This is somewhat of a follow-up to the last post I made. The last time I talked about this feeling I had of “media homogenization” and how it feels like everything is becoming more and more whittled down into generally appealing Emmy-goop. So, I feel like I should try and give some context to where I’m coming from here.
A part of the problem is that the internet is blitheringly fucking stupid. See, sometimes you’ll get treated like a gatekeeping reactionary or like you’re just blinded by nostalgia if you insinuate the new shit sucking, or how hyper-accessibility and homogenization has been whittling away at art until there’s nothing left.
And in a way they're not wrong, despite the destructive environment that it’s currently in, I suppose art really is doing just fine! It’s fine... but it’s not what I want, so no thank you. And it’s not really nostalgia if you watch older movies, play older video games, tv shows, books, etc. not to relive old memories, but because they just do things you want that the new shit doesn’t do.
Part 1: Physical media was really important
The last time I mentioned that literally every single medium has been increasingly serving the lowest common denominator in its audience, but I didn’t really explain why. The thing is, there’s this clip here of Matt Damon explaining that the loss of the DVD meant that they had essentially lost an entire source of revenue, and that ended up killing entire swaths of films that couldn’t cover their expenses anymore.
A lot of my favourite films were by all intensive purposes “DVD movies”, movies that failed at the box office, though eventually gaining a cult following through home video releases.
They say artists deserve to get paid or else you’ll see less of it. And that is true because I was there as it was happening, I saw it with my own eyes...
Part 2: Convenience ruined everything
A common talking point hovering around this sort of thing is you might have heard about “the death of Monoculture”. But I don’t know man, have you ever considered that the monoculture fucking blows? I think there’s too much monoculture actually, the monoculture is all there is now.
There's a thing you'll see online which is like "Blockbuster nostalgia" and as someone who grew up in the 90s and 00s, I never once set foot in one of those. It was too far away and it was too expensive anyways.
What I instead got was like one of those dumpy video rental stores with a weird ass name and a Bugs Life standee that eventually became so whited out that you could barely even see it anymore. But it had random, eclectic collections.
The benefit of this was I grew up with an extremely varied media diet. You ever watch Dr. Katz? Or like Mystery Science Theater 3000? My family rented Showgirls and Cool World one night, it was a weird night.
The point being is that I didn't have much reference for what was considered good and popular, it was kind of the wild west, and my viewing experience was largely independent. You can say "taste is subjective", but I didn't really have that, I was exposed to a lot of different things and liked most of them.
However, imagine my surprise when all of that completely went away in favour of *dramatic music* Norbit. Fucking Norbit. And it was likely because they were eventually pivoting to solely having whatever movie just came out on DVD. Which was probably why it was replaced by streaming.
And you'll notice after a while is that shit like this happens all the time, it's like an endless cycle. I feel like every single time there's like people or a business or whatever bringing cool and weird shit to the masses, it eventually shifts to focusing solely on dull, tasteless hacks until it's inevitably killed.