i think there is an (erroneous) assumption in art that unhappiness = interesting, authentic; happiness = boring, phony. this has become a kind of feedback loop in entertainment and life. individuals no longer feel their lives are unique or worthwhile unless they suffer in some visible way, and artists no longer feel their work is worthwhile to an audience unless it offers a reflection of that inner turmoil or external oppression. which is ironic, because so much of the 'darkness' is dull, fake emo brooding that has become predictable. there is little room left for modeling or celebrating joy, the way earlier art often did.
i also think there is a disconnect between lived hardship and what is translated into 'darkness' on the page or screen. the roddenberry example is a perfect case. there was a man who suffered a great deal of hardship, yet rather than casting a dark gloom over his entire existence and work, perhaps it gave his life purpose and meaning... in other words, something like happiness. in the past, a heroic deed would have been understood in these terms. we assume hardship necessitates sadness when often people report just the opposite--they crave the purpose, challenge, or camaraderie of it. those who live sheltered, comfortable lives and write dark fictional stories are possibly the least equipped to understand genuine hardship like roddenberry's. yet, their 'understanding' continues to influence ours through their books and films.
"There is little room left for modelling or celebrating joy, the way earlier art often did." This is spot on, and I think one of the great tasks of this era's artists--to inspire joy and wonder.
Trauma has been commodified in myriad ways in the last two decades, perhaps because in the USA, the collective trauma of 9/11 was the first in a while for a lot of otherwise comfortable, middle-class white people, who historically (and continually) run the contemporary modes of literary cultural production. The memoir-focused culture in MFA programs is another component that conflates individual trauma with plot or story.
I'm reminded of a quote by James Baldwin about how deceptively simple it is to actual live a life that espouses the principles of joy, love, and community ... mostly because it starts with artists illuminating the darkness instead of succumbing to it : "We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact.”
That's the great irony that I find with so many great quotes or clichés -- they're cliché precisely because they're true, and it's easier to dismiss them than actually consider them and do the self-work ... and isn't it so much easier to send a video of a hip squirrel who just went viral on YouTube TV?
Great comment J.M. Whilst a work of fiction, Brad Pitt's character Roy McBride in Ad Astra goes through a similar journey and transformation. In which he faces a lot of adversity and mortal danger, reuniting with a long-lost father who's fallen into despair because of the emptiness of space. Yet McBride who was stoic and somewhat 'unfeeling' beforehand, is re-energised because he learns to embrace life, to cherish happiness and make the most of it.
Darkness became associated with depth and authenticity and happiness with shallowness, the false surface. That seems to follow the logic of Psychoanalysis.
Star Trek is an interesting show to track because I believe it represents the core self image of liberal America.
TOS was liberal post WWII, Cold War, Space Race idealism America, full of hope and idealism for the Civil Rights movement etc.
The Next Gen was post-cold war America is the boss of the world, The Federation is victorious, it had a mandate and America left its Cowboy past behind and embraced a new neoliberal European model with a know it all Earl Gray drinking Frenchman in charge. Truly cosmopolitan and liberal. The Prius model of Star Trek. Picard and the Federation will fix all.
DS9, maybe you can't fix everything, maybe some people are really bad guys. Maybe having the right beliefs isn't enough. Maybe sometimes you have to do some fucked up dark shit and when it's all over the Bajorans just want to worship the Prophets and don't want to be part of the "community."
Current ST is just liberal disillusionment with liberalism and the slow acceptance that maybe not everyone wants to join their club. It's ultimatly spiteful and self hating.
Great topic. The world flipped in the age of antibiotics. Life before that was nonstop fear, dread, and superstition whereas it's now stable and increasingly reliable. When the world is dread we tend to want cheer even if it's largely fake. We still live in a backlash to that.
Yeah, I came here to say this as well. It might not even be about "thrills", but just a chance to explore something that we don't in our day to day. By so many really meaningful measures we live in the best period of human history: longer lives, less disease, more education, air conditioning, more free time, more convenient appliances, etc. When I see the charts showing happiness over the years I read that as us being naturally wired to be X% unhappy no matter our outside conditions. A bit of variance, but I'd bet that it stays in that range even 200 years in the future.
Yes i think that is a large part of it. A related element is just unawareness. We might see things as near catastrophic today, hence the dark and gritty, wheras the recent past was far worse. I caution that this is not a clean story though, more of a mixed psychological bag.
Within recent scifi (the literary variety) there's been a growing backlash to 'grimdark' in the form of what's now called 'hopepunk': the guiding ethos being, yes everything will be mess but everything's worth fighting for and remaining hopeful within the mess is the way back up into daylight. And I think maybe that's going to percolate through to TV shows too? Certainly Star Trek is doing it with Strange New Worlds, which is resolutely hopeful - with Pike being a great example of acknowledging how bad things can get - ie. knowledge of his own terrible fate - and deciding to not let it derail his hopefulness.
(It's also why I've loved Kim Stanley Robinson's work for a while now, for its willingness to weave something from the mess of the present and carry it forward in a way that says "we'll muddle through, that's what we do". Again, maybe that'll start filtering through to more mainstream media as well...)
So I guess the question is: what do we want and need? Because writers and their readers certainly use storytelling as a form of emotional release, even therapy? But - how does it work generally? Some people seem to alleviate their existential dread using dystopian fiction, others need the exact opposite...
The author takes a more data-driven approach in trying to answer "why" than they do in actually validating the premise.
Are shows actually getting darker and grittier?? Or does it just seem that way?
Plenty of uplifting or whimsical shows come out all the time like Ted Lasso, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, One Punch Man, Extraordinary Attorney Woo. And there were plenty of gritty movies in the past too. Ben Hur, Seven Samurai.. Star Trek: TOS by the way may not have been visually dark, but people (redshirts) died left and right in that show. Side note: Books don't seem to be getting more miserable over the last 200 years: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0750-z
*If* franchises tend to get more miserable, maybe it's because you've gotta raise the stakes each season / movie in order to keep up the momentum.
I'd also be curious about how and whether censorship of movies has changed. Maybe it has become more relaxed, allowing stories to be told that we were already interested in hearing anyway.
My 2c is that we've been on an energy diet these last 50 years, and this has led to (effectively) declining living standards. We've not seen things get better, so we can't imagine them getting better.
Technologically maybe. But real wages have fallen for most, mental health has deteriorated, people are more lonely and anxious. And yes expectations always play a role
I think it comes down to a pervasive nihilism. The roots of it can perhaps be traced by to the First World War and the shattering of the old pieties that came with it. Religion was out, patriotism was out; reason and individualism were in.
But it turns out that reason and individualism don't make us as happy or enlightened as it was supposed. Reason alone does not give you purpose or goals. Individualism makes it impossible to be happy for anyone but yourself, and, it turns out, it doesn't do much to make you happy yourself.
Can we imagine any modern person saying “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Yet without a cause or a person you are willing to die for, and in whose success you can rejoice even as you die, what is left except to put off dying as long as possible while having as much pleasure as you can in the meantime? And even that, it seems, does not make us happy.
Our unhappiness, of course, must be someone else's fault, but as nihilists, all we know how to do is to tear stuff down, so reason and excellence and competence must go too -- relics of the old order from which we allege all misery came. But that does not make us happy either, only more angry and aggrieved.
So what is there for modern literature to do but to explore this unhappiness?
My own little pet project it to try to revive what I call the "serious popular novel". Contemporary literary culture has a hole in the middle. On the one hand, there the is dark and gritty literary fiction written by and for the academy. On the other, algorithmically defined genre fiction designed to push the buttons that release endorphins in the reader -- the literary equivalent of a diet of fat, salt, and sugar.
High culture had become nihilist and low culture has become hedonist, and there is a hole in the middle. Serious popular fiction is an attempt to fill that hole. But it is fundamentally incompatible with nihilism. It needs something to believe in, some cause and some value outside the self. Then maybe we can have a happy literature again.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known"
Not with those words and not with that syntax (not an American, anyway), but I can imagine a fictional character saying something like that. It is basically what heroes (in any form from the most mundane to the spandex-wearing variety) are supposed to think. It is also expected in some quarters in the real world.
Mmm. Been thinking in a few spare moments. Not sure the old/new distinction is real enough to serve us well, though it's tempting. I know for me at least, the old is right in many regards, bringing its slowness, its reverence, its surrender to some current that exceeds the individual.
Then though too, my tendency to throw my phone until it breaks or spit on the Internet's nasty cynicism tends to waste more of my energy and not allow me to participate in something that plainly others are quite enjoying.
I'd say it comes around to family, most? Curiosity, most? I think certain morals exceed political and theological conflict, namely humility, surrender, altruism, love. Obviously communication faces an interesting conflict, constantly, in that it doesn't actually express fully what the individual hopes it would, doesn't change people the way we'd hope, but that's not new, right? We all keep trying to show who we are without quite understanding how we are who we are, hoping that the show is sufficient?
I guess it comes around to silence for me, again, Mark. And though I fear I've pushed myself way off-topic in trying to answer your question, I'll let the realization be what it is, that the things I end up really believing in, and thus maybe the moments in the products of my own literature that seem 'rightest' or most founded in something I aught to trust, have all come when I wasn't trying to blab.
I think if we could all quiet down a bit, the same old things we've been reverent of and the new things we've wondered about are there. Tacking names on 'em is what we do because it's what we can do and that's okay, but with us all touching base about it constantly, it's a lot harder to remember we are touching base.
Dunno. Could be good to worship curiosity for awhile. Maybe worship just 'okayness', rather than good or bad. Aliveness. These all seem fundamentally good to me anyway.
Be really nice to believe we actually on't know what we're talking about just to reckon with how alien the principal of 'being alive' actually is to a thing that's alive. Seems to settle me down when I'm feeling clutchy.
"humility, surrender, altruism, love." Actually, very much Christian virtues. You would not find much admiration for them among the Romans or the Greeks, for instance. But the problem with these virtues in the abstract is that they can only be practiced in the particular. Humility before what greater being? Surrender to what superior will? Altruism towards which of the needy (there being too many for you to support them all)? Love of what or whom in particular?
At the practical level, all of these virtues require practical objects. Without particular pieties to guide us to specific objects, we get lost in political abstractions like "equity" that do not actually exercise these virtues. (Every see signs of humility or surrender in a politician?) We preach them all while practicing none of them.
It is no secret that the exercise of these virtues towards particular objects makes us happy. But that requires particular pieties. Without those, we lack the elements of happiness even if we admire the virtues in abstract.
As a Roman Catholic, I have my particular pieties and I am glad of them. I think they help make me reasonably happy, despite what I lack in the exercise of the virtues, which is a lot. And it allows me to write novels that are not desperately grim. And that too makes me reasonably happy, though I would perhaps be a little happier if more people read them. :-)
Why don't you come talk to us on The Nudge sometime?
Podcast. 'Writing and editing when it isn't your day job'.
Mostly three fellows who keep encouraging each other to write every week, bringing guests on every so often to freshen the waters. We talk on Saturdays for Americans, Sundays for me, here in Korea. Been doing it for a couple years now.
We do a read-aloud of guests work so, no matter what, you'd get three encouraging sets of eyes on this Northumbria bit of yours, or whatever else you fancy sharing.
I'm in my fifties and yet before Netflix picked up Seinfeld during the pandemic, I had never seen the show—not one episode! This is like finding a juror for the OJ Simpson trial who hadn't seen or heard about the car chase leading up to his arrest. Or like finding an American adult without a strong opinion about Donald Trump.
The Seinfeld characters have their foibles, they're sneaky, mildly manipulative, sometime underhanded, all too willing to tell white lies. They burn down a home inadvertently and cause other problems, mostly unintentionally, without accepting responsibility. And yet it struck me that they were happy. They meet up frequently and chat and have fun together. Kramer chases women but there is nothing creepy about it and the ones he gets want to be got. Sure it's a sitcom but people really did meet up face to face and enjoy each other's company in that era. And they generally arrived on time. Standing someone up was a social faux pas, not one excused by a lame text message.
The Wire is a great show, a sprawling examination of the drug traffic, policing, justice system, education, and political system of an entire city. But it's relentlessly dark. Finally, though a long series of unlikely events the one truly good cop almost ends up running the department but of course a small thing from the past trips it up. You know something like this will happen and yet it is heartbreaking. House of Cards (American version) is similarly bleak. Francis Underwood has one seemingly real, if far from equal relationship, with the owner of a barbecue joint. And yet he managed to eventually screw over this little guy, and that for me was just too depressing to continue with the series.
The endless series of superhero movies does nothing for me. If I knew nothing about the Marvel Comic Universe, so much the better. But I have a theory that the dearth of real life heroes is behind beating these franchises to death. We are escaping reality.
I'm 51, and this is exactly how I feel too. Though I did watch 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends' every week back in the 90s, as well as shows like 'ER' and the whole batch of sitcoms that were on back then. That's the thing that, to me, stands out about today: there are no real comedies anymore, except for "comedies" that take a harsh, biting look at today. (I loved 'Arrested Development' but it did have kind of an acid take on the era; and, it's almost 20 years old now!). Also, the realism of the violence, and the overall tone of movies today, is just unrelenting. I feel like I'm being hit over the head with a shovel by most "entertainment" today.
Here's a thought experiment: can you imagine a movie like 'You've Got Mail' being made today? Or 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles'? You really can't, and not only b/c no studio would back a movie about middle-aged people, for middle-aged people that feels hopeful. I did enjoy the Christian Bale 'Batman' movies, but I can't bring myself to watch 'The Batman' with Robert Pattinson or 'Joker' with Joaquin Phoenix, which seem from their trailers to be just relentlessly bleak to me.
I admit there is something in it. I am not American, but, as someone who experiences American culture downstream, it seems to me that the cynism/idealism, joy/pain balance in American pop culture changed a little (Seinfeld itself was probably part of this transformation with its flawed, cynical protagonists), but hasn't been there a whole essemble of shows recently (basically, Chuck Lore's whole deal) which (quality and changes in moral standards and censorship apart) are basically Seinfeld for the 21th Century? Flawed characters enjoying real social life and one another?
The Big Bang Theory for example was a hit. The clips I have seen from The Good Place make me think that, despite the unudual circumstances, there is a feeling of comradeship and good will among the (flawed) protagonists.
Don’t miss out on the Good Place! In addition to being a truly great show and hysterically funny, it is truly different from almost every show out there. A must see!
Thanks for the suggestion. I have been thinking about it. The clips I watched impressed me. It seems a lot of thought went on this show. I will try to watch it.
True, those are great examples. But it seems to me too, they're exceptions that prove the rule Erik is describing. 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends' were just the two most successful of a whole host of comedies that aired back in the 90s; it was as if we (not exclusively, but by and large) experienced culture through the lens of comedy back then. I don't think you can say the same is true today.
What do you suspect is it that has driven away our notion of a hero?
Instinct tells me that the closer I've gotten to every person I've known, the more I've realized they cannot be what I thought they were at first and that this *might* be tied to your suggestion? That every person in the public eye for any length of time is plumbed for each detail of themselves, and then each detail is pared against by colonies of observers all bearing serrated knives.
Look at a polemical figure like Elon Musk who to some must be considered a hero. There are those who think he has mankind's future in his third eye and those who think he abuses the underman to advance selfish motives, yet another bad-faced villain with a plastic, smiling mask.
Maybe heroes require quieter culture?
Maybe us all knowing each other makes it impossible to be mysterious,and thus heroic?
The environment that breeds heroism tends to be 'the fleeting encounter'. Superman arrives, puts the train on the rails, and disappears. (What a hero! the boy cries). He does not share his Instagram handle and discuss the traumatic results of the experience with those he has saved in order to bring them back to baseline normal, give them his real name, and suggest regular meetings for a long-lasting friendship. This friendship would give them time to realize he has flaws.
Dunno. Seems at the heart I'm finding that old Two Face line from The Dark Knight: 'You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.'
Guess I ended up at superhero movies just like you.
Guess my questions became a whole lot of attempts at answers, but maybe you can help me out here.
If there is no counter-culture, then perhaps the artistic presentation of our unhappiness is scripted. 'Grittier' is a look. What if the actual situation is that most people are not all that unhappy, but are also not all that that joyous. Unfeeling -- not as being callous, but as somehow not able to experience the depth of feeling our grandparents did?
One hypothesis - the 12th grade happiness largely tracks perceived economic opportunity (see also the dip following the dot-com burst). As someone who graduated high school in 2006, even though I was a nobody from a nowhere town, I felt like the world was at my feet. This doesn't require 12th graders to have a particular awareness of macroeconomic factors, but it's reflected through what you see your slightly older peers accomplishing. Everyone I knew who had bothered to go to university got a great job. On the cultural level, technology seemed net positive and like it would drive continued growth and progress (also true for late-90s / pre-dot-com-bust).
I'll admit my bias here - I think we often reach for abstract cultural explanations for things that could have, alternatively, pretty straightforward material causes (I think a *lot* of millennial angst can be traced back to the housing market, and would love to see studies controlling for homeownership when surveying millennial attitudes).
I have a pet theory that how your life turned out relative to what you thought it would be at ~16-22 is probably the single biggest factor determining your life satisfaction. If you apply this lens to people you know, it holds up remarkably well, I've found.
Works for me! Went less well than expected at first (and was unhappy) then much better (and I'm now happy!) Although 16-22 year old me would be disappointed I'm not a scientist.
I like kpop because it has a happier vibe than western pop, but even kpop is getting darker which annoys me. When I want dark music I listen to atmospheric black metal, not pop.
Sad art is not only higher status but also easier to make. It's harder to write a smart comedy than to kill some characters in a tragedy and it's harder to write a catchy melody than to create some harsh sounds.
In a way you could lay this at the feet of the death of Modernity's grand narratives, which we had all the way up through Clinton in the form of neoliberalism-- which a lot of liberals liked, until they didn't. It's also in the 1960s when this "bad faith" aspect of postmodernity raises its head in Hollywood with films like Two Lane Blacktop, Easy Rider, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Vietnam didn't help to restore faith in our mission, but instead left us reeling. I think that we also have arrived at the end of the future where we are stuck in a loop until someone or something invents a new myth we can all trust in.
My guess is that "place" determines more than we know--even in the case of a pandemic. Although Eudora Welty refers to "Place in Fiction" in _The Eye of the Story_, I find her words on target. See what you think: "Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place."
I don't suspect you're wrong at all. I'm curious if you find us able to 'place' ourselves, in history, as it were. After all, Hoel seems after pinpointing us, locating 'why' exhibit characteristics of a depressed society or culture. Perhaps I'm wrong there, but there is some effort at triangulating the vibe of the time against previous conditions.
Is it all a question of 'where are we?' and if so, is it a question we need to ask? Or is asking the question fruitless, and/or driving us off course?
Eric, I think the accident of birth, where we're born, has much to do with our sense of hope and opportunity--and that's been so throughout the past. Being the lit freak that is me, let me take Eudora Welty's example a bit further. She goes on to say this: "Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Every story would be another, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Imagine Swan’s Way laid in London, The Magic Mountain in Spain, or Green Mansions in the Black Forest." If we extend her writing advice to Hoel's essay here, location affects not only who we are, how be live, but how we feel about existence to a great extent. And I would add that you are so right in saying that we need to ask the question 'where are we?' on the location aspect but on the existential level. "Why am I here?" is a question I address in my essay on Virginia's Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_ that you can read quickly and for free here: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/virginia-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse
I'd love to continue this conversation there too. And if you're interested, I'll give you one month free to my paid posts if you email at mltabor@me.com
My guess is that we should be in an exchange. I'd love that.
it will stop being like this by the end of the century (tho the "culture" will stop being truly inventive and art/"culture"/media will keep recycling its previous works/symbols and combine them in different ways).
I would love for the dark and gritty to turn into the light and hopeful, cheery and dare I say happy moving forward- too much dark has definitely permeated the moods and lives of its audiences. Bring on the light!
i think there is an (erroneous) assumption in art that unhappiness = interesting, authentic; happiness = boring, phony. this has become a kind of feedback loop in entertainment and life. individuals no longer feel their lives are unique or worthwhile unless they suffer in some visible way, and artists no longer feel their work is worthwhile to an audience unless it offers a reflection of that inner turmoil or external oppression. which is ironic, because so much of the 'darkness' is dull, fake emo brooding that has become predictable. there is little room left for modeling or celebrating joy, the way earlier art often did.
i also think there is a disconnect between lived hardship and what is translated into 'darkness' on the page or screen. the roddenberry example is a perfect case. there was a man who suffered a great deal of hardship, yet rather than casting a dark gloom over his entire existence and work, perhaps it gave his life purpose and meaning... in other words, something like happiness. in the past, a heroic deed would have been understood in these terms. we assume hardship necessitates sadness when often people report just the opposite--they crave the purpose, challenge, or camaraderie of it. those who live sheltered, comfortable lives and write dark fictional stories are possibly the least equipped to understand genuine hardship like roddenberry's. yet, their 'understanding' continues to influence ours through their books and films.
"There is little room left for modelling or celebrating joy, the way earlier art often did." This is spot on, and I think one of the great tasks of this era's artists--to inspire joy and wonder.
Trauma has been commodified in myriad ways in the last two decades, perhaps because in the USA, the collective trauma of 9/11 was the first in a while for a lot of otherwise comfortable, middle-class white people, who historically (and continually) run the contemporary modes of literary cultural production. The memoir-focused culture in MFA programs is another component that conflates individual trauma with plot or story.
I'm reminded of a quote by James Baldwin about how deceptively simple it is to actual live a life that espouses the principles of joy, love, and community ... mostly because it starts with artists illuminating the darkness instead of succumbing to it : "We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact.”
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for sharing that quote. It might almost seem hyperbole if it weren't so prescient.
That's the great irony that I find with so many great quotes or clichés -- they're cliché precisely because they're true, and it's easier to dismiss them than actually consider them and do the self-work ... and isn't it so much easier to send a video of a hip squirrel who just went viral on YouTube TV?
Yes! I definitely agree that for whatever reason, dark and gritty is taken more seriously as an artform than bright and cheery. Just look at all the movies that have won an academy award: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Academy_Award-winning_films
that list is staggering to read from beginning to end! and it definitely take a turn for the dark and gritty over the years :-(
Great comment J.M. Whilst a work of fiction, Brad Pitt's character Roy McBride in Ad Astra goes through a similar journey and transformation. In which he faces a lot of adversity and mortal danger, reuniting with a long-lost father who's fallen into despair because of the emptiness of space. Yet McBride who was stoic and somewhat 'unfeeling' beforehand, is re-energised because he learns to embrace life, to cherish happiness and make the most of it.
Thanks! I've never seen that film, but I'll have to check it out...
It's not a new thought. "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -Tolstoy
Darkness became associated with depth and authenticity and happiness with shallowness, the false surface. That seems to follow the logic of Psychoanalysis.
Star Trek is an interesting show to track because I believe it represents the core self image of liberal America.
TOS was liberal post WWII, Cold War, Space Race idealism America, full of hope and idealism for the Civil Rights movement etc.
The Next Gen was post-cold war America is the boss of the world, The Federation is victorious, it had a mandate and America left its Cowboy past behind and embraced a new neoliberal European model with a know it all Earl Gray drinking Frenchman in charge. Truly cosmopolitan and liberal. The Prius model of Star Trek. Picard and the Federation will fix all.
DS9, maybe you can't fix everything, maybe some people are really bad guys. Maybe having the right beliefs isn't enough. Maybe sometimes you have to do some fucked up dark shit and when it's all over the Bajorans just want to worship the Prophets and don't want to be part of the "community."
Current ST is just liberal disillusionment with liberalism and the slow acceptance that maybe not everyone wants to join their club. It's ultimatly spiteful and self hating.
Nice! I agree! They really did get the sort of center-left viewpoint, and that was always kind of the point of Star Trek, I think...
Now do Star Wars...
Really interesting arc !! I do think the ST writers are reflecting the evolving left-ish world view over time. Quite perceptive!
Great topic. The world flipped in the age of antibiotics. Life before that was nonstop fear, dread, and superstition whereas it's now stable and increasingly reliable. When the world is dread we tend to want cheer even if it's largely fake. We still live in a backlash to that.
I think this is an interesting hypothesis: so we always emphasize the opposite in order to kind of "thrill ourselves" in some way?
Yeah, I came here to say this as well. It might not even be about "thrills", but just a chance to explore something that we don't in our day to day. By so many really meaningful measures we live in the best period of human history: longer lives, less disease, more education, air conditioning, more free time, more convenient appliances, etc. When I see the charts showing happiness over the years I read that as us being naturally wired to be X% unhappy no matter our outside conditions. A bit of variance, but I'd bet that it stays in that range even 200 years in the future.
Yes i think that is a large part of it. A related element is just unawareness. We might see things as near catastrophic today, hence the dark and gritty, wheras the recent past was far worse. I caution that this is not a clean story though, more of a mixed psychological bag.
Within recent scifi (the literary variety) there's been a growing backlash to 'grimdark' in the form of what's now called 'hopepunk': the guiding ethos being, yes everything will be mess but everything's worth fighting for and remaining hopeful within the mess is the way back up into daylight. And I think maybe that's going to percolate through to TV shows too? Certainly Star Trek is doing it with Strange New Worlds, which is resolutely hopeful - with Pike being a great example of acknowledging how bad things can get - ie. knowledge of his own terrible fate - and deciding to not let it derail his hopefulness.
(It's also why I've loved Kim Stanley Robinson's work for a while now, for its willingness to weave something from the mess of the present and carry it forward in a way that says "we'll muddle through, that's what we do". Again, maybe that'll start filtering through to more mainstream media as well...)
So I guess the question is: what do we want and need? Because writers and their readers certainly use storytelling as a form of emotional release, even therapy? But - how does it work generally? Some people seem to alleviate their existential dread using dystopian fiction, others need the exact opposite...
The author takes a more data-driven approach in trying to answer "why" than they do in actually validating the premise.
Are shows actually getting darker and grittier?? Or does it just seem that way?
Plenty of uplifting or whimsical shows come out all the time like Ted Lasso, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, One Punch Man, Extraordinary Attorney Woo. And there were plenty of gritty movies in the past too. Ben Hur, Seven Samurai.. Star Trek: TOS by the way may not have been visually dark, but people (redshirts) died left and right in that show. Side note: Books don't seem to be getting more miserable over the last 200 years: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0750-z
*If* franchises tend to get more miserable, maybe it's because you've gotta raise the stakes each season / movie in order to keep up the momentum.
I'd also be curious about how and whether censorship of movies has changed. Maybe it has become more relaxed, allowing stories to be told that we were already interested in hearing anyway.
My 2c is that we've been on an energy diet these last 50 years, and this has led to (effectively) declining living standards. We've not seen things get better, so we can't imagine them getting better.
Materially, they have gotten considerably better. It's just that they haven't gotten better to the same degree that peoples expectations have risen.
Technologically maybe. But real wages have fallen for most, mental health has deteriorated, people are more lonely and anxious. And yes expectations always play a role
I think it comes down to a pervasive nihilism. The roots of it can perhaps be traced by to the First World War and the shattering of the old pieties that came with it. Religion was out, patriotism was out; reason and individualism were in.
But it turns out that reason and individualism don't make us as happy or enlightened as it was supposed. Reason alone does not give you purpose or goals. Individualism makes it impossible to be happy for anyone but yourself, and, it turns out, it doesn't do much to make you happy yourself.
Can we imagine any modern person saying “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Yet without a cause or a person you are willing to die for, and in whose success you can rejoice even as you die, what is left except to put off dying as long as possible while having as much pleasure as you can in the meantime? And even that, it seems, does not make us happy.
Our unhappiness, of course, must be someone else's fault, but as nihilists, all we know how to do is to tear stuff down, so reason and excellence and competence must go too -- relics of the old order from which we allege all misery came. But that does not make us happy either, only more angry and aggrieved.
So what is there for modern literature to do but to explore this unhappiness?
My own little pet project it to try to revive what I call the "serious popular novel". Contemporary literary culture has a hole in the middle. On the one hand, there the is dark and gritty literary fiction written by and for the academy. On the other, algorithmically defined genre fiction designed to push the buttons that release endorphins in the reader -- the literary equivalent of a diet of fat, salt, and sugar.
High culture had become nihilist and low culture has become hedonist, and there is a hole in the middle. Serious popular fiction is an attempt to fill that hole. But it is fundamentally incompatible with nihilism. It needs something to believe in, some cause and some value outside the self. Then maybe we can have a happy literature again.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known"
Not with those words and not with that syntax (not an American, anyway), but I can imagine a fictional character saying something like that. It is basically what heroes (in any form from the most mundane to the spandex-wearing variety) are supposed to think. It is also expected in some quarters in the real world.
What then should it believe in, friend?
Well, that is definitely the question. But if not the old pieties, then a new one. Any suggestions?
Mmm. Been thinking in a few spare moments. Not sure the old/new distinction is real enough to serve us well, though it's tempting. I know for me at least, the old is right in many regards, bringing its slowness, its reverence, its surrender to some current that exceeds the individual.
Then though too, my tendency to throw my phone until it breaks or spit on the Internet's nasty cynicism tends to waste more of my energy and not allow me to participate in something that plainly others are quite enjoying.
I'd say it comes around to family, most? Curiosity, most? I think certain morals exceed political and theological conflict, namely humility, surrender, altruism, love. Obviously communication faces an interesting conflict, constantly, in that it doesn't actually express fully what the individual hopes it would, doesn't change people the way we'd hope, but that's not new, right? We all keep trying to show who we are without quite understanding how we are who we are, hoping that the show is sufficient?
I guess it comes around to silence for me, again, Mark. And though I fear I've pushed myself way off-topic in trying to answer your question, I'll let the realization be what it is, that the things I end up really believing in, and thus maybe the moments in the products of my own literature that seem 'rightest' or most founded in something I aught to trust, have all come when I wasn't trying to blab.
I think if we could all quiet down a bit, the same old things we've been reverent of and the new things we've wondered about are there. Tacking names on 'em is what we do because it's what we can do and that's okay, but with us all touching base about it constantly, it's a lot harder to remember we are touching base.
Dunno. Could be good to worship curiosity for awhile. Maybe worship just 'okayness', rather than good or bad. Aliveness. These all seem fundamentally good to me anyway.
Be really nice to believe we actually on't know what we're talking about just to reckon with how alien the principal of 'being alive' actually is to a thing that's alive. Seems to settle me down when I'm feeling clutchy.
Not that you are. Just sometimes I am.
"humility, surrender, altruism, love." Actually, very much Christian virtues. You would not find much admiration for them among the Romans or the Greeks, for instance. But the problem with these virtues in the abstract is that they can only be practiced in the particular. Humility before what greater being? Surrender to what superior will? Altruism towards which of the needy (there being too many for you to support them all)? Love of what or whom in particular?
At the practical level, all of these virtues require practical objects. Without particular pieties to guide us to specific objects, we get lost in political abstractions like "equity" that do not actually exercise these virtues. (Every see signs of humility or surrender in a politician?) We preach them all while practicing none of them.
It is no secret that the exercise of these virtues towards particular objects makes us happy. But that requires particular pieties. Without those, we lack the elements of happiness even if we admire the virtues in abstract.
As a Roman Catholic, I have my particular pieties and I am glad of them. I think they help make me reasonably happy, despite what I lack in the exercise of the virtues, which is a lot. And it allows me to write novels that are not desperately grim. And that too makes me reasonably happy, though I would perhaps be a little happier if more people read them. :-)
Why don't you come talk to us on The Nudge sometime?
Podcast. 'Writing and editing when it isn't your day job'.
Mostly three fellows who keep encouraging each other to write every week, bringing guests on every so often to freshen the waters. We talk on Saturdays for Americans, Sundays for me, here in Korea. Been doing it for a couple years now.
We do a read-aloud of guests work so, no matter what, you'd get three encouraging sets of eyes on this Northumbria bit of yours, or whatever else you fancy sharing.
Start small?
Sure. Sign me up.
I'm in my fifties and yet before Netflix picked up Seinfeld during the pandemic, I had never seen the show—not one episode! This is like finding a juror for the OJ Simpson trial who hadn't seen or heard about the car chase leading up to his arrest. Or like finding an American adult without a strong opinion about Donald Trump.
The Seinfeld characters have their foibles, they're sneaky, mildly manipulative, sometime underhanded, all too willing to tell white lies. They burn down a home inadvertently and cause other problems, mostly unintentionally, without accepting responsibility. And yet it struck me that they were happy. They meet up frequently and chat and have fun together. Kramer chases women but there is nothing creepy about it and the ones he gets want to be got. Sure it's a sitcom but people really did meet up face to face and enjoy each other's company in that era. And they generally arrived on time. Standing someone up was a social faux pas, not one excused by a lame text message.
The Wire is a great show, a sprawling examination of the drug traffic, policing, justice system, education, and political system of an entire city. But it's relentlessly dark. Finally, though a long series of unlikely events the one truly good cop almost ends up running the department but of course a small thing from the past trips it up. You know something like this will happen and yet it is heartbreaking. House of Cards (American version) is similarly bleak. Francis Underwood has one seemingly real, if far from equal relationship, with the owner of a barbecue joint. And yet he managed to eventually screw over this little guy, and that for me was just too depressing to continue with the series.
The endless series of superhero movies does nothing for me. If I knew nothing about the Marvel Comic Universe, so much the better. But I have a theory that the dearth of real life heroes is behind beating these franchises to death. We are escaping reality.
I'm 51, and this is exactly how I feel too. Though I did watch 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends' every week back in the 90s, as well as shows like 'ER' and the whole batch of sitcoms that were on back then. That's the thing that, to me, stands out about today: there are no real comedies anymore, except for "comedies" that take a harsh, biting look at today. (I loved 'Arrested Development' but it did have kind of an acid take on the era; and, it's almost 20 years old now!). Also, the realism of the violence, and the overall tone of movies today, is just unrelenting. I feel like I'm being hit over the head with a shovel by most "entertainment" today.
Here's a thought experiment: can you imagine a movie like 'You've Got Mail' being made today? Or 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles'? You really can't, and not only b/c no studio would back a movie about middle-aged people, for middle-aged people that feels hopeful. I did enjoy the Christian Bale 'Batman' movies, but I can't bring myself to watch 'The Batman' with Robert Pattinson or 'Joker' with Joaquin Phoenix, which seem from their trailers to be just relentlessly bleak to me.
I admit there is something in it. I am not American, but, as someone who experiences American culture downstream, it seems to me that the cynism/idealism, joy/pain balance in American pop culture changed a little (Seinfeld itself was probably part of this transformation with its flawed, cynical protagonists), but hasn't been there a whole essemble of shows recently (basically, Chuck Lore's whole deal) which (quality and changes in moral standards and censorship apart) are basically Seinfeld for the 21th Century? Flawed characters enjoying real social life and one another?
The Big Bang Theory for example was a hit. The clips I have seen from The Good Place make me think that, despite the unudual circumstances, there is a feeling of comradeship and good will among the (flawed) protagonists.
Don’t miss out on the Good Place! In addition to being a truly great show and hysterically funny, it is truly different from almost every show out there. A must see!
Thanks for the suggestion. I have been thinking about it. The clips I watched impressed me. It seems a lot of thought went on this show. I will try to watch it.
True, those are great examples. But it seems to me too, they're exceptions that prove the rule Erik is describing. 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends' were just the two most successful of a whole host of comedies that aired back in the 90s; it was as if we (not exclusively, but by and large) experienced culture through the lens of comedy back then. I don't think you can say the same is true today.
It is a good point. Thanks for your reply.
What do you suspect is it that has driven away our notion of a hero?
Instinct tells me that the closer I've gotten to every person I've known, the more I've realized they cannot be what I thought they were at first and that this *might* be tied to your suggestion? That every person in the public eye for any length of time is plumbed for each detail of themselves, and then each detail is pared against by colonies of observers all bearing serrated knives.
Look at a polemical figure like Elon Musk who to some must be considered a hero. There are those who think he has mankind's future in his third eye and those who think he abuses the underman to advance selfish motives, yet another bad-faced villain with a plastic, smiling mask.
Maybe heroes require quieter culture?
Maybe us all knowing each other makes it impossible to be mysterious,and thus heroic?
The environment that breeds heroism tends to be 'the fleeting encounter'. Superman arrives, puts the train on the rails, and disappears. (What a hero! the boy cries). He does not share his Instagram handle and discuss the traumatic results of the experience with those he has saved in order to bring them back to baseline normal, give them his real name, and suggest regular meetings for a long-lasting friendship. This friendship would give them time to realize he has flaws.
Dunno. Seems at the heart I'm finding that old Two Face line from The Dark Knight: 'You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.'
Guess I ended up at superhero movies just like you.
Guess my questions became a whole lot of attempts at answers, but maybe you can help me out here.
Fair enough, but I don't think a more recent comedy series like, say, The Big Bang Theory, is so different from this Seinfeld standard.
Ted Gioia wrote an interesting substack presenting the posiiton that we are living in society without a counter-culture.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living
If there is no counter-culture, then perhaps the artistic presentation of our unhappiness is scripted. 'Grittier' is a look. What if the actual situation is that most people are not all that unhappy, but are also not all that that joyous. Unfeeling -- not as being callous, but as somehow not able to experience the depth of feeling our grandparents did?
One hypothesis - the 12th grade happiness largely tracks perceived economic opportunity (see also the dip following the dot-com burst). As someone who graduated high school in 2006, even though I was a nobody from a nowhere town, I felt like the world was at my feet. This doesn't require 12th graders to have a particular awareness of macroeconomic factors, but it's reflected through what you see your slightly older peers accomplishing. Everyone I knew who had bothered to go to university got a great job. On the cultural level, technology seemed net positive and like it would drive continued growth and progress (also true for late-90s / pre-dot-com-bust).
I'll admit my bias here - I think we often reach for abstract cultural explanations for things that could have, alternatively, pretty straightforward material causes (I think a *lot* of millennial angst can be traced back to the housing market, and would love to see studies controlling for homeownership when surveying millennial attitudes).
I have a pet theory that how your life turned out relative to what you thought it would be at ~16-22 is probably the single biggest factor determining your life satisfaction. If you apply this lens to people you know, it holds up remarkably well, I've found.
Works for me! Went less well than expected at first (and was unhappy) then much better (and I'm now happy!) Although 16-22 year old me would be disappointed I'm not a scientist.
Separately, the art continues to be spot on for every post, I laughed out loud at this one
I like kpop because it has a happier vibe than western pop, but even kpop is getting darker which annoys me. When I want dark music I listen to atmospheric black metal, not pop.
Sad art is not only higher status but also easier to make. It's harder to write a smart comedy than to kill some characters in a tragedy and it's harder to write a catchy melody than to create some harsh sounds.
In a way you could lay this at the feet of the death of Modernity's grand narratives, which we had all the way up through Clinton in the form of neoliberalism-- which a lot of liberals liked, until they didn't. It's also in the 1960s when this "bad faith" aspect of postmodernity raises its head in Hollywood with films like Two Lane Blacktop, Easy Rider, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Vietnam didn't help to restore faith in our mission, but instead left us reeling. I think that we also have arrived at the end of the future where we are stuck in a loop until someone or something invents a new myth we can all trust in.
My guess is that "place" determines more than we know--even in the case of a pandemic. Although Eudora Welty refers to "Place in Fiction" in _The Eye of the Story_, I find her words on target. See what you think: "Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place."
I want to hear more about this.
I don't suspect you're wrong at all. I'm curious if you find us able to 'place' ourselves, in history, as it were. After all, Hoel seems after pinpointing us, locating 'why' exhibit characteristics of a depressed society or culture. Perhaps I'm wrong there, but there is some effort at triangulating the vibe of the time against previous conditions.
Is it all a question of 'where are we?' and if so, is it a question we need to ask? Or is asking the question fruitless, and/or driving us off course?
Eric, I think the accident of birth, where we're born, has much to do with our sense of hope and opportunity--and that's been so throughout the past. Being the lit freak that is me, let me take Eudora Welty's example a bit further. She goes on to say this: "Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Every story would be another, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Imagine Swan’s Way laid in London, The Magic Mountain in Spain, or Green Mansions in the Black Forest." If we extend her writing advice to Hoel's essay here, location affects not only who we are, how be live, but how we feel about existence to a great extent. And I would add that you are so right in saying that we need to ask the question 'where are we?' on the location aspect but on the existential level. "Why am I here?" is a question I address in my essay on Virginia's Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_ that you can read quickly and for free here: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/virginia-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse
I'd love to continue this conversation there too. And if you're interested, I'll give you one month free to my paid posts if you email at mltabor@me.com
My guess is that we should be in an exchange. I'd love that.
it will stop being like this by the end of the century (tho the "culture" will stop being truly inventive and art/"culture"/media will keep recycling its previous works/symbols and combine them in different ways).
We've been recycling Gilgamesh for at least 4,000 years. When in recorded history has culture ever been "truly inventive"?
I would love for the dark and gritty to turn into the light and hopeful, cheery and dare I say happy moving forward- too much dark has definitely permeated the moods and lives of its audiences. Bring on the light!