Life as a Novelty

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I've been doing a lot of thinking, as I usually do either while working or just when I'm not at writing or at Church (which is why I watch and read so many adventure stories: I need a break!), about a subject I don't think gets touched on a whole lot these days. I've especially noticed it goes unmentioned when speaking with others about important subjects. That being the idea of novelty, in that it has become the default view of life to think of everything as frivolous.

For the longest time I've thought about why this subject particularly gets under my skin, and I think it's because it's gotten more obvious as the years have gone by, especially after the Greatest Generation left us years back. The world still feels a little bit smaller from their absence, and I think there are several reasons for that.

A while back I read a comment on X that read about how Baby Boomers thrive off of being subverted, as if it is their default view of life. This post was tagged with a video of a criminal chasing a scared young woman down an alleyway only to present "twist" at the end. He wasn't chasing her! This faux criminal was giving her a lost wallet she had dropped. The video was tagged with some sort of heartfelt message about how things in the world aren't so bad or whatever, which isn't an altogether incorrect message, but the problem is that this video gives a false impression of how the world works. This is not how a situation like this plays out in the real world.

If you lose your wallet and someone is going to give it back to you, they are not going to chase you down like a psychopath before having a whiplash mood change at the last moment as if they were some kind of joke on an old episode of The Simpsons. I know this because I've had someone return my wallet to me before. It's very anticlimactic, as it should be. This kind of situation isn't like a plot twist in some old movie. But the above video had to be presented a certain overblown way in order to get its (generally true) message across to its audience.

The above example highlights a problem, an expectation in reality that has been at the forefront of mass culture since at least the 1970s or so when Baby Boomers properly began making culture themselves. It's a the need to have reality subverted, for the natural order to be thrown off, to be tricked and shown how wrong "common" sense truly is. In other words, if you look at the history of mainstream and pop art (and yes, even "High" art) you can see how important escalating the shocking and explicit content is baked into how these stories are told. Everything needs to always be more extreme, ratcheting up to the point where there will be no taboos left. And when you get there eventually you have a free-for-all of atomized folks with different levels of power demanding their own morality reflected in the mainstream and what they dislike stamped out.

An obvious truth here should now be apparent to anyone younger than this generation. Escalation cannot continue on forever. Eventually you either run out of building materials and leave yourself stranded at sea, or you trip and fall down the other side into bottomless nihilism. Either way ends unsatisfactorily for all involved.

This is not referring to horror, specifically, but everything from rock music to romance stories. We talk about how "tame" things used to be when they weren't ever actually "tame" at all. We've simply desensitized ourselves to what normality is and can only feel new emotions by demanding to have our expectations be constantly subverted.

And now you know how we got a generation of people (well, at least a chunk of them) who think telling a normal story, but doing The Opposite of what a normal story would do, is peak art and creativity. It's been this way for ages. This is where the nadir of Subversion bottomed out in the 2010s to the point that even those who had swallowed it up to that time had enough. And now we sit unsure in the '20s just where to progress from here. After all, most of us have never known a climate of anything else, and those that did are long gone now.

So what do we do? The answer is to stop treating life, and entertainment, as a novelty.

Hope I Never Lose Myself

I'm not being facetious when I say part of the reason for the current state of rotting culture is that we have been dependent on this Baby Boomer idea of constant subversion and escalation to the point that there is nothing there anymore. It's over. There's nowhere left to go. The answer is not throwing away the past and only consuming the next escalated sensation in its place. That idea was never sustainable, and I don't know why we ever thought it was. We need another way.

So where do we go from here? You can't create an ecosystem where being surprised is the only thing that matters. Eventually you will train yourself like a viewer of an M. Night Shyamalan movie to the point where the "twist" is all you're looking for. This leads to expecting that twist above all and nothing else about the movie mattering. This is what actually damaged his career more than anything. Novelty above all is not sustainable. If we want to put away obsession with surprise as the greatest need, what else can we hope for? This is what we need to figure out.

Well, the point of stories, despite popular opinion, is not to Make You Think. It's not to entertain either, though that is a very appreciated side effect. Stories are meant to reinforce the Good, the True, and the Natural Order. They exist to boost and support a healthy society and allow it to keep functioning as it is. When you notice so much modern art is about destroying the past or the current norm for Something Better, it makes sense as to why so many argue between themselves over its value. The divisiveness is not a feature, it's very much a bug, at least for society itself. Those indulging in this very clearly see it a different way.

We live in a fractured society, therefore the power of our art is diluted from the get go. Artists and creators now have to work around both this hostile climate and the constant need for Surprise in a flooded market with no real way to reach a higher level of presence to pierce the wider mass audience that have been trained to think of everything as novelty. Of course, there isn't even a "mass audience" anymore and there hasn't been for decades, some would say since Cultural Ground Zero. Artists are hobbled from the start of their journey to the end while navigating a shattered field with no clear sign post or direction to grow in.

How do you relate to an audience that doesn't relate to each other anymore, never mind the competition glut of endless choice? Obviously there is no easy answer to that. I'm not even certain there's an answer at all, other than things will only begin to change when the culture itself finally does, and that can only happen when we leave Boomer World and the climate created by its living corpse. Things will change, they have to, but what comes next when it does?

Personally, I think the only way forward is to return to a healthy expectation in regards to art. Desire the Good, the True, and the Imaginative, and put aside the need for subversion and twists, since those are not the purpose of storytelling. Desire more from entertainment than mere Surprise and eventually artists will get the hint.

And, to be fair, I do see things changing. However, that change is coming mostly from the younger generations coming up. That cohort of Gen X, Y, and Millennial, all seem to be stuck in the same mode as ever, though there are exceptions. Half are adapting while the other half dig our heels in further. Soon enough we're all going to have to face the younger generations that have already moved on from the Land of Subversion.

We're not as clever as we think we are, and it's okay to admit it. But we still have to move on from that old idea of art as novelty.

Let me give an example of this refusal to let go.

Awhile back there was a new cartoon in crowdfunding about "adulting" and it was a typical animated sitcom of that The Simpsons started . . . from back in the 1990s. One of the comments on this project said, effectively, "Millennials should not be allowed to make cartoons anymore. They had their chance and they've blown it." They've had the chance to do anything, and they keep wasting it on doing nothing at all.

Of course, the comment is hyperbolic, but is it wrong? Said generation (including Ys above them) have been making cartoons, at this point, for nearly two decades. What did they make? Comedies that "flip tropes", subversive adventure stories where the heroes are "just as bad" and everything is upside down, and despite growing up with 2D, have helped bury the form in the grave for uninspired and well beyond tired CG animation that looks like everything else. They're just managing the decline and it is time to call it out for what it is.

What, exactly, have we added to the medium? What is our distinct mark? What is it we even have to say? Why do we refuse to ask any questions or push beyond the same ones we're "allowed" to ask and have been repeating for decades? We can aspire for more than this.

While I agree with the growing assessment that Gen Y is more of a scribe generation, meant to record and carry on knowledge, than it is in actually applying fresh creativity to anything, I do think we are in a very real danger of leaving behind the wrong things while we take useless garbage with us instead. We're old enough that reassessment is due. And it's a problem that needs course correction now before we lose yet more important things.

As we've touched on before: nobody needs to know about or endlessly analyze tropes. We've been doing it for a quarter of a century and it has not produced better art, just people who want stories to be checklists that are "subverted" because audiences think the point of stories is to be tricked or "made" to think. Art has become a quest to find the next jangling set of keys for the ever distracted audience that just want noise to fill the silence.

This isn't what art or entertainment is supposed to be.

Perhaps this is an unfortunate side effect of being brought up in a post-War society where comfort dulls the senses, but it is the reason despite having more art and entertainment made in the last century than the rest of recorded history combined, so much of it is so awful and only getting worse as we get further along. And no, it has not "always been that way" or whatever similar nonsense you are told, not when your modern industry prides itself on not understanding the past and willfully distorting and dismantling the work of the dead. It's far more insidious now than it ever has been, and this is not something to pride ourselves on.

It is because art is no longer made to reinforce cultural standards and beliefs and lift up your neighbor in fellow man: now it is meant to shape them to be like you. While that might have worked for awhile, the Baby Boomer generation was completely hoodwinked by this psyop after all, their children were then thrown up in a world of unreality, the safest and most improbable time in all of recorded history. Now that this false world is falling apart around us, still we cling to the hope that screaming into the void will accomplish anything as long as we tug on bootstraps and give a firm handshake to people we won't look in the face otherwise. All this in an atomized world where everyone is constantly talking past each other to make a little more pocket change.

No, the only way forward is to throw out the bathwater, not the baby. We don't need to obsess over the jangled key of tropes: they show up in everything regardless. We need to remember what stories are made to point towards, to enforce, and to lift men into. They do not exist to fill shelves that will be dumped into the landfill in fifty years for the next batch to take its place. This is purely temporal thinking, and it is not sustainable.

Man's destiny is Eternal. We are more than pieces and parts. We are more than this. Our art should reflect this, not point away from it.

Life isn't a novelty, it's a Blessing, and it's time we start acting like it.

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