This is it. This is your final destination. Last stop, total terminus, all there is left to be.
Don’t like it? That’s fine, but God only knows what’s on the other side of those crystalline thresholds and airy synthscapes.
Only God knows.
This is a manifesto. Not a political, sociological, or economic manifesto, but one speaking of the arts and entertainment. I’m not here to cure cancer, solve poverty, or heal the world. Not yet.
I am here to warn, elucidate, and state in no uncertain terms why I create what I create, why I love what I love, and why you should be as adventurous, outgoing, and well-rounded in your taste-making as I strive to be. For the sake of yourself, your children, and your children’s children. Whether you are in the seats as the lights go down, or if you were there behind the camera when the film was fresh and the scene was ready. This affects and effects all of us.
Now, why have I threatened you all with a permanent stay in an early 2000s Czechoslovakian office complex? It’s less to do with the Czechs and more to do with the time. That office is at the tail end of a giant, chromium-plated tapestry known as the “Y2K aesthetic,” or as I like to refer to it: “Y2K futurism.”
The Tumblr blog I linked in the caption is a perfect, self-explanatory gallery that captures the concept in all its round-edged, pop art glory. A movement from the mid-90s championed in fashion, architecture, and music videos that came to an end in the early 2000s. In part because of world events like 9/11, changing economic tides, and, to quote Eldon Tyrell: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”
This is the end. The last possible thing we can have any semblance of collective nostalgia for, we being here in the West, and to some extent, across the globe.
Now I think it’s a handsome look. It has flair and flamboyance, backed by a positive vision of the future, a future equal parts colorful and sleek. But what lies beyond the glass door is…nothing. Everything we could possibly hold some inkling of vapid affection for has been wrung dry by every corporation on the planet.
The 70s and 80s adoring the 50s made sense; innocent affection for a bygone era when faced with so much change happening in such rapid succession. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse.
The 2000s and 2010s love of the 80s got…out of hand shall we say. Synthwave died the day “Blinding Lights” became a planet-smashing success, more franchises, fads, and cultural icons were mined for all they were worth, and as the 2020s dawned, we now sit with a heap of 90s nostalgia waiting around the corner, and some have already set about fitting the 2000s for their own pair of rose-tinted shades. A decade that stands built on the back of refined 90s aesthetics that were slimmed up even more during the 2010s while everyone was falling over themselves for legacy sequels, with returning franchises beginning to fall on the swords of their corporate owners, one by one.
To put simply, the 2000s was the first decade without a true identity of its own. Everything that made it what it was came from either extending aesthetic developments made in the 90s or clamoring for the return of the 80s. The 2010s took all that was done in the 2000s and set to cleaning it up even further. Popular music became more processed, voices grew weaker. Architecture lost not only the spark of classical design ages ago, but even the inspiring qualities of modern design in the mid-century. Fashion is a non-entity, now a reflection of any and all crazed delusions had by elites. Literacy declines, books grow more inarticulate. Comics and games find themselves mired in a trillion sociopolitical squabbles, ruining big-name legacy brands and setting the mediums adrift.
The corporate answer to a world without identity is to mine its past identities; to mine nostalgia. And what it will soon find is that it will not only run out of things for people to care about, but the growing distance between them and their audiences will continue to burn up any and all goodwill left. And when we turn towards the world of art, the truth is that our answers do not lie in that realm either.
The art world, when faced with a world without an identity, tucked tail and turned away. They gave us no solution, they sought no identity. So many subscribed to the postmodern open-endedness that they ceased producing work that could fill the void. Work without a backbone or a soul. And yes, it is important that an artist give of themselves and only themselves in their work, but the best works bring something to the rest of humanity through that act of individual expression. Enlightenment, joy, revelation. And these contemporary works cease to spark any or all.
Art and entertainment do more than coexist; they inform each other. The works of masters inform the workman, and in many such cases, it is the workman’s labor that pleases the masters most. Ingmar Bergman watched Creature from the Black Lagoon on his birthday, one of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite pictures was psycho-biddy classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And on the flipside, B-picture legends like Roger Corman would help bring films like Bergman’s Cries & Whispers into the American market to terrific success and acclaim.
Creatives can draw on almost everything they can get their hands on, such as Ray Bradbury finding time for both Shakespeare and for Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Harlan Ellison learning from the pulps and comics of his day as he grew up. This is all natural and important to every craft, from the game designer to the fine painter. To be well-rounded in your interests, to learn and appreciate the fresco and the pop album.
For audiences, it is just as important. For all the crowing there can be for “learning about the human condition,” you cannot half-begin to comprehend such a condition without looking to what drives us, and it may not be as profound as a fear of death itself, or grand existential horror lurking in the rawest nerve of our mind. We can be driven purely through aspiration. We can be touched by something as simple as godforsaken television program, or a song played at just the right time. The intellectual richness of art is not where the human condition can only be found. It can be found in the courage of the superhero and the fantasy of genre fiction without lapsing into pretense.
And yet, both worlds have failed us. The corporations show no sign of giving pause and reconsidering what they’re doing to these legacy properties, and the art world continues to grow more insular by the day.
The only remedy is to make like time-travelers and return to the true past. Not any of this Mickey-Moused, half-assed remolding of the past. Learn to appreciate the John Colliers of the world just as much as the Sophocleses, the ancient myths of the world as well as flights of fancy born of the pulps and the comic books. Learn to love the Moebiuses and the Jack Kirbys of the world as you would the Rembrandts and the Monets. To listen with the care and attention demanded of Bach and Handel as you would the kickass rock record or the coolest platter of jazz.
As creatives, there is nothing that the modern world can provide you other than a reminder of where you will be if you persist in malnourishing your soul with this half-baked, half-hearted dreck.
As an audience, there is but one thing the modern world can provide you; the works of creators who know this and can cut a path for all who wish to be free of this cultural purgatory. A purgatory of undead franchises and of empty-headed creations.
There is a quote by the man himself, Mr. Martin Scorsese, that continues to ring as true as eternity is long:
“Study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas.”
The only way forward through this mire is to heed the man’s words. Learn from and cherish the jewels of the centuries and eons gone-by, and carry with you their spark of brilliance and imagination into your craft, whatever it maybe. It’s your only hope at this point. Until we unlock the fourth dimension and can craft enjoyable, ineffable works, we have reached the absolute limit of every medium we have.
For the artists reading this: you have been warned.
For the audience member reading this: go and seek out those treasures of the past, and brace yourself. The coming years will be wild.
And as for myself, I’m learning more everyday. And as I learn, I grow. And as I grow, the strength of my work grows. And as the strength of my work grows, that’s the time when magic is truly made. Now get out there and make some for yourself.
Addendum: July 4th, 2023
I had a lot of really terrific conversations yesterday thanks to this article, and I want to bring up a salient point made over their course. While it doesn’t change much, it does extend the timeline a bit further.
There are a few possible avenues for this heavily strained nostalgia to maintain a foothold in the zeitgeist. There are localized cultural touchstones specific to certain countries, and on a global scale, the advent of dark-and-gritty productions like Game of Thrones or the works of Zack Snyder, as well as internet culture of the 2000s during the so-called “Wild West” days and the advent of platforms like YouTube. These were all mentioned over the course of discussions I had in private.
On one hand, these are certainly factors to take into consideration, but on the other, they will only extend this unsustainable cycle by 20 years at the most. Certain things like early internet culture are so aesthetically fractured and fragmented that the only real appeal is in reexamining it, something currently done by YouTubers like Justin Whang and Wavywebsurf, and what could be gleamed was partly adopted by vaporwave, though there are certainly those who pine for the days of early YouTube.
And while grimdark-looking productions do have a concrete aesthetic vision, there’s something in my gut that tells me its 15-minutes of public love-in will be short-lived. There’s a time and a place for cold realism, there’s a time and a place for grit and grain-laden texture, but something just tells me it won’t hold in the same way the colorful excess of the 80s or the psychedelia of the late 60s/early 70s has held.
In short, we will become faced with pickings so slim, even the suits will have a trying time in their attempts to repackage and resell us these visions. It doesn’t change much, but it is some food for thought, to consider what we may collectively find ourselves attracted to.