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

Cafe Society
41

In reading through this thread, I’m reminded strongly of a passage from James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”. Though I had to look it up to put it here, I have never forgotten the gist of it.

"Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness."

I write poetry (that I don’t inflict on other people) because it is something that needs to come out in some way. I really have no other way to describe it. I wrote a poem in my early 20s that was filled with heightened language, vivid imagery, with a specific rhyme scheme and patterned syllabic count per line. At the time I wrote it, I remembered wondering if I was alright and also where was it coming from. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized it was completely and totally about my father molesting my (one year) younger sister for years, which my (one year) older sister and I (separately) witnessed several times. (Note - not talking about recovered memories here.) There is no mention in the poem anywhere about this but once I made the connection, it was very apparent.

I have a couple of dozen poems that I memorized in my 20s that served to keep me going when I was destitute, when I was hitchhiking around with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. They spoke/speak to me strongly with their messages but really what has kept them in my memory all these decades later is that they are, to me, beauty. Not beautiful, but actual beauty itself. One such is Curiousity, by Alastair Reid.

I’m going to be honest and confess, Aeschines, that your thread has left me cold. So much concern about Story, oversaturation, fatigue. Seems to me that you have been Eliot-ized to a degree. So, to answer your question from my POV, no, there is no limit to pop culture. New people are born everyday. To paraphrase Mr. Baldwin, they will find ways to speak their dreams, their struggles, their importances, their beauty. Of this I have no doubt. Your meta-concerns will matter not a whit to them. I do not intend being unkind or dismissive. I’m just some random guy on the Internet banging on a keyboard. But I did not see this aspect of the matter addressed much in the thread and it seemed important to me to so do.

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I liked the quote about the blues. I’m a big fan of the blues. I don’t actually think you and I are too far off in sentiment.

That sucks, man, sorry to hear that. I’m a poet myself, so I understand.

I’ll read that when I’m fresh in the morning, thanks. Yes, I’m a poet and poetry fan. I know how the right words can help us pull through.

Haha, perhaps we share the same opinion of Eliot too.

You are emphasizing the power of great art. Well, I totally agree with you. What I am doing in this and related threads of mine is not dissing art but expressing my concern about how social changes are making “great art” difficult to process, promote, and ultimately preserve as a society.

Ah, but this lack of concern, not with my personal concerns but rather with the mechanics I describe is what does bring about the limit. Yes, there will be new people. 20 years from now there will be another Harry Potter or Twilight or Hunger Games or whatever, and people will think it’s the thing, but it will only be a thing. And there will be another pretty girl like Jennifer Lawrence playing the latest Katniss, and she’ll get old and that movie will fade. And those people who were young and thought, “This is the thing, this is the time,” will grow 20 years older, and then it will repeat.repeat.repeat.

OR, maybe we as a society will go “meta” on that cycle and say, “This just keeps repeating.” That meta-ness may change how we as a society create and consume that content.

You’re fine. But what aspect specifically do you mean?

Do you mean the fact that there will be new people? Yes, I had thought of making some addenda. As society and technology changes and indeed new people are born, there will always be a demand for content that reflects the now. Simple example: movies made before cells phones and the Internet. Movies that have people wearing clothes that don’t look dated. Jokes about current topics. Modern special effects. Etc.

But that is just surface up to the point where society so vastly changes that the old content is deeply obsolete. Example: Gay jokes in 80s movies are tacky, cell phones and the Internet are not present, but society hasn’t changed all that much. So an action movie like Die Hard still takes up mindshare as an action movie. I bet that, 50 years from now, Die Hard will still seem like a good action movie and be watched. 1,000 years from now, life might be so different that the movie doesn’t make sense to people on any level accept as a historical curio. Or who knows, maybe for that very fact, it will occupy even more mindshare. Shakespeare’s society is vastly different from our own, but the anachronisms of the content and language actually work in its favor for occupying “play mindshare.” Although, I have read commentary online to the effect that the language is now so hard for people to understand that Shakespeare might be starting to fade ever so slightly in the collective consciousness.

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I think this is correct. It will literally be like lives within life.

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The American public seems to have an unlimited interest in the bizarre. This explains the popularity of the Kardashians. It seems that the Bruce Jenner-Caitlyn Jenner story will generate over $100 million for Jenner. Is this proof that there is no such saturation?:slight_smile:

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I think this is selective memory.

That was the period of pulp magazines, more than 1000 titles on every genre and subgenre, including more than a dozen western romance titles. The biggest names sold a million per issue. The rest were full of hacks grinding out 40,000 words a week about The Shadow and a zillion imitators.

This was also the heyday of the detective novel, and later the private eye. There were such a flood of hack writers that by 1930 both the British Detective Club and the American who wrote as S. S. van Dine put out lists of rules begging writers not to continue reusing stupid cliches in every book.

In Hollywood, so many westerns were made and forgotten that we don’t know the name of Pete Morrison, who starred in 132 movies and probably don’t know a bigger star like Tom Mix, over 250 movies, or Gilbert M. Anderson (“Bronco Billy”) with over 350 films as an actor and even more as a director. And that was before the hundreds of films and tv shows of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

Soap operas were only fifteen minutes long on radio. Four per hour, usually four or five hours a day, five days a week, on the radio networks and on local stations. Millions upon millions of words. For a real picture of superabundance I recommend “Soapland” written by, of all people, James Thurber and included in The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948).

Cultural detritis gets totally forgotten except by obsessed fans and scholars. This is mostly fortunate, although as a quasi-scholar I have to say that they are often more revelatory about their eras than much higher art. That makes commentary about popular culture in other eras by non-experts suspect if not worthless. The current era - which is always being denounced, and I mean always, every single year as far back as we can go in mass culture - always seem uniquely depraved. That tsinami of low culture is both unique and timeless, each wave different but all similar in composition and effect.

The only other guarantee is that people in the future will look back at today and retroactively glorify it as a high point because the low points will have vanished.

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That is basically my point. 'Xap - we have a new channel, but the basic phenomenon is the same.

This remains an interesting topic, but should be considered in a full context.

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I’m reminded of the fashion industry. It has been said about the fashion industy again and again: “Everything has been done and redone and done again. There are no new ideas. Sooner or later designers are going to have to admit this, and we’ll all give up the chase after new fashions and resign ourselves to wearing simple straight black or white unisex robes without adornments.”

And yet the fashion industry keeps churning out new fashions each season. People keep taking an interest, and designers keep working. And there’s even a flurry of occasional novelty when technology invents a new fabric or a new way of treating an old fabric so that it looks or wears differently.

It’s just the nature of art and people. It’s not about doing something new every single time. It’s just about “refreshing” the existing model every so often, when the existing model gets stale. And the “refreshing” process can be pretty simple, such as going retro.

But one way or another, it keeps working. It’s just that the older people complain about it. They see spandex coming back into fashion for the third time in their lifetime, and they get a little jaded and start bitching about the lack of new ideas in the fashion industry. But it’s new for the kiddies, so it gets snapped up by them.

So really it’s just a problem of having bitchy old folks around. Old folks need to either have shorter memories or shut up. :slight_smile:

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That feeling doesn’t have much to do with the actual running time of MASH*, though. I’m harping on this not to be pedantic*, but because I think it’s actually kind of offensive to suggest as you have that the real Korean War, which lasted for more than three years and directly affected millions of people, didn’t contain at least 125 hours of material. A TV series that presented only dramatic reenactments of true stories from the Korean War would be quite different and probably much less entertaining than MASH*, but if it’s purely a question of length then more than enough happened during the actual war to fill that many hours of screen time.

*Well, I am a Doper, so maybe it’s partially to be pedantic.

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All the information you provided was good, thanks. But you seemed to be responding as though I was saying literature was of a higher quality then. I wasn’t saying that. I was saying that, if one could write, that was the sweet spot for selling your work, since demand was high but people who could write were still fairly scarce.

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Yet my thesis is pertinent here. It has been observed that fashion hasn’t changed since 1992, and that’s also been debated on the Dope:

People were so used to fashion changing at a super-rapid pace, probably assumed that that would keep going, but then it slowed down to a crawl. Also looks became much more variegated, i.e., the Long Tail, and this is pertinent to the potential trend with Story.

I think the fashion industry is analogous to the content industry: sure, they keep churning out new fashions each season, since they will die if they don’t.

But fashion is different than content in that clothes wear out. Plus, even if the base fashion doesn’t change, you can always compete with patterns, colors, and details. E.g., it would be possible to do the year 1956 in fashion all over again simply by retaining all the base looks and doing everything in different colors, patterns, slightly different cuts, etc., that still fit within the fashion parameters of that year. So releasing a new fall collection doesn’t necessarily entail “new fashions” per se.

BTW, I don’t think fashion changes totally stopped in 1992. But I do think we’ve collectively settled upon a uniform for the long term. One can observe small variations in that uniform.

The thing is, I’m not actually complaining about the quality of content these days. I’m also not complaining about having seen the same thing over and over again. I’m not really complaining at all, except about personal fatigue from the oversaturation. I am saying that a societal trend is brewing beneath the surface. Your point about fashion ended up being a good example of a similar trend! :slight_smile:

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I wasn’t saying that. I thought I was making a point that your last sentence deals with. People who could write were no more scarce then than now. That’s a constant. The percentage more that gets published (or the equivalent for other arts) is also a constant.

The cycles may be shorter today, and the amount of content may be higher, true. It feels hard to avoid some trends. I’ll bet, given some of the complaints I’ve read, that it felt just as hard in the past. Television as a medium was hated, hated, hated! by a remarkable number of people who couldn’t stand that other people spent so much time watching it and talking about it.

I’m trying to take my personal feelings out of it - as I said, I feel much the same as you as times. Asking about the future without looking at similar times in the past is futile. I don’t think you appreciate just how similar our time is. No good reason why you should just to drop an opinion. The issue is a real one that most people feel affected by, so it’s a good discussion issue.

And it slams right into my area of research so I feel it especially strongly. We’ve been through this before. Is this time going to be different? I don’t know. Some times bring true change. When I look closely at it, though, I can’t find any good evidence that this will be the time. We may be slamming into a wall; it’s just a familiar wall.

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Well, I don’t agree that people who could write were no more scarce, ever, since we simply had lower literacy rates in the past, and they rose gradually over time. Plus, my guess is that passive literacy (can read) rose faster than active literacy (can also write), but I don’t have the cites to back it up. But it seems commonsensical. My feeling is that if I could take my current writing abilities back to, say, 1880, I would have an easy time selling my writing.

I doubt that the percentage of writers that get published today is the same as it was in the past, if by published we mean “meaningfully and lucratively published but not self-published.” But again I can’t back it up for shyte.

The thing is, I think we have a rather “superficial past” at work here! Think about it: Everyone alive today was basically born at the dawn of pop culture as we know it. For humanity has a lot of time ahead of it. 1,000 years from now, tech-mediated pop culture will be ancient, but having commercial TV be less than 70 years old, that’s nothing. Thus talking about being “through it before” is perhaps misleading. We are still in the infancy of it all.

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Aeschines, I fear you’re up against that unstoppable juggernaut, the Internet’s passion for the There’s Nothing New Under the Sun Conventional Wisdom. (C.W. which is demonstrably wrong, of course…not that any such inconvenient fact could ever loosen its iron grip.)

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Could be! :slight_smile:

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“As we know it” is a weasel term that makes it work for whatever you want it to. But by my definition, popular culture started with the birth of high speed printing presses, which is circa 1850. That was before my grandparents were born.

That’s really my main disagreement with you. You’re not looking at things I think absolutely must be looked at, and that results in what I see as false conclusions.

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I get a definite whiff of special-snowflake-itis out of this discussion. Along of the lines of “I see a core truth that the unwashed masses can’t grasp.” Or possibly “Our modern selves have a special status that doesn’t apply to all of human history that preceded us.”

Nothing presented in the thread to support the hypothesis that we’ll run out of stories to tell has struck me as compelling. Most of it just boils down to misplaced ego-stroking, or hubris. At least that’s how it reads to me.

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That is an interesting dating that makes sense to me.

Sorry, what is it that I’ve not looked at? Thanks.

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The many things that I have already mentioned in previous posts that are examples of oversaturation.

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Well, I am a seven-sided snowflake, and that’s pretty rad.

I think this kind of thinking is in the air. I was glad the fashion point came up, as Kurt Andersen’s essay on fashion not having changed much since 1992 is pertinent. Here’s that link again:

C’mon, this is prima facie true. We have technologies at our disposal that no one before us did.

The point is certainly subtler than that. I don’t think we’re going to run out of stories. The key point is that the “broad strokes” (e.g., hero’s journey) that once made one story special to a tribe can be repeated ad infinitum and lose its power. The solution is to make subtler stories, which I personally love and appreciate, but these are harder to sell. Thus we see Hollywood go even harder into repetition mode.

If thinking one has something to say about something is egotistical or hubristic, then I am guilty as charged.

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You mean like the pulp magazines and whatnot? I agree. The effect is cumulative, however, I believe, since the good is retained. This certainly does not happen with complete justice, but whatever does remain takes up bandwidth.

Example. I’m interested in the Beatles and have read a bunch of articles online about them, including the comments sections. There is a large number of young people who listen to the Beatles. As well there should, since they are great. And I think young people will be listening to them 50, 100 years from now, who knows. That takes up room that new bands can occupy, mindshare if you will.