Can’t drink these all the time, right? Why should your media diet be any different?
Well, it all certainly LOOKED exciting, all that glitter and tinsel and wish-upon-a-star twinkling light. But here we are, barely into the early morning of a new year, and there’s a dull headache pinching your eyes now that the season is finally fading. Can’t see it? Well, then, listen. Hear that? It sounds like the whistle on a Doppler-shifted Emerald City Express heading out of town. It sounds like lament and exhaustion and a sigh of relief, all at once.
For those of you who couldn’t wait to warble with Elphaba and Glinda, I’ve got to ask: how ya feeling now? I’m sure there’s a solid percentage of fans who will forever hold fast to their broomsticks and bubble wands. But as a part of the national conversation, I’m really not feeling my inner Oz these days. A few years from now, will anyone recall W-2 beyond a vague recollection of the pink and green color scheme? (I’m talking about the second Wicked movie, not your tax form, you silly-nilly!)
Despite appearances, I’m really not here to trash this particular sugar-toothed movie. My concern has to do more with the disposable aspects of big creative work.
Big-top spectacles have been a cultural commonality forever. Crowds always have and likely always will show up to distract themselves from the day-to-day, even when there’s no obvious benefit to anyone but the canny producers who convinced them to buy a ticket. In a capitalist culture, the action itself is the value, and there’s no point in keeping a vigil hoping the mainstream will suddenly develop deeper intentions beyond having a good time.
Disney fare presents a particular brand of ephemerality. Where good and bad witches might spar with dubious wizards in one theater, superheroes over in the Marvel pavilion are determined to convince you of a slightly more sophisticated means of escapism. Don’t like spandex? How about mystics wearing natural fibers who can move objects with The Force, brought to you by the LucasFilm division? They’re all Disney, which means they all must adhere to a certain kind of Disney playbook. Most of the time that means media that goes down easily, but with limited nutrition. The problem is that always drinking things like milkshakes can, as the song goes, ruin your tum-tum.
Disney is not the only purveyor of transient culture. With massive media megaliths motivated to make monopolies, we are all collectively diminished. To be clear, this is not another long-haired lament mourning certain aesthetic pursuits with admittedly limited appeal. (And, if you know me in person, I happen to have no hair at all). Instead, it is to say that the more we find mainstream media coming from massive, even hegemonic corporations, the weaker our collective creative souls become.
Independent media still exists. In fact, many genres are now creatively more daring and capable and inventive and diverse in tone and style and polish than ever before. But the market is also awash in a sea of content, tiny signals against a thunderous background noise. The vast media middle has become so large as to drown many solid pieces of work, to say nothing of the artists doing that work. This same phenomenon goes for recording companies, now almost non-existent in a market based on infinite record-at-home musicians. The question is not whether there will ever be a golden age for 21st century music. The question is whether the great talents capable of great works will ever be able to support themselves enough to develop sustainable careers to pursue their crafts. This is also true for books (does anyone remember books?); same for theater; same for tangible, traditional art work that used to find its way to galleries not so very long ago.
Big movies like Wicked for Good come and go these days, but they hardly ever stay for long. Corporations know that the action in the first week is the action that matters. Rare is the production that earns its reputation gradually, that organically grows and solidifies a reputation. Rarer still is a big creative event that penetrates the culture and shifts the tone or changes the conversation. It’s true that the world stops for eighteen minutes during the Super Bowl halftime show, but big spectacles alone do not build culture. They mark time and they distract. They may entertain—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but when spectacle itself becomes the baseline for determinations of creative quality, culture suffers in ways that only show up later.
Drink milkshakes every day, and your future self will regret it.