I realize that title is a very ambitious one, and I'm not going to be able to get a totally satisfying explanation in this humble blog. But I think that there's a lot of vitriol and passionate anger over the direction various pieces of entertainment are going that seems worse than usual.
And maybe that's just the fallacy of things feeling more intense while they're happening.
Consider the Star Wars prequels. These days, it seems as if most people remember them as catastrophic artistic failures doomed by a brand and a creator who had grown beyond the reins of creative limitations and outside opinions. My recollection - as a middle schooler, at least when Phantom Menace came out - was that the initial response was positive. But over time - and not a ton of time - we kind of reevaluated the movies and started to question the decisions made in making them. My personal position on them is that I think George Lucas had grand ambitions for the prequels to represent a more complex, politically relevant, and nuanced backstory to his grand epic, but did not have the writing chops to make his characters feel real amidst the ideas and spectacle he wanted. So, while I don't mean to say there was no cynicism in those movies, I think that they were trying to be good and just, you know, failed to be.
Yet in a lot of ways, I think that the response to the prequels set the stage for the current outrage culture.
To be clear: outrage culture is not confined solely to entertainment. The current political moment (please let it end) is fueled by outrage. And the internet being, to paraphrase the Simpsons, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, it has formed communities out of shared outrage. Indeed, disliking something grants people a kind of identity, whether it's the prequels, the new Star Wars movies, the state of World of Warcraft, the last season of Game of Thrones, or, you know, one political party or another. Or one ethnic group or another.
Yeah, that's the darkest extreme of this outrage culture. Racism is, I think, largely born out of a desire to identify with a group, and by defining yourself as the ones who want to, say, keep people who look a certain way or follow a certain religion out of your country, you can derive a sense of belonging.
But to step back from that can of worms, I think there are other elements at play as well.
One big one is franchising.
Sequels are nothing new. But a lot of the time, movie sequels were sort of afterthoughts. I don't think there are many people who liked the Lost World more than Jurassic Park. Similarly, while Men in Black was revelatory in how fun and funny it was, I imagine most people don't even remember what Men in Black II was about.
Basically, sequels of the post-Jaws/Star Wars era were largely bad, or rarely more than "meh." Star Wars was the big exception - even though I think some older fans found Return of the Jedi disappointing, Empire Strikes Back is seen as the gold standard for expanding a series, worldbuilding, and playing with tone.
But Star Wars also created a model that would shift the way we consume these stories, and I'm going to finally start getting to the point I actually intended to make with this post.
Star Wars started as a stand-alone film, but when Empire was announced, they also knew that Jedi was going to come after it. Empire came out in 1980, and Jedi in '82. Which means that watching Empire Strikes Back, you needed to form an opinion about a story that wasn't finished yet.
Twenty years later, the Lord of the Rings movies came out in December of 2001, 2002, and 2003. There was no question, when finishing the first movie, that there were two more coming later. They took a series of books that had been written together as one massive epic and kind of replicated the process in filmmaking. You knew that there was more of this story to tell because it had actually been shot as one massive film.
Not everything can be done that way, though.
Consider also the rise of prestige television. TV has become far more serialized, and Game of Thrones was a new strategy for adapting an epic fantasy series. With production design and visual effects you'd expect for a big-screen feature, Game of Thrones told its story over a course of time that dwarfed the 12-ish hour epic that was Lord of the Rings.
And given that we watched it over the course of nine years, it meant something very important:
We had to decide whether we liked it a long time ago.
Basically, when Ned Stark was getting his head cut off (spoilers?) most viewers had to, at that point, decide whether they were invested.
Now, certainly some people got off the train later, but it became something of an identity. OK Cupid, before the last season, allowed people to add a banner to their dating profiles identifying them as Game of Thrones fans.
Art is something people identify with. Think about how music genres tend to have their own fashions, despite there being no direct relationship between sound you generate and the clothing you wear.
And so, while hyping oneself up to expect perfection from some movie or show you like can lead to disappointment, the thing that turns that disappointment into rage is that people feel like there's some part of their identity that they've lost.
I mean, the Simpsons was a huge part of my childhood, up until about 2000. I think that stretch of the show is maybe the greatest television comedy of all time. But as the show changed and its humor lost its cleverness, I had to let go of it. It was painful.
But on the other hand - artists are constantly doubting themselves and struggling just to get the work done at all. Art is created by humans, and it's also subjective. You might have derived a certain meaning from a piece of art that is at odds with the artist's intentions. And while that can be just kind of interesting when you have a finished piece to examine, with a work in progress like a long-running series, it can lead to painful cognitive dissonance when you find that you and the artist were on diverging paths.
But no artist can anticipate every audience member's reactions and what they'll specifically invest in. I think it's on us to be able to take a step back, take a deep breath, and simply express rational disappointment if a series ends in a way we find unsatisfying. Anger is not the right emotion to derive from such an experience - or at least, if we do feel that way (we can't really help which emotions we feel) we need to recognize it for what it really means, and not, you know, send death threats to people involved in the production.
No comments:
Post a Comment