Over the holidays Patton Oswalt, a comedian and writer (some of you may be more familiar with him from his role on
The United States of Tara or as the lead in Pixar's
Ratatouille), had an article posted on wired.com (
click here to read it). For the purposes of this blog I'll summarize:
Oswalt grew up in the heyday of geekdom - back in the time where if you wanted to be a geek you had to work for it. You had to go out and search for the thing you were interested in. You had to track it down. Order it. Wait for it. Trade it amongst fellow admirers. Within a group of friends it was likely that everyone had their specialties - one was probably into Asian cinema, another comics, and another was into music - and they would help educate the others to some degree. It was a community where the currency was information and you had to trade for it. But now we live in a time where anyone can gain the same kind of knowledge over the course of a weekend, they can "master" a genre, or bittorrent a director's entire filmography or a band's discography. In addition to that he believes that nothing new of substance is being created and it's just recycled geekdom that's now become trendy,
"Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. ... Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling."
He believes that we're on the brink of something he calls
Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever. And he believes that the dangers of that are that this weakens the foundation of geekery, it makes them weak: "
Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?"Oswalt's solution? Burn it to the ground. Make pop culture so bad that people are turned off it completely and it can begin anew. We can rebuild, and hopefully learn our lessons.
And now, my response:
I'm a geek. Like Oswalt I spent a lot of my youth tracking down stuff that I was into. And I'm from a small town, so it's not like I could just take the subway to one of several comic shops or video stores. My town had
one video store. No comic shops. I had to rely on my cousins to give me their hand-me-downs in that respect. As a kid I think I watched every film in that video store over and over and over again, and so I became a walking dictionary of eighties and nineties flicks. And then, THANK GOD, the internet came about and I finally had a way to find out about other films that I might like. I could research. I could ORDER them! This was far before the time of downloading films. Hell, you'd be lucky if you could download a song in less than an hour (here we are living in a time where we're pissed off if we have to wait longer than thirty seconds). Now, as an adult, anyone who has visited the basement of my house where I keep my office knows that I haven't changed a whole lot. My walls are shelves, on top of which are 'toys' from my youth. On the shelves are hundreds of VHS, DVDs, and now a few Blurays are trickling in. There is also an ever growing collection of trade paperbacks, and the walls are filled with film posters. So I get why Oswalt has his back up and is concerned. His people are my people.
Amongst my friends I've had discussions similar to this one - how the world is over-saturated with content. Growing up I had a No Fear poster in my bedroom that said
"Precious few are born with it, and even fewer know what to do with it." And I liked that a lot. And I still think of that quote when I see people running around making feature length films on their home cameras, editing them in their basements just because they can. And I'm not saying that it's a bad thing - some really amazing stuff comes out of that. Those are the precious few who know what to do with it. But in an age where everyone can be a filmmaker - should everyone? I don't think that there is an answer to that question outside of a case-by-case discussion. Hell, some people may even say that I'm not qualified to be a filmmaker.
Having things readily available does make it a lot easier to be a geek - and of course it makes it people lazy when something is handed to them and they don't have to do the legwork themselves. However the upside is that people have access to content that they normally wouldn't have, being from a small town I would have loved to have access to the information that someone in my position could now. And isn't that the point? To get people to watch, to read, to experience? Quality and content not withstanding - if people want to watch crappy mash-ups, remakes, reboots, etc... isn't that their right? These things aren't getting made because people don't like them - hell nothing unpopular gets made on this scale. But it doesn't fit with Oswalt's barometer of taste and so that's a problem for him. He's an established actor and writer and so he can write this kind of thing from a place of privilege. If I'm honest it feels more like someone who longs for the days of his youth, in uncomplicated times where the biggest problem you had was trying to find the latest installment of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run. And now it feels like he's the guy screaming at kids to get off of his lawn. Like the teenager who now hates something for the sole reason that it became popular. The thing is - if you don't like something, you don't have to watch it. You can turn your TV off, go to a different website, avoid YouTube altogether. Vote with your dollars and with your time and energy. No one is creating content for the sole purpose of pissing you off (there are, of course, exceptions to this - I'm looking at YOU
Michael Haneke)I don't buy single issues of comics - I wait and buy the trade paperbacks 'cause they take up less room. I've stopped buying as many movies as I used to and now sit back and enjoy Netflix (I LOVE my Netflix) because it gives me access to movies and TV series that I've either forgotten about or had been meaning to see, but life getting in the way has made me forgot. It's even made me revisit some stuff I probably wouldn't have.
Here is the real problem with what's going on, and because Patton is established it's not an issue for him, but it is for the generation of filmmakers and storytellers coming up. As mentioned above, we live in a time where everyone can pretty much get everything they want to consume whenever they want it, and if they really want to, for free. How is that going to work in the long run? What would happen to all farmers if suddenly everyone started growing their own food? To phone companies if everyone suddenly became telepathic? This is how, in the long run, industries crumble. This is what worries me about the future of pop culture, not that people are cramming data into their heads, but that the data might not be there to cram. It's probably a silly concern. There will always be a storyteller and an audience as long as people are around to talk and to listen. I know that. But I also know that, as a filmmaker who has his first feature in the stages of being released into the world, I want as many people as possible to be able to see it. And I don't care if they're a bit lazy about it.
