=culture =media
At one point, I thought I'd try
joining a local book group. One local book group was reading Ready Player
One, so I got a copy.
I did not go to that book group.
In the book Ready Player One, the
main character becomes wealthy and famous by knowing a lot about 1980s
American popular culture. It was written as wish fulfillment by the author,
Ernest Cline, a manchild that wants to believe knowing a lot about 1980s
American popular culture makes him better than other people.
It's not
important in itself; I'm using it here as a symbol and case study of
problems in current American culture.
Ready Player One
is not a good book. Given those problems with it, why did many people
like it? Why did it become a movie that was financially successful?
We can look at positive reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, but most of them
aren't very helpful:
here's one such
example from Patrick Rothfuss, a notable fantasy author. (Huh, he
apparently wrote
this instead of finishing the series he's known for, and particularly
liked this quote.
I'm now going to assume he's a bad writer.) Anyway, many of the positive
reviews have no substantive content or are objectively wrong, which makes
this a bit harder.
Having looked at a bunch of positive reviews now, I think the reasons for them can be distilled down to:
- People with
positive feelings for things they liked as a kid feel validated by them
being important in a book. (But if things are bad, then people don't deserve
validation for liking them. Also, people might sometimes deserve validation
for understanding and appreciating things, but that's
different from approval that's socially-determined rather than based on an
individual appreciation.)
- Video games are culturally important now, and
there's a (culturally western) tendency to seek authenticity by going back
to origins of existing things, so Pong and Zork are more "authentic" than
modern games and thus liking them is a way of trying to seem cultured. (But
you really don't need to play Pong and Zork, even if you're designing
games.)
- Every time another work set in a video game world comes out,
somehow there are lots of people who never encountered that concept and
think it's amazing. (You could call this the "SAO effect".)
There's a hedonistic worldview that exists ("Let people enjoy things!") where stories are good or bad only insofar as people enjoy them or don't. I disagree with that for 3 reasons.
reason 1
Once upon a time, people told
stories about great hunters and warriors, and the kids hearing those stories
would often grow up to become hunters and warriors.
Today, people
tell stories of superheroes, but you can't grow up to be a superhero. Little
girls watch Disney movies and parents humor them as they pretend to be
princesses, but disappointment with that is inevitable and can be bigger
than the enjoyment that was had.
Successful and notable people can
fairly often tell you about how they're in some way fulfilling their
(uncommon) childhood dream. That satisfaction of alignment between work and
childhood stories was once more common, and has mostly been lost.
This even happened to me: at 8, I wanted to understand how computers worked,
read Feynman books, and decided I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, but
when I heard about the state of string theory, I decided I wanted to be an
inventor instead. But "inventor" is (like "superhero" and "astronaut") a
mythology rather than an occupation. You can be a researcher and work on
what you're assigned by executives, and you can aspire to be a professor and
spend your days writing grant proposals and telling grad students to work on
whatever gets approved, but those aren't quite the same thing.
reason 2
If a culture has an oral history consisting of a corpus of stories, there's a big difference between a child asking for their favorite story from it and them getting an original story designed to maximize their enjoyment. I think much of the enjoyment that people get from stories that appeal to them is based on (on some level) thinking those stories were created for some purpose other than just appealing to them.
reason 3
As creative works build upon
their predecessors, they also have an obligation to be something that can be
built upon.
References to past works that understand them and use
them as shorthand for some meaning can be a foundation for further
creativity, but empty
name-dropping simply for a sense of recognition and validation can't.
Don Quixote and Shakespeare referenced now-obscure events, and the Bible
references history now lost, but if those references were as hollow as those
in Ready Player One, well, culture would have progressed differently. Not
every book can be as influential as Don Quixote was, but I think fiction
authors have an obligation to at least attempt to write something worth
extending, something with an original idea, something creative.
Hollywood has gotten good at
making 3d animation and combining it with video footage, but prominent
movies are mostly remakes of things from decades ago with improved visuals.
It's interesting to compare the density of ideas in those to smaller
independent projects like, say,
Dynamo Dream.
Producers fund remakes because those have been selling better than
big-budget attempts at original stories, but that's because the writers
hired are bad.
Game of Thrones was successful because it followed a
mediocre series of fantasy books and had good costumes and effects and
acting; when the Hollywood people tried to extend the story with their own
writing, the result left even fans of the TV series mocking it and calling
for Benioff and Weiss to resign. Then, Benioff and Weiss got a $200M deal
with Netflix. I understand the logic, but the people who control the money
really need to learn that the names at the top of credits often aren't the
real reason for successes...
...well, also, the lucrative kinds of leadership in Hollywood are more about connections than competence. For an example of what happens when you make something successful but aren't part of the Hollywood ingroup, we could look at what the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender have been up to:
As of 2015,
Konietzko was working on writing and illustrating a sci-fi graphic novel
series, Threadworlds, that is to be published by First Second Books, but
there is no release date.
Konietzko is also active in photography and
has a band, Ginormous, with which he has released several albums, including
Our Ancestors' Intense Love Affair and At Night, Under Artificial Light.
In September 2018, it was announced that Konietzko and DiMartino would
serve as executive producers and showrunners for Netflix's upcoming
live-action series based on Avatar: The Last Airbender. On August 12, 2020,
Konietzko and DiMartino revealed on social media that they have both
departed the show, due to creative differences with the Netflix team.
I can't say I'm surprised about "creative differences with the Netflix team" - maybe they were creatively dwarfed by talent Netflix brought in from Neo Yokio. Well, uh, could be worse, I guess.
When criticizing media like this, I think it's only fair to note something that you like unironically. Ready Player One is a book, and The Man Without Qualities is a book that I like. Is that unfair? Maybe it has to be some kind of SF/fantasy adventure with video game elements. OK then...Worth the Candle? You can read that for free if you want. Then, if we consider Neo Yokio "an American TV show" and Ex-Arm "a SF anime" I guess I'll go with Malcolm in the Middle and Planetes.