absolutely ludicrous

November 9, 2024 1:30 AM

Watching Rocky IV in 2024, however, was clarifying to me in the ongoing debate around "21st century cultural stasis." The basic argument is that culture is less healthy because there are fewer significant aesthetic changes. This implies a healthy ecosystem produces a large quantity of relics, as new styles outmode old ones. Songs that are "so Eighties" imply that the Nineties rejected all of those artistic choices. In the logic of the stasis narrative, if The Bourne Identity doesn’t scream 2002 with the same volume as Rocky IV screams 1985, culture must be slowing down. from Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV [Culture]
posted by chavenet (15 comments total)

ludacris/wiki
posted by HearHere at 3:20 AM on November 9 [1 favorite]

When it comes to Rocky IV, I think it's less that we're seeing The Most 1985 Film Ever and more that we're seeing The Most Sylvester Stallone 1985 Film Ever. Although he is clearly trying to make a commercial film, the pulpy choices, the cheesy choices, the frankly bizarre choices, and the obviously heartfelt choices (you may be so cruel hearted as to laugh at Rocky's speech to the Russian audience at the end; reader, I am not) are all there because a fantastically successful filmmaker was allowed to do whatever the fuck he wanted, for ill or good. As the author of this piece alludes to, the main difference now is that this rarely happens today, for the very reason that studios want to make movies that are dully, predictably, overwhelmingly profitable. Sure, Rocky IV was a hit, but would a studio make a lot of money trying to make movies like it? How could they even try to make more movies like this?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:09 AM on November 9 [6 favorites]

They Make Faster and Furiousest 14, The Stathamator: Stathamax, Star Wars: Subuniverse Merch Saga, etc.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:44 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Recently I've been fascinated with imagining what it would have been like to live through different eras of human history, so this post is very timely for me. It was prompted by a documentary series I saw on NHK. One of the commentators claimed that science fiction couldn't have been invented before the late 1800s because before then the rate of progress was so slow that you could reasonably expect to grow old and die in the same world that you were born in, and therefore there was no cause to extrapolate progress into the future. (I'm paraphrasing.) Reading this article, I'm forced to wonder whether I'm just happening to live through a period of history with an anomalously high rate of change in culture. Not just popular culture: the civil rights advancements of my youth being turned back, the end of Moore's Law making computer improvements more incremental, etc. What a strange time to be alive.
posted by The genius who rejected Anno's budget proposal. at 5:15 AM on November 9 [6 favorites]

Just reading the summary, it sounds like the thesis is embedded with the value assumption that culture should innovate, rather preserve. That, to me, seems to be at odds with the very definition of what culture is: the method and means by which information can be preserved and transmitted across a population and across generations.
posted by CookTing at 5:40 AM on November 9 [5 favorites]

This seems just wrong, especially when it comes to film the first two decades of the 20th century have lots of clear cultural markers. Basically movies are matrixified and pulp fictionified in the oughts. Bourne Identity is clearly deeply indebted to the Matrix. SO much desaturation, and digital editing has become practical even though they’re still shooting film which leads to a distinctive editing style (cut cut cut cut cut lots of cuts that were impractical before). There is also a very recognizable impact of 9/11 and the Iraq War on 2000s American cultural output. And other interesting but entirely of their time things are going on: can you imagine Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Lost in Translation in any other decade? Both of them somehow are specifically movies of the internet before the smartphone. The real change in the 2010s is the marvelification of everything, and the full embrace of digital production. Digital film completely transforms the color palette and balance of light and dark in film, the 2010s become the era of “bisexual” lighting. And the era of the smartphone. There’s probably more to the 10s but i still feel to close to it to recognize all its idiosyncrasies. Really you can trace all of these elements through just by watching the multi decade Fast and Furious series which basically embraces each cultural shift through the past 20 years. Tell me the first one doesn’t make you cringe a bit at the 2000s of it all, while the last few are pure spasms of the past decade of superhero movies. Anyway culture is continuing to change just in different ways. Much more of the change is just happening online now
posted by dis_integration at 5:42 AM on November 9 [16 favorites]

Part of me thinks the decentralization of media and therefore Art cannot be a departure from an agreed-upon aesthetic base if there is no shared baseline.
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:46 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Just a nagging thought: if you still think the 21st century is not producing films that are instantly tied to the year they were made, please go watch Jon favreaus 2014 movie Chef, which is the most 2010s movie you will ever find: twitter is a central plot point, and the whole thing revolves around food trucks and unselfconscious cultural appropriation, a kind of gen x aging masculinity, all of which will permit archaeologists to date a fragment of it exactly 10,000 years from now
posted by dis_integration at 6:25 AM on November 9 [6 favorites]

Also ETEWAF - Everything There Ever Was Available Forever

It's easier to see parallels / copying of past styles and influences on media because most media - currently - is available to anyone with an internet connection

Comparing the colour grading of films is a thing film nerds couldn't do without vast resources and time until relatively recently.

Same with any media.

Tracking down music samples wasn't easy to do for non professional's, yet by 2002, most commercial songs played in public places were identifiable (with a small degree of error) by Shazam !

Wanna see an iconic film clip from any English language film ? It's probably on YouTube.

Wanna download most 'Classical' literature - that's in public domain? - Gutenberg, or Standard ebooks, or archive.org

Is everything *ever* available?.

No. [Also Modern 'Lost' Media is Definitely a concerning Phenomena]

But most of the pop culture things that people want to discuss are.
posted by Faintdreams at 6:37 AM on November 9 [4 favorites]

One place to look for very of-the-moment video is TV advertising. I remember being in elementary school in the 90s and watching some video in class that was taped off TV within our short lifetimes, and everyone being fascinated by the commercials because they had changed so much in a few years.

But also, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec are as much of their era as Rocky IV or the X-Files. We’ll say the same about The Curse, Ted Lasso, and Slow Horses, and 2020s streaming docuseries.

And yeah, a lot has moved online, especially in terms of aesthetic earnestness and maximalism. If I say Tumblr circa 2014 or “narwhal bacon” era Reddit, people know what I mean. Dril tweets had their era which is fading. 2000s Facebook party photos. There were the earnest posts with a hand clap emoji between every word, and instagram food and high filter posts. Memes have evolved. I think we forget how many eras of online culture we’ve passed through because nobody is looking at old social media posts the way we do old movies.

Tiktok of today will look very dated in a decade and has its own flavors of maximalism. White Americans’ approaches to race will look as ridiculous as ever in hindsight.
posted by smelendez at 6:57 AM on November 9 [5 favorites]

the very definition of what culture is: the method and means by which information can be preserved and transmitted across a population and across generations.

It's a definition, I guess, but hardly the very definition.

Alternate definition, from Brain Eno: ’Culture’ is everything we don’t have to do.

.
posted by Ayn Marx at 7:32 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Following on what dis_integration posted above: consider the film Missing (2023). A young woman searches for her mother who has disappeared in Columbia. The woman doesn't leave her bedroom for most of the movie, instead conducting her search via internet resources, most of which are real or at least plausible. No spoilers, but the film sticks the landing with the woman's last internet trick. Very 2023.
posted by SPrintF at 8:42 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]

My wife has been background watching through "Bones" recently, and I've been catching the odd episode while she does so, and last night there was an episode on that was focused on Japanese culture, and featured a subplot about the main characters trying to figure out the gender of a non-binary guest character. It was offensive on both aspects, but the degree to which it was offensive, and the ways in which it was trying to be current, made me able to peg when it was produced to the year (2009), which amused me, but also surprised me, because I think about the thesis of the original article here a lot.

I need to ask my niblings (all in their late teens to early twenties) how much they see cultural aesthetics as changing over their lifetimes, because it could well just be something that I stopped noticing as much in adulthood. But also, those lines have always been blurrier than we want in terms of the boxes we try to put them in: Fifties aesthetics lasted well into the Kennedy years, the sixties aesthetics we remember are largely attributable to counter-culture iconography that was more memorable than it was ubiquitous, the tones and styles of the seventies" are largely the same as in the early eighties, giving way to the neons that would define the late eighties and early nineties, etc. I've been on one of my semi-regular Buffy background watches lately, and hoo-boy is that a cultural relic, but it's one from a changing period, where one of the first episodes features this classic moment while the last one is making winking references to Homestar Runner.

And I have to wonder how much of this question is just looking at the wrong media. Like, at what point did ballet stop being a reflection of its era and calcify into a reflection of its era of cultural relevance? Are we seeing this happen to some degree with film, novels, and pop-music right now? And are the real media that "matter" today, such that folks in ten to twenty years will be able to point to them as cheesy relics, to be found on TikTok, YouTube, etc.? I'm guessing yeah, probably. (Television is still pretty healthy in this regard, I think, at least for now. The streaming era demanded so much content at such a steady clip that it can't help but be diverse enough to capture a wide range of the zeitgeist and disposable enough to feel time-stamped. But that may well change soon too. TV production is slowing down right now.)
posted by Navelgazer at 9:19 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]

Ayn Marx, it seems people here are using the word "culture" for style. Far be it from me to prescribe meaning, but this is a very different conversation than what came to my mind. And to me the summary still begs the question, to what extent are is changes in style reflective of changes in culture?
posted by CookTing at 10:23 AM on November 9 [1 favorite]

I would take all the rubbish 80's movies over the all the superhero crap.
posted by night_train at 2:08 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]