Hollywood product has degraded to the point that hardly a day goes by without someone noticing Cultural Ground Zero.
Valued neopatron, DJ, and fellow ex-movie theater employee Scott Waddell brings up this book, wherein MST3K’s Kevin Murphy notices “movie ground zero.”
Dial around your radio and you’ll sometimes hear a station’s tagline: “The best music of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and today!” Then it dawns on you that it has been “today” for twenty-four years. You are not crazy and you aren’t in some purgatorial Groundhog Day scenario. You are in purgatory but we call it by another name: Post Pop-Culture Ground Zero 1997.
So you are not alone in this wasteland. In fact, even a boomer like Kevin Murphy (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame) noticed something was amiss way back in 2002 with his book, A Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey.
For those keeping score at home, 2002 is only five years after Cultural Ground Zero. So Kevin gets points for being an early noticer.
Kevin embarked on a wild experiment for his book. “Beginning tomorrow, January 1, 2001, I, Kevin Murphy, promise to go to a theater and watch a movie every single day, for an entire year.” What follows is a diary of the theaters visited, the movies watched, and plenty of commentary about the experiment and the state of the modern moviegoing experience.
After noting how Kevin kept a month-long movie fast in preparation for his experiment–overt ritual behavior that would be sublimated into the emerging Pop Cult–Scott relates Kevin’s experience watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“From the outset, each and every person in that theater got sucked in, laughing at the jokes, thrilling at the stunts, hissing at the Nazis. No cynicism, no jaded boredom, several eruptions of spontaneous cheering. It was a one-hundred-and-fifteen-minute roller-coaster ride, the most wonderful experience I’d ever had in a movie theater, and I didn’t even have a date.
“Events such as this are not just movies, but genuine adventures; the films themselves when removed from their context amount to nothing. The company, the mood, the venue—they’re as integral to a moviegoing memory as they are to a romantic meal, a thrilling concert, a great ball game…Life amounts to what we experience, not what we consume, but I’m afraid we’ve become a nation of consumers.”
Excuse me while I tap the sign:
But fast forward eighteen years and Kevin starting noticing something. “When the [MST3K] series ended in 1999, and I returned to the theaters, I didn’t like what I was seeing. Multiplexes were erupting around me like massive concrete sores. I began to notice fewer and fewer people happy as they left the theater, including me.”
We’re not supposed to ask questions about our entertainment, but Kevin raises one so crucial as to merit bending the rule: When was the last time you walked out of a movie theater happy? As happy as you were after seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Terminator 2 or even Jurassic Park?
Kevin feels out the contours of the problem in his observations about the first Harry Potter movie:
It looked like a movie and sounded like a movie, and if you bought the theme cup it even tasted like a movie. My theory is that Harry Potter is a groundbreaking achievement for the future: a movie clone. It has all the outward appearances of a piece of entertainment without shouldering the onus of actually entertaining.
That right there is as perfect a summation of Cultural Ground Zero as any: The mass replacement of entertainment with entertainment-like product.
And following on that revelation, Scott delivers his conclusion:
And here we are in 2024 and it’s “today” for another year. A lot has happened since Kevin’s book—Netflix, streaming services, and the last time we felt the smallest pang of nostalgia for any film made post-1997 was perhaps Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. However we can still imitate him by taking our entertainment consumption in our own hands, become “smarter and pickier” when it comes to movies where “money and time are on the line.” This is doubly important given that the rulers of the entertainment industries have made it a mission to actively attack everything you hold dear.
Thanks to Scott for sharing Kevin’s book. His timing is spot on, since we’re in the middle of the latest Pop Cult pushback against moviegoers having dignity.
This time, they’re accusing people with standards of “culture warring” and whining that “Nobody wants to have fun.”
Notice how they’re deflecting attention from the entertainment-like product that normal people are noticing is not fun to the people making those observations. It’s a basic, tired DARVO tactic.
Because normal people want to have fun. Implying otherwise is absurd.
It’s the joyless nuPuritans in the Death Cult who lie awake at night, shaking in fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.
Since we’ve already broken the ban, here’s another forbidden question: Who wants you to have fun?
Is it the self-hating scolds in charge of Hollywood, their Pop Cult water carriers, or independent creators who listen to their patrons instead of preaching at them?
Ordinarily, I’d conclude with a link to Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You, but taking a page from Kevin and Scott, here’s some genuine entertainment I made so you can have fun.
The deep lore of Tolkien meets the brutal struggle of Glen Cook in the dark fantasy prelude to the acclaimed Soul Cycle.
Originally published here.
English (US) · 