in any specific detail of the story, and they used the Trojan War, and specific elements that suited them, as a metaphor for Real Things That Were Happening Then, too (like the Peloponnesian War). Stories that are in this fuzzy-truth category have a ton of utility beyond simply campfire-storytelling (which is itself incredibly useful for all sorts of things – many of which are still relevant today, just in different ways).

Sorry, that’s a bit of a long-winded digression, but I think you’ve hit on something really interesting here. A lot of people love stories – fictional stories – as long as they have some reason to believe they are true. It is a much smaller group of people (the high ‘per capita’ consumers I mentioned in my previous post) who are interested in fictional stories just for the sake of the story itself.

So I think you are right in an important way: immersive, active storytelling is going to be a big hit with a lot of people who are not ‘into’ fiction as yet – because, at least if the technology is any good – it will feel true to them.

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If you’re saying that we’ll lose interest in telling fictional stories before the human race goes extinct, I don’t think you could be more wrong. We always have and always will tell stories.

Pretty sure fictional stories – defined as those not empirically verified – have been around as long as nonfiction stories. Mainly in the form of religion. (“And then Zeus, Hades and Poseidon killed their father…”)

Saying that we’ll abandon stories and switch to virtual mood manipulation feels about as real to me as saying that we’ll abandon eating food by switching to a completely pill-based diet.

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The Mid-Life Geek Crisis is a real thing, I see it a lot. I went through a brief period in my 30s where I was seeing through the formula and getting bored with everything. Then we had a renaissance, with amazing TV, some impressive movies, and video games and comic books being taken seriously, and it renewed my love of it.

However, Pop Culture’s now gotten rather too nerd-heavy, and the iconography is drowning out the quality again. We went through this in the 90s when Batman and Star Trek influenced too many other things and it all became a big clusterfuck. There has been an expectation of that happening again, we do have too many superhero movies and TV right now, and things like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Hunger Games seem like they would’ve been the big influences.

But that’s not really panned out. Instead the stories have actually improved, the filmmaking (editing, VFX, cinematography) have taken huge leaps forward, especially in TV, and the influence of what has come before seems to have been equal parts ignorance (fast cuts, shaky cam, star power) and insight (good stories, well told, well acted, beautifully shot).

I think currently there’s more improvement than mistakes, and we’re in a good place. But it can be overwhelming and exhausting, and some of we consumers may have to take a step back and breathe.

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I agree with everything you said. Clearly, people told and tell stories on any number of “levels,” often multiple levels.

In my haste, I merely meant to distinguish legends from mere fictions told as entertainment.

Absolutely. And video games have already started this trend.

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I think part of it for is the disconnect between our pop culture and the arc of the national culture that lies beneath it: decline and depression. A movie like Ultron says nothing about our current world but is merely escapism from it. I am vastly tired of our economic and social system right now, and pop culture to me has no cathartic purpose. Maybe I’m missing some things on TV (I plan on binge-watching Breaking Bad someday) that are relevant, but I don’t plan on being a TV watcher anytime soon.

Yet, there are also countertrends, such as the now vocal CGI fatigue. Also, the need to make movies to please China as well, further lessening the possibility of making anything truly pertinent to “our times.” I agree with you that the tech and talent is there, but there needs to be a commitment to subtly different and meaningful stories. Not McGuffin + boobs + splosions! = story.

Yes. And you mentioned Marvel. Every story being an ad for the next story. Now if you thought Loki and that shit he was going to pull on New York or the evil elves and their red mist or any of that shit was scary–scared the piss out of you, didn’t it?!–then just wait until Darkseid, er, Thanos gets his hand on the Infinity Gauntlet, man! That is some muthafuckin’ TERRIFYIN’ shit, man! You might as wear a goddam fucking DEPENDS into the theater cuz yoo are gonna LOSE YOUR SHIT!!!

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To write a good story, it’s not what you say but how you say it.

Artistic devices have always been roughly the same, which each generation refines in order to achieve originality and express their own vision.

All these mechanisms, most of which have become cliches, are in fact images and symbols that can and will be reinterpreted in new contexts because history may look cyclical to old timers but it never repeats itself through and through.

Look at the young people. Their approach is infectiously optimistic. They regard the past as a reservoir of ideas and techniques they can use to express their own preoccupations or their reactions to nowadays challenges.

There is a critic who claims that the first modern Man appeared the moment a Homo Sapiens individual told the first story. I think the story will permanently adapt to any cultural environment and continue to live as long as we will live.

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I’m not really even sure what this means.

Sorta agree. Have you read tvtropes.org? (If not, take care! This site is famous as a major time-killer!) It’s really quite clever how crowdsourcing has picked apart anything and everything so that any move you make could be seen as having been done before.

Yet there’s a big difference, at least to me, between lazy McGuffin-based storytelling as in Marvel movies and getting into the subtleties of human motivations and emotions and pathologies as in Taxi Driver. I certainly found the latter to be a lot more exciting as well.

Cool, maybe they will get us out of the current rut, although I think the problem lies far deeper than mere quality. As I said, the noisy system tends to fatigue the mind even when good things are presented.

Yeah, man, no doubt. Some people have taken me to mean that I think people will stop telling stories. I sure as hell don’t think that. My feeling is rather that there is an oversaturation of stories and entertainment overall that makes us overfed and sick of stories. It’s like taking 20 vitamin C pills a day. Vitamin C is necessary for life, but that much would make you sick. Stories are an essential part of how humans think, but we are guzzling them in a way that did not happen in the past.

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Actually, I think I know what you mean. Star Wars is a hero’s journey story told in a gussied-up sci-fi way. In Harry Potter, you have the Chosen One, etc., in a magical context.

The “what” is the hero’s journey and Chosen One, respectively. The “how” is sci-fi and magic, respectively.

Amiright so far?

But this actually serves as a good example. What if we get 250 heroes journey and Chosen One movies in the span of 10 years, which might not be too far off the mark? That’s what I mean by “oversaturation.” Even though those tropes have a deep psychological pull, you can get sick of them after a point, and then even a really good, new hero’s journey story will seem tiresome.

If you lived in 500 BCE or 1600 or even 1850, you might have heard only one hero’s journey story in your life. Maybe told by the tribal elder or fellow soldier around the campfire, maybe read in the handful of fiction books you had in your library.

Then, in 2015, everyone wants to sell you a million movies and video games and there’s fanfic and $0.99 ebooks on Amazon and video games and all that. And you get CHOSEN ONE CHOSEN ONE CHOSEN ONE CHOSEN ONE out the ying-yang and burn out that circuit.

That’s what I’m talking about.

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It’s all just entertainment. From strippers in strip clubs to high-brow stuff. And people will always need to be entertained.

I studied Russian Lit in college. According to my profs, the earliest popular Russian literature was travelogues: Stories of the experience of travelers in foreign lands. That’s a lot of that is what drives culture and art–seeking the exotic.

But once you had international travel and cameras, you didn’t need the storyteller to write travelogues. So instead the later writers dipped into history (Westerns), fantasy (sci-fi), etc.

Then the US became multi-cultural. Norman Mailer saw it coming decades ago and said that no more Great American Novels would be written by whites. The audience was increasingly multicultural and wanted more than just the same old stories about middle-class angst and quiet desperation in white suburbs; and also, the ethnic minorities had their own exotic experiences to bring to the table. So now we have many TV series depicting life as a drug dealer, life in prison, life in biker gangs, etc.

A lot of the OP addressed pop and kiddy culture (Harry Potter, movies based on Marvel Comics). Those things demonstrate that fantasy is still a popular place to find the exotic. But science is always opening up new vistas as well. Archaeology teaches us new things about the past, and we get series like “Rome” or “Deadwood” (the old West is still alive!). Or we get new adult sci-fi epics. Or new movies guessing at what dystopia will look like once the machines take over or after a nuclear apocalypse. And so on.

The search for the exotic is still on. And with advances in technology coming quicker and quicker, the possible vistas for new exotic territories and stories keep expanding. And people will continue to want their entertainment.

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Mass media is way richer than ever before, indeed, and the apparently nauseating repetition will not lead to fatigue, in my opinion, but to the highly competitive environment that will force the story to survive the process of bitterer selection through novel mutations.

Beware though. The symbol can stay the same (in our case the cliche), but its meaning may be completely altered. And we’re talking about narratives, which consist of entire sequences of such symbols.

Original artists will always find a way to give their stories a fresh taste. I occasionally watch serials for children and teenagers. Most are just boring and unoriginal, indeed, but some make me laugh and feel young again. (It’s manner of speaking - I don’t feel old at all.)

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Ah, well. If you’re looking for where all the good storytelling has disappeared to, TV is your first stop. It’s there in spades. You don’t even have to look very hard for it, just not on the familiar Networks.

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I’m still trying to clarify your thesis:

  • There are only so many stories, and they’ve been told?

  • The Internet is such a huge story-delivery machine that we’ve engorged ourselves on stories, while at the same time, some folks reject them altogether?

  • There are only so many…formats? genres? that a culture can innovate in order to tell stories that reflect their culture, and the US Culture has used up its quota?

  • Something else?

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And you don’t have to hear/see/experience ALL the stories. So the evolution of media, including the move to niche narrowcasting under way for decades now, has brought about a story binge… it will pass and we’ll revert to a more manageable environment and take it in manageable doses. Not *everyone *has read one or all of The daVinci Code/Hunger Games/50 Shades/, nor seen one or all of Mad Men/LOTR/Arrow/whatever, and people will eventually realize nobody *has *to.

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There’s only so many different types of characters, motivations, and themes.

There’s not a big difference between modern sci-fi fantasy where astronauts travel through space on a spaceship and find aliens on other planets vs. an old time myth where sailors travel across the ocean on a wooden boat and find natives on other islands. Aliens are what gods used to be. Or demons. Robots, golems. It’s all the same, just different clothing.

Eventually you want to break out, find more weird and artsy stuff, but then you realize there’s a reason why all these conventions exist. Or maybe you like it for awhile, but you want the old stuff again. Or you find it too artsy/pretentious.

Personally, I find it fun to analyze a movie as I watch it, trying to predict what tropes they’ll use, or how I’d do it differently. It’s like a puzzle.

The thing is the new generations don’t get tired of it because they don’t care about the stuff you saw. So more is made. Certainly the best of the old stuff is recognized, but at some point it has to stop. Imagine how many “classics” someone in the year 3000 will have to watch or read to be culturally literate. A bunch of it will just go down the memory hole.

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Me too! :slight_smile:

These are all partially right.

There are only so many fictional stories that can be told in broad strokes. In the past, a person would hear only a few of these in his/her lifetime. But now one could take in a new hero’s journey or Chosen One type story on a regular basis. What once was effective and unique becomes pat and cliche. The broad strokes get worn out.

Then you have more specific types of stories written in less-broad strokes that also get worn out. I think the serial killer story is a very good one for our time. Yep, serial killers are pretty interesting. But something seems off to me when there are many times more serial killer stories than actual serial killers.

Finally, you can just have so many stories that you actually kinda get tired of stories themselves. More on this point: Right now, I think content providers are in oversupply, each trying to justify its existence and survive. Book publishers need to pump out hit books, TV stations need to pump out hit shows, and movie production companies need to deliver the mammoth tentpole hits. Plus comics, video games, you name it. So we have more of a push market on the part of the suppliers than a pull market on the part of consumers. My observation is that humans rarely handle an excess of supply over demand very well. It’s not fun either for the suppliers or the consumers, and it leads to a variety of market pathologies. OTOH, when demand exceeds supply, unless it’s something like basic necessities and people are dying, humans handle it well and it leads to fun for both sides and a healthy market.

Let me give an example: high-end whisky, scotch and bourbon. There is high worldwide demand with lots of pull from consumers. Single malt producers don’t need to advertise: they’ve got fans on the Internet promoting the products. Prices are healthy but still affordable. Whisky makers really don’t have to compete, and they are cool to each other, since everyone is going to sell out their stock. When Heaven Hill had a big fire in 1996, Brown-Forman and Jim Beam helped them out.

Another example. Music was in huge demand in Mozart’s time. Any decent composer could sell his stuff. The shitty movie Amadeus makes it seem that Mozart was a dick to other composers, thought he was above them all, but nothing could be further from the truth. He adored Haydn; the two became best friends. Mozart praised the string quartets of Pleyel in one letter I read. He was generally positive about other composers, based on what I have read. Since demand exceeded supply, there was no reason to be dicks.

But now, man, everyone has a story to sell. Supply exceeds demand. Market pathologies ensue:

• Noise: People can’t process all of the available content, so even good content finds it hard to find an audience.

• Disdain: People tend to dismiss and revile things that are in oversupply. Hence the rise of “haters” for any and all content that is put out there. Twilight haters, etc. You don’t really have “whisky haters.”

• Ads: Ads are welcome in a pull market because people want to be informed. I think that’s why people love, for example, 50s TV ads. It was a time in which demand generally exceeded the supply of goods, so people welcomed ads. Moreover, ads didn’t have to be overly clever. The ingenuousness of 50s ads appeals today. Yet our era is one in which supply generally exceeds demand, engendering general cynicism about products. In such a push market, producers need to advertise, the ads need to be clever, and the ads are seen as robbers of mental bandwidth.

• Conservatism: Since we have a push market for content, producers do what’s safe. Thus, sequels, prequels, and remakes reign supreme these days. In a pull market, it’s much easier to take chances and be original.