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Some musings on ephemeral popAugust 21st, 2006 |
The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations.
In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” The Brosnan Bond movies of course answered that question; the 1995-era sense that history had ended was turned on its ear in not too many more years.
In 1987, the cover was Timothy Dalton. The cover boldly argues “Those Silly Simpsons: Why Tracey Ullman’s Cartoon Clan Deserves Its Own Show.” Today, of course, most folks who watch The Simpsons probably don’t remember that it originated on Ullman’s ill-fated sketch comedy show. If they remember Tracey Ullman.
The cover also asks “Is Madonna Over?” way too early, but given the other evidence on the covers, it’s a reasonable question. What we’re seeing here is the way in which pop culture has real trouble seeing past its own nose. Did email jokes truly “forward” the future of comedy, as this cover asserts? Nope. But things close up to us are magnified, and things that recede from view are really easily forgotten.
The next cover hammers this home: 1973, with Roger Moore. “Helen Reddy Teams up With Flip Wilson.” “On the Set of a Very Special Maude.” And in a particularly poignant portrayal of the era, the double dose of irrelevancy of “Why We Love Jonathan Livingston Seagull: An Exclusive by the Carpenters.” At the time the issue came out, Karen Carpenter had had enormous success, was riding high with one of the top-selling greatest hits albums ever, was unknowingly at the peak of her career, as The Carpenters would face lower sales in the mid-70s — and she had less than ten years to live. As far as Jonathan Livingston Seagull, well, never mind.
Now we move before I was born, going back to 1969. The deeply ironic cover proclaims, “THE NEW BOND: George Lazenby Takes Over As 007 — And He’s Here To Stay!” I suspect most people haven’t even seen the single Lazenby Bond film; and yet Lazenby is improbably hip as he has done voicework for Yu Yu Hakusho. Other items on the cover include Gore Vidal pontificating on whether Easy Rider is art — some things never change — and a behind-the-scenes look at the amazing special effects of The Love Bug.
By the time we get to the Connery cover from 1963, proclaiming Bond “President Kennedy’s Favorite Secret Agent,” and a little blurb about how “perky Jane Fonda” is going to “follow in daddy’s footsteps,” we’re into a realm of historical artifacts; Connery remains a vital and admired presence, but this is a cover 40 years old, and the small headline about “Lesley Gore’s Secret Sadness” seems sadder because the whole context is lost to most of us — probably even to Lesley Gore fans, at this point.
Now, this excursion did have a point. Change happens, and usually faster than we quite know. We’re discussing some elements of that change in the thread on HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray, for example, and one thing that is clear is that not only is the tech changing faster than we quite know what to do with it, it’s also (as the science fiction has it) a poorly distributed future. But technical change is is many ways the easy one. Pop culture — and in this I include games as well as movies, music, books, and TV — is far more ephemeral, far more self-referential and demanding to follow, far faster in pace.
Right now, the hot game on XBox 360 is — pop quiz, do you know the answer? Well, Dead Rising is getting the ink. But no, maybe it’s still Chromehounds. Next week, what will it be? And yet the experience of playing on the 360 is also an experience of launching Joust (a game 24 years old); or Crystal Quest, which I first played on a black and white Mac; or Geometry Wars, which first saw the light of day as an Easter Egg.
Like technology, pop culture accretes. If you have the urge to check out how the modern police procedural developed, you can get the DVD set of Hill Street Blues. If you want to lord it over other commenters in a thread on Joystiq, you compare David Jaffe and Tim Schafer unfavorably to Dani Bunten (I actually saw this the other day). But pop culture is also so dense, so fast moving, that it’s easy for almost anyone to have a few memories that are so obscure that they generate a sort of underground fandom, popping up in force only at booths at geek conventions.
In a world like this, Dead Rising is destined for much the same trivial ending as that article on Lesley Gore. And it’s only going to get worse, as the volume of pop confections increases and the pace of their release increases. At any given time, pretty much everything in the pop cultural landscape is doomed to irrelevancy; the landscape is actually a landfill that hasn’t figured itself out yet.
There are basically two accomodations to reach with this, to my mind. One is to embrace the decay, to realize that despite the fact that new technologies are going to allow us to preserve all of this irrelevancy, keeping around forever pristine copies of “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes, the #1 song in the country at Christmas of 1979 — despite this fact, nobody is going to care. So you live and work in pop culture very much for today, and perhaps for the fond memory that maybe it conjures up from time to time in someone who was touched by it.
The other is to say pop culture can go hang. This seems, to some degree, to be what at least a couple of ex-Bonds have done; neither Connery nor Brosnan seem to be particularly driven by box office in their subsequent choices. I have real doubts that Brosnan’s Evelyn will live as long as his turns as Bond, but it was certainly more heartfelt, and as I result, I can remember the plot better (frankly, the Bond films mostly mush together for me).
Either way, they both demand a sort of perspective, a perspective that was perhaps easier in the days before all this… stuff could get preserved indefinitely. In the days before recordings, this all was truly ephemeral. It evanesced the moment you walked out of the theater, the moment the song ended. Shakespeare’s company kept dozens of plays about ready to be performed on short notice — and when the Globe burned down, the great fear must have been that the only full copies might be lost (and indeed, we have lost Cardenio and others). This sort of essential disposability must affct our relationship to pop culture, and give us a very different perspective on following it obsessively.
Today, I see that happening with the indie games, which may be months of work for an hour’s amusement. And one of them ost interesting things I see surrounding that scene is the comment that “these aren’t real games” — as if because of their very ephemerality, their smaller feature set and limited scope, they are somehow less of themselves, perhaps just as many music fans might regard The Carpenters as “not a real band.”
Of course, this is silly. The Carpenters touched plenty of folks, and a casual puzzle game is just as much of a “real” game as Dead Rising. And in 100 years, nobody will give a damn about any of it, except those fans who collect the retro, recapture their youth, or prefer to live in their pop cultural pocket, ignoring the swish and flow of pop around them as they cling instead to the familiar rocks of something they once knew and loved.
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[...] Some musings on ephemeral pop on Raph Koster Some musings on ephemeral pop on Raph Koster The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations. In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” [...] via Raph Koster [...]
[...] Raph Koster is one of my favourite bloggers. He was a lead designer on the best game of all time. His blog is nominally about games but he covers a lot of the surrounding territory too. Today’s post is about the recent history of pop culture as seen through the covers of Entertainment Weekly whenever a new actor took on the James Bond role. In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” [...]