We have made of ourselves a great orphanage, and all of us little Olivers, asking for more. We learn our morals from coffin makers and Fagins and only expect the worst of our fellow man.
That is the summation of the situation our situation is in. Popular culture has overwhelmed us. We are suffocating like a toy poodle in Margaret Dumont’s lap. Someone once said, if it wasn’t for popular culture we’d have no culture at all. This might be the meme for our current state of affairs. This is us. We have abandoned all else…mostly.
There is a revolt going on. If it were gauged for size and weight it would be quickly squelched, but it is there, and not just in one place, or attached to one political cell or cohort. I cannot judge its power any more than its numbers. But I certainly hope that it’s big, or else we are lost. It is the culture that supports our civilization, not just Elon Musk. And the Machine will not be patient with our necessary faults. That is, those faults we must live with or else we die. The faults that make life worth living. Without them we have no virtues.
I think I will blame Dickens first.
Dickens wrote characters, not people. This was worse in his early work, and bettered as he grew older and learned from his fellow writers, but it was a fault he never lost entirely, succumbing to the tropes of the stage in his time, and making characters into props and devices. This, and his sense of plot, made him very popular. But it was ruinous for literature in general. Because it was an easy tool, other writers copied him. The newly reading audiences presented with the cheap product off the steam presses, succumbed to the quick entertainment on the page. Teachers loved it because the plot points and characters could be conveniently used on tests. The more difficult writing of a Hugo or Balzac, or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, could be safely left in translation.
But Dickens cannot (even if you could) be dismissed as worthless. His plots are often terrific, and his perceptions about society very intelligent. Dickens saw early on that the reduction of the human spirit to a cog on a wheel in the industrial age, so visually captured by Charles Chaplin in Modern Times, was already felt by the working public in the mid 19th Century when most people were still farmers. But just as Dickens characters often lacked the complexity of flesh and blood, our literary judgments are too often reduced to simplicities. And this then is abetted by the sheer quantity of the printed product using modern industry. What should you read?
The Dickens character became a staple of Hollywood. It was so much easier to deal with a Fagin in under two hours running time. And the visual cues of Hollywood became advertisement for the books in the ever-larger supermarket of printed paper. But ‘popular culture’ as we understand it today, may have begun with the glazing of Charles Dickens. The torrent of imitators—a torrent is a lot, all at once, and seemingly unstoppable—resulted in a transformation of literature; and as literature was then the primary vessel of culture in general, it changed everything. The Victorian age, good and bad, was born.
And this then became the cue for ambiguity. An educated elite wanted to separate themselves from the ‘reading public.’ Sophistication required avoiding the obvious. Hiding true meaning in obscurity, so that it might survive. Some societies craved this ambiguity more than others, the Swedish and the French come to mind. Slogging through Proust felt like punishment to one adolescent and I have never been able to return to find out if I missed anything while trying to pass the test. But there again, the easier dismissal, this time for lack of plot development or defined characters, makes me the poorer. I am sure that the author did not labor that hard and consistently with nothing to say.
American fiction was plagued with Fagins. Whole genres such as mystery and science fiction grew up around them—easy to package as well as to read. In the case of mystery, noir offered the ‘sophisticated’ angle on what were essentially the same stories again and again. In England, whole villages were murdered, or so it seemed, by characters driven with the motivation of cheap mechanical toys.
Raymond Chandler and others tried to redeem the mystery genre with human complexity. Science fiction finally lost its pulp origins to writers like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison who kept asking questions. And Hollywood realized that the questions—why more than how, and what more than who, might be used as hooks to get the public back in the seats. Reel life could transpire in ninety minutes if framed well. But I am afraid they will need an invasion of body snatchers to keep the theaters open now.
The problem is that the whole enterprise of fiction cannot be contained on one boat, even a bigger one. and reducing reading habits to genres is as counterproductive as making every character a Fagin or an Oliver.
But there is an even worse aspect to consider. What of an audience willing to spend time, for instance, reading bodice busters? The sexual motor driving romances is symptomatic of an unhealthy pornography and worth some consideration, is it not? But it is not the pornography by itself that is the matter, but the context. The standard of masculinity there alone is a psychological and social disaster.
Fifty years ago it was westerns. Bookkeepers in Queens were reading formula Westerns like candy. What aspect of that was healthy? If even one of them got in their over-priced cars and drove to Montana to work on a ranch for $30 a week plus room and board, that would have been worth it. But they stayed home and lived on the paperback page. I love westerns—as a setting, not a genre. Frederick Manfred, Elmer Kelton, and Cormac McCarthy cannot be judged in the same way as Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Zane Grey. Meanwhile the American public happily sat on the living room couch and watched cardboard characters in gun fights that defied Western history.
The problem is—there are many problems. The motivation of the corporate publishing is bread and circuses. The Alfred and Blanch Knopf’s of the publishing world are long gone and replaced by bean counters and college business majors who look at flow charts for personal guidance. Hollywood has been absorbed by multinational corporations with no sense of human identity, making the Jack Warners and Louis B. Mayers of yesterday look like aesthetic geniuses—which they were in a perverse way.
I have not even begun a critique of music, primarily because I can’t read the stuff—but I listen. What I hear, outside of some film scoring, doesn’t inspire. Architecture is slowly overcoming the brutalism of the mid-twentieth century, but mostly by imitating the past, which is not a positive. Art, as in painting and sculpture, is trying yet to survive the bludgeon of photography, but the Wyeth family cannot carry the weight of that revolt alone and the few who persist in the old ways are much ignored by an audience numbed by what passes for realism. At least the range of drama between David Mamet and Horton Foote seem to have drawn audiences to human complexities worth considering, beyond the new racial and gender stereotypes.
But film and video appear to carry the greatest possibility for breaking the fall, even while AI and digitalization seem to have mesmerized, the technology is offering creative minds a chance to do things that were impossible beneath the deadweight of corporate and union bound Hollywood. The script writing of Taylor Sheridan offers the hope of complex characters doing interesting things outside of the cubicle, but one (me) longs for a little more humor. Where is our Preston Sturges? Our Ben Hecht? We don’t have to judge by box office now. Hasn’t that freed us or has it left us talking to an audience of one.
And none of this is curable by sudden revelation in our digital world. The bots are on it! Every hint of success will be copied ad infinitum and any taint of failure will be scrubbed before it can infect. How will we know if we succeed? In our short term on earth, we will not. But we can succumb, as a species, or we can revolt.