Charlie Brown, advertising, and whatever comes after postmodernism
I went to undergrad hoping for a career in advertising. This video reminds me why I’m happy I bailed:
It also reminds me of my junior-year class in postmodernism, in which we spent at least half the semester trying to arrive at a definition for the term — and never really got one. This video certainly has aspects of what we were seeking. It appropriates familiar cultural elements (The Charlie Brown Christmas Special) for use in unexpected contexts (advertising), much the way Michael Graves used the Disney dwarfs to hold up the roof of the Team Disney building. And in both cases, the project doesn’t really make sense unless you’re familiar with what it’s playing off. In this case, Lucy isn’t Lucy and Linus isn’t Linus, but the joke doesn’t work unless you understand who they usually are.
But I’d argue that the video also represents more than whatever postmodernism is or was. It’s the kind of thing you can’t imagine existing without YouTube. While the technology to make it could exist independently of internet distribution, the idea of doing it feels net-dependent. If Ernie doing M.O.P. is the quintessential video mash-up –
– then The Charlie Brown Ad Agency is its close kin. A mix-in, maybe. And it exists in the same metaverse as Beyoncé’s Single Ladies video, which remakes a mash-up (Walk It Out Fosse).
I offer these observations without any clear idea about what it means for screenwriting, but you can look at many current films through this lens. The Dark Knight is less a Batman movie than a Big Serious Movie with Batman mixed in. Twilight isn’t a vampire story. It’s a teen girl fantasy with a small thread of vampirism — not even real vampires, but something almost wholly different — woven in.
And I think that’s what our books and movies are going to be for a while: Aliens vs. Predator vs. Mr. Magoo. Our cultural world is vast and ephemeral, so we look for familiar icons that we can recall and repurpose. We want to know just what we’re getting, yet still be surprised. We’re toddlers that way.
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December 26th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Alien VS Predator has always been weird to me. I always figured the two would LIKE each other.
December 26th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Hmm, interesting, thoughtful post.
Somewhat related, I’ve been told more than once that “everything has been done.” It’s just about putting a new spin (preferably your own) on it.
December 26th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
The only mash-up videos I can think of that existed pre-internet/pre-digital editing are “Apocalypse Pooh,” (sound of APOCALYPSE NOW on Winnie the Pooh cartoons), “Blue Peanuts” (BLUE VELVET and Charlie Brown), and having the animated Archies sing “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. I think all three were made by the same person, and I knew about them because they were available as a free rental on VHS at Kim’s Video in NY in the mid-90s (though I think they existed long before then).
And the editing was very crude by today’s digital standards…it was probably done on linear video.
And of course, they’re all on YouTube now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN22WAvMAGw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD99ze7984s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikJZG5hzAtw
December 26th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Neopostmodernism
http://wikibin.org/articles/neopostmodernism.html
How The Zombies Saved Christmas!
:P
December 26th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Have superheroes and other movie characters become the new archetypes of our collective subconsciousness? (Or are they just the old ones in flashy costumes?) If so, is fan-fiction fair game? After all the characters belong to all of us. Or something.
But speaking of Batman there has been some wonderful overthinking done about him: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/12/11/the-dark-knight-returns-on-dvd/
My favorite is the literary edition.
December 27th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Our cultural world is vast and ephemeral, so we look for familiar icons that we can recall and repurpose.
Who’s “we,” though, John? Because I think it’s the multi-national conglomerates who run entertainment these days, and not so much the artists or the audience. The congloms are the ones afraid to greenlight anything that’s not a sequel, prequel, remake (sorry, “reimagining”) or tween novel adaptation. This isn’t the state of the art; it’s the state of commerce. The fact that people still show up and buy tickets or DVDs (albeit in ever-decreasing numbers) doesn’t point to tastes as much as it points to a tacit willingness to be led around on a leash by soft drink executives looking to score a third home in the Hamptons.
December 27th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I think we could discuss this for hours, and I might try to do just that. What’s strange to me is that the only thing I liked in Beyonce’s video (besides Beyonce scantily clad) was her strange metal arm. That strikes a chord with me that could be taken in a thousand different directions, which in my head is creating a fourth generation of the subject matter.
Additionally, I think this process is often applied but rarely successful, and most of the time, people don’t know it will succeed until it does.
December 27th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Coincidentally, I was just talking to somebody the other day about “The Dark Knight,” in terms similar to yours. I described it as a gritty, pessimistic crime drama with a guy in a rubber suit in a minor supporting role. It’s an example of what I’ve been calling “springboarding,” the trend of using some familiar story, character or genre cliché as a starting place, then going somewhere else entirely with it.
Compare “The Dark Knight” to the other noteworthy superhero movie of the year, “Iron Man.” Personally, I liked both quite a lot. But while “Iron Man” was a skillfully executed example of a superhero story with no real surprises beyond its above-average cleverness, “The Dark Knight” was something more. Hell, I’ve heard it favorably compared to “Godfather II.” I think that goes too far, but not by much. I’d certainly put it in the same overall class as “Heat.” It started out on the same playing field as “Iron Man” — adrenaline- and testosterone-fueled genre fiction — but ended up somewhere else. It springboarded.
Upon reflection, maybe it’s going too far to call it a “trend,” but it’s definitely a pattern that one can spot without too much difficulty. Think of films like “The Brady Bunch Movie.” It decontextualized the source material and tried to do something different with it.
Christ, I sound like a lit-crit major. Quick, somebody punch me.
Like the aforementioned Charlie Brown doohickey, I don’t think a story like that works unless the audience is familiar with the source material. The whole gimmick is, “Look, it’s the same, only different.” If you take away that sense of same-ness, it’s no longer a culture-clash story; it’s just weird for the sake of being weird.
(Just as a side-note, I happen to have despised “The Brady Bunch Movie.” But with $42 million at the box office on a $12 million budget, and a raft of both literal and spiritual sequels over the past decade, I have to at least begrudgingly admit that it was a sort of success.)
The same core concept is at play in Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica.” Start with something familiar — at least familiar to men who were nerdy kids in the 1970s — and take it in a different direction. For that matter, I’d even put “Million Dollar Baby” in this category, since it begins with (and if I remember correctly, was heavily marketed as) a pretty standard underdog-learns-life-lessons, makes-it-big story, then takes a hard turn in the third act. It’s that same pattern of “I’ve seen this before” becoming “this is not what I expected.”
I guess this concept all revolves around encapsulating the unexpected. It’s less drastic, and less calculatedly manipulative, than a story that’s structured around a shocking plot twist, but it’s the same sort of idea: The audience starts out feeling like they’re in familiar territory, then ends up being surprised. When it works, the surprise is pleasant, or shocking, or provocative, and the audience buys it as having been earned, rather than being jammed into the screenplay as the thematic equivalent of “ha ha, got your nose.”
December 27th, 2008 at 10:33 am
“We want to know just what we’re getting, yet still be surprised.”
I think that single sentence sums up the entirety of Art, or at least an awful lot of it.
We want to be surprised, no matter which art form – movies, literature, music, poetry, jokes, even paintings: all depend on subversion of expectations for the “wow” effect. But there can be no surprise unless we know what to expect. So we also want to (think we) know just what we’re getting, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to be surprised.
Does that make us toddlers? I think it makes us humans.
There used to be areas of art where the goal was to attain some kind of objective perfection rather than to move reader/listener/viewer in unexpected directions. Today we consider that a kind of sport, not art. And if somebody dares to do it ways that do not fit into a competitive framework, then it’s still not art but mere hackwork.
December 27th, 2008 at 10:53 am
“The congloms are the ones afraid to greenlight anything that’s not a sequel, prequel, remake (sorry, “reimagining”) or tween novel adaptation.”
No.
There’s been more original IP produced this year by the major “congloms” than any year previous. The point, ultimately, is the people who throw down this arrogant, anti-wealth, commerce-is-king rant aren’t actually looking at what the real and big picture is.
December 27th, 2008 at 11:05 am
When I don’t know what people are talking about I usually throw in the word existentialism, I diplay a microemotion of pure torture, regain my composure…and then people leave me alone.
Hey! I thought this was an acting blog.
December 27th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
In response to: “We’re toddlers that way.”
Postmodernism doesn’t work in the long run. If everything is a reference to a reference to a reference, as so much creative work is currently, then audiences are forced to either “get” everything, or else be alienated by everything. It may work in the short term for a target audience, but the work won’t hold up for long. Once the references become irrelevant, the work built on references becomes, likewise, irrelevant.
If screenwriters wish to make an art out of their craft, they’re best served by returning to themes that are more universal and collective, rather than purely contemporary and specific. Think if Shakespeare had wasted his talent solely on referring to things that were trendy for his time; his work would have vanished in obscurity.
There’s no mandate saying we have to pander to child-like audiences. We can step up, reach a little higher, and ask them to do the same.
December 27th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
In response to Jeff Harrell:
When I was in a film crit class in college we looked at the five stages in the development of a genre. The two I remember most clearly are 4 and 5: parody, and then genre blend. Once the genre’s conventions have been identified and they start to become cliche (stages 2 and 3, if I remember correctly), parodies of the genre will emerge, followed by what you refer to here as springboarding – taking the conventions you expect from one and combining it with something else. John mentioned the Twilight series – I’m not too familiar with it, but from what I know, I would suggest hat after a slew of bad Freddy Prinze Jr movies, we got “Not Another Teen Movie” to thoroughly break the genre, and now here we are, in full-fledged blend mode.
While I certainly see your argument regarding The Dark Knight, I don’t think we’ve quite approached that point yet. <a href=”http://dkfwriting.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/review-the-spirit/>The Spirit is the first comic book film I can think of to approach parody, by thoroughly embracing the campy cliches of the superhero genre. I think the springboarding that occurs in The Dark Knight is more a function of the source material – after all, this is “The Dark Knight,” “The Detective.” I suppose that doesn’t change the nature of the film, which is a gritty psychological suspense thriller, in which the hero wears a rubber suit and the villain wears makeup.
I guess I’m just wondering what that has to do with postmodernism.
December 27th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Alien VS Predator has always been weird to me. I always figured the two would LIKE each other.
http://alienlovespredator.com/
December 27th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Schmetterling, I think it’s actually a Screenwriting blog, but Mr. August can clarify if he likes.
Michael: I don’t think a reference to a reference is necessarily a bad thing. Sure, no one wants to see a remake of the Godfather (because why do we need that when the original is so good) but if someone can give me the story of the Godfather with a Mexican immigrant in America, or a Tibetan in China, or even androids (And now my mind is whirring with the thought of an android mafia), then I’m intrigued because I want to see what they do.
The Lion King is Hamlet, but told in such a way that at first you can’t believe it’s Hamlet. And it’s also a magnificent movie, but that’s not because it’s The Lion King: Based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The reference is blurred or obscured and slightly vague. I mean, I certainly didn’t pick up on it when I was 12 years old watching it in the theater.
I think I’m getting off topic. Actually, now it just feels like we’re discussing Hero With A Thousand Faces. I don’t know. Maybe the stories stay the same and the way we present them is what changes. Keeping up with the times. I’ve rambled for far too long. Take what you wish.
December 27th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
If everything is a reference to a reference to a reference, as so much creative work is currently, then audiences are forced to either “get” everything, or else be alienated by everything.
But everything was a reference to a reference to a reference even in Shakespeare’s day. No one was coming up with “new” stories or characters back then; they were co-opting old and familiar tales and tweaking them a bit for the times. West Side Story did that with Romeo and Juliet, but Romeo and Juliet had already done it with Tristan and Isolde. In essence, culture was “postmodern” before there was even such a thing as “modern.”
December 27th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Shakespeare made tons of references to current and past work that would have been known to all those watching his plays and would have been considered trendy and hip. But if the references aren’t picked up then you won’t laugh at them, however this does not mean they can’t still enjoy the rest of the work. The basic stories were known since ancient times and haven’t changed to this day.
Now since I think of Post Modernism as being a reaction to what is modern then this makes perfect sense. I mean in architecture it was a reaction to the bland style of buildings that were considered modern at the time. So in this sense it could be post modernism.
Though I feel since this is the same idea where ads take from art and artist take from ads that they aren’t commenting on the modern style but now just co-opt other work for a different style or idea. This is similar to the people/person who told copy-write law with disney characters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo.
We might be in the age of (co-opt) or DRM. Since this has become a style in and of itself.
December 27th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Michael…
I really don’t think its in debate whether or not it “works” anymore.
Watch ADAPTATION very very very carefully and you’ll see (in exactly the way Tom Stoppard always does) that there comes a point in self-reference where it simply becomes too good not to do…
“Fuck the audience if they can’t see it… I have to do it anyway… because it MEANS something now” -syndrome.
Kaufman’s character is Cage… playing Kaufman… in a war in his own head with the hollywood formula… on the set of Being John Malkovich… where a real actor, is being referenced, in the terror of what its like to get into his own head… all done in a self cannibalistic hollywood formula.
And by SELF, I mean, any aspect of our collective self…
Half of Saturday Night Live is referential. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is ENTIRELY referential. And Shakespeare In Love is… A man who writes plays, where men, dressed as women, play women, who dress as men… dressing up as a woman, to chaperon a woman who is dressing as a man, to be in a play where men dress as women.
Its just a word. When it works, it works because of good writing. When it doesn’t, its because of bad writing.
December 27th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I’m sorry if this starts an OT flame war, but I have to say:
It’s taken me a year to figure out why I’m the only one who disliked “The Dark Knight” and I think Mr. August nailed it. “Batman Begins” is a Batman movie– it’s all Batman, all the time. You’re supposed to empathize with him and understand his journey. But “The Dark Knight” is a big serious movie with Batman mixed in. If I wanted to see a big serious movie I might have liked it, but the whole point of my enjoyment for “Batman Begins” was me liking Batman. And “The Dark Knight” could have replaced Batman for Spiderman; it would have made no difference.
December 28th, 2008 at 7:39 am
I still can’t figure out the term ‘postmodernism’ but I do get ‘mash-up,’ and Slumdog Millionaire fits the bill: a Bollywood-Hollywood hybrid 2/3rds English and 1/3rd Hindi, a film that introduces the modern India to global audiences using a classic Dickensian story. The world is a mash-up, and our films will certainly reflect that fact if they mean to remain relevant.
December 28th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Great post. The Watchmen is (at least in part) a postmodern deconstruction of superhero archetypes, so it will be interesting to see how the general public reacts to it (assuming first that it’s true to its source and second that Fox doesn’t prevent its distribution).
December 28th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
There’s a difference between co-opting old story lines and retelling them in different guises, which is a legitimate and unavoidable part of storytelling, and basing your work largely on references to other work. Kaufman’s ‘Adaptation’ is funny if you know what he’s talking about, but it still works even if you don’t, because the point isn’t entirely the reference, but the story that includes references. Same with Shakespeare.
Saturday Night Live is a good example of what doesn’t work in the long term – it might be funny now, but decades from now, to another generation, it will be meaningless. That’s why they make new episodes every week. If you build your house upon the sand, to paraphrase, it won’t stay standing long. Similarly, if your work’s foundation is a set of inside jokes (or references), then you’re limiting it to a small and fleeting audience. Ever hung out with a group of people you don’t know well who won’t stop making inside jokes? It’s one thing when you’re inside, and nothing when you’re not.
December 29th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Thats all true… I’m just saying that Rosencrants and Guildenstern and Shakespeare In Love are the supreme examples of work that is definitely based entirely on work that came before them… and no… nobody can honestly understand them without the prior material… but nonetheless they work completely. Simply because A) the audience in possession of the prior material is so huge… and B) half of the intelligent/wit feeling comes from knowing that not everyone gets it… (its just his way of having the audience feel superior the whole time). And when your target audience feels smart BECAUSE they get it… and your peripheral audience feels that they’d get bonus smartypants points if they DID get it, and 20 years later its still going strong… ya… it works.
December 29th, 2008 at 7:56 am
You seem glad to have missed out on the ad world.
You should be. It’s just like the Charlie Brown mash-up suggests. Only in three dimensions. With the post-modern irony.
December 29th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I loved this discussion.
Chris, thanks for the Godfather in another setting commentary. It reminds me of how much story can be mined simply by taking a brilliant existing plot and giving it the specificity (and therefore the uniqueness and originality) that a new setting and world impliesl.
Nick, loved your comments too, especially linking Romeo and Juliet to Tristan and Isolde. Of course! Thanks.
And Dave, thanks too. Loved Slumdog, and of course it’s Dickens.
I tend not to look for these connections but they’re important, so I’m thrilled to have gotten so many from one discussion.
As for postmodernism, the term always makes me think of Hegel, Derrida, et al (all the postmodern critical theorist types). Their project was to deconstruct, whereas is to construct. And since not much is created ex nihilo, that means we borrow or steal. I agree with Synthian that how good it is depends upon how well it’s done. And, of course, sometimes its just for fun (Saturday Night Live) and it doesn’t matter that it’s not immortal.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Think about all the things we as writers assume our audience already knows when they come to the material. At one end of the spectrum is the supremely obvious — we can safely assume the audience knows about gravity. At the other end of the spectrum are the deep references caught and recognized only by remote and tiny subcultures or nested niches — the in-jokes.
In between are many other degrees of referential safety. What can a writer safely assume the audience knows? Employing references that are less “safe to assume” can make writing feel plugged in and lively. So, too, the audience, if they get it. By sharing unsafe assumptions, the audience that gets the references comes out the other side feeling better connected with itself — that is, with its other members. The people who don’t get it may not even realize there were references along the road, at all.
A film that’s safely referential is comfort food — sports movies where the underdogs win in the end, romcoms where the meet-cute leads to a smiling ending, revenge pictures where wrongdoers don’t just get defeated but comeuppance. A film that deeply references foreign cultures (or subcultures, or histories, or sciences) is either a curio or For Other People. Good references in the middle ground can make a work feel accessible but provocative, which is almost always good, isn’t it?
Postmodernism, then, is about catching something right before it passes out of the popular awareness and injecting new meaning in it. This can be done well or badly, obviously, and still be postmodern. So it’s about timing — there’s a sweet spot when pop-culture material is recognizable to, but underappreciated by, a lot of people. That’s the postmodernist’s target.
It occurs to me, writing this, that postmodernism done well sends the referenced work on its own little character arc, in which the first Act begins with the familiar starting point of, say, The Charlie Brown Christmas Special and the final Act ends with that familiar “character” (the book/movie/whatever itself) changed — by our experience.
I’ll write more about this, I think.
December 29th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Hey John, I know someone threw out the term neopostmodern, or something, but I believe what comes (or has come) after postmodern thinking is referred to as transmodernism. If you look at the wikipedia definition, I think you’ll find a similar idea to what you are describing.
In a sense, transmodernism is a mash-up of modern and postmodern thought.
And in that regard, I think you are dead on in your assessment of Batman and Twilight as transmodern works.
December 29th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
All this highfalutin talk, and my big question is, am I the only one tired to death of making cartoon characters swear? That Charlie Brown thing was awful, I can’t decide if I can bring myself to finish the last two thirds of it.
As for Dark Knight, I liked that it was a serious movie with Batman thrown in. I just didn’t like that it was so sloppily written and made, it had moments of absolute brilliance but other parts that were extremely rough, almost begging for another draft before they shot the thing.
While Iron Man was much more conventional, the execution was spot on throughout. It’s a tough call for me which I like better – TDK was way more ambitious, which I really respect…but it failed to meet those ambitions in many ways for me.
And thanks for bringing up Shakespeare in Love, a perfect example of this sort of postmodern reference raised to genius level.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I think the point made above by LadyUranus is a great one: Whether a story is good or not can depend greatly on one’s expectations. Pizza is not objectively better than a cheeseburger, but if what you’re really craving is a cheeseburger, the best pizza in the world can still disappoint.
For my part, I don’t really care for superhero movies. Sure, there are exceptions; I confessed above that I enjoyed “Iron Man.” The first “Spider-Man” was a good flick, and the original “Superman: The Movie” can do no wrong in my book. But as a rule, I’m more likely to enjoy straight dramas than movies that fit into what I can only call the poorly defined “comic book” genre.
So I liked “The Dark Knight.” I wanted pizza, expected to get a cheeseburger, and ended up having a pizza with some cheeseburger-inspired toppings. It worked for me, big time.
I’m not sure it would have worked the other way around. In fact, I’m positive it wouldn’t, because it didn’t. The last-but-one Batman movie, “Batman Begins,” was allegedly gritty and naturalistic, but I actually found it to be bland and disappointing. It was too silly to be realistic, but took itself too seriously to be fun. For me, it fell into an uncanny valley of sorts, and I deemed it a failure. I’ve had plenty of time to come to grips with the fact that I’m in the minority on this.
What we’re really talking about here, though, is subtext. Imagine you’ve never seen, or even heard of, Charlie Brown. Does the video up yonder “work” for you? You can appreciate “The Lion King” without making the connection to “Hamlet.” In fact, since it was nominally a kids’ movie, it’s fair to guess that a lot of people appreciated “The Lion King” without ever hearing of “Hamlet.” The parallels to a classic are one layer of subtext, not part of the text itself.
Contrast that with the “Noun Movie” series, where the allusions are right up front, and absolutely necessary to appreciating (I feel like I need a shower just from typing that) the work. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and there’s nothing there for you.
I dunno where I’m going with this. I’ve managed to dive pretty deep inside my own bellybutton by this point.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Later that same day, I’m reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and see him define postmodernism as “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.” Alternately, he offers, “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, product.”
This seems to suggest that prior to modern art, artists did not think of their work as product or, consciously, as art-in-the-making. As though artists of old painted or sculpted or wrote only in a kind of euphoric trance — until we sullied all of that with modern commercialism. It used to be that artists would say, “Yes, I suppose I would like to eat and have somewhere to sleep, but really I want to be heard!” Isn’t that right?
Except that implies a weak understanding of how patronage has long worked and seems reasonably dispelled by the existence of art studios run by the Masters for the purposes of recreating some of their works for sale to customers who couldn’t afford to be patrons.
Just saying.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:55 am
I’m won’t invoke specific tedious Frenchmen, but it’s interesting to note that the Charlie Brown Christmas special was in fact commissioned by Coca Cola, was an absolute rush job, and there used to be Coca Cola signage in the intro part. So the mash up “text” (ha!) is in some ways closer to reality.
(Not a Charlie Brown expert, my child likes it and that info is in the “making of” section of the DVD.)
Also, could we declare a ten year moratorium on the term “post-modern”? I think if everyone stopped using it, it might go away. Then a lot of bad art, architecture and general culture might also go away, as it would stripped of the protective and obfuscating cover of “post modern”. Being post any coherent aesthetic it lacks definition. As it lacks definition it is impossible to criticize on its merits, or lack thereof.
December 31st, 2008 at 5:50 am
I present the following clip as pretty much my entire view on postmodernism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaVaJgeBH4
December 31st, 2008 at 10:45 am
I am trying to come up with something new but there are only 26 letters in the English language and they’ve all been used before. And no, I’m not going to learn Chinese.
January 1st, 2009 at 2:42 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36NyoChXmiY
January 1st, 2009 at 6:11 pm
I’m seconding the motion for a ten-year moratorium…
…let me just finish my Tang, turn off my Rock-Me-Amadeous record and we’ll draw up the proposal on dito-paper.
And for those in need of an undeniable example of postmodern cool… I present Ernie Cline: THE GEEK WANTS OUT.
http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/
(After an exhaustive study of postmodernism and other things that don’t matter, Ernest Cline’s head exploded. He then wrote the film Fan Boys.)
January 3rd, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Eventually mash-ups will lose their novelty, and become just another thing (not that they’re exactly new — but software like Premiere and Final Cut make them easier to make, and the Internet makes them easier to distribute to more people). Right now it’s the “hot new thing” like full CG features, Web serials, and yet another stab at stereo 3D. Something else shiny and distracting, perhaps even something old made new again, will eventually catch everyone’s attention. We’re kind of like cats that way.
Recycling of culture has been going on for a long time (among early classic films can be found adaptations of stage plays, books, national myths, etc.), but there is also ultimately always going to be a place for new material — regardless of how much like toddlers we may all be.
And genre mixing (and other more subtle and less parodic cousins of the mash-up), like in John’s Batman example, is one way in which new material emerges while still maintaining a relationship to the familiar.
And to the naysayers above: not all postmodern art and culture is bad. Dismissing an entire segment of culture offhand is just plain silly.
January 4th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
There is no pool ad people will not piss in. It’s enough to make Cory Doctorow himself serve a DCMA take-down notice on these d-bags.