Online only: Pop culture too uptight, serious
A few weeks ago, I walked into a 1950s-style diner named Cheesy Jane's and ordered a burger, onion rings and chocolate shake. Above my table, a model train coasted along a track suspended from the ceiling. A different song began to play on the oldies radio station, and the singer asked a series of questions I hadn't heard in years: "Who put the bomp in the bomp ba bomp? Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong? Who put the bop in the bop she bop? Who put the dip in the dip da dip da dip?"
And I thought, "Wow, if you wrote a song like that today, people would think you're stupid, perverted or possibly a psychopath."
And then it hit me. You know what's wrong with our pop culture today? It takes itself too seriously. It needs more whimsy.
Our popular culture has responded to the trials of globalization and terrorism by sucking the whimsy out of nearly everything. No longer is pop culture here to relieve us of our stress; its job is to educate, to be real, to send a message. We prefer irony to humor and gritty realism to entertainment. Escapism is a label real artists hold in contempt.
We live in a serious world faced with serious issues, doing our serious best to live responsibly as global citizens, in our spare time watching movies with titles like A Serious Man. Does that last part make any sense?
The transformation began with written fiction. Novelist Michael Chabon, who began his career as earnestly as he could and then started writing books about magicians and drunk Yiddish detectives, noted, "Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it." Writers who create enjoyable work are likely to see their output excluded from the category of "art" because art cannot be "entertaining."
The depreciation in our respect for "mere entertainment" has resulted in a fundamental shift in the kind of books we read, music we hear and, most dramatically, movies we watch. In 1939, The Wizard of Oz was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. Today, it would be a politicized critique of income disparity between the rich and the working classes, if it were even made.
Consider James Bond. When they were first made, the Bond films were equal parts awesome action sequences, hilarious bad guys, gratuitous love affairs and silly self-parody. Now they are serious action movies almost completely indistinguishable from their competitors.
Typical pre-reboot Bond plot: Evil billionaire builds a giant space station to release poison gas into the atmosphere. Typical post-reboot Bond plot: Businessman tries to steal water rights in Bolivia. Typical post-reboot Bond girl name: Camille Montes. Typical pre-reboot Bond girl name: Pussy Galore.
The rest of Hollywood reflects our newfound seriousness, too. Witness the difference between the Jokers portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, or the naive charm of the original Mr. Deeds Goes to Town compared to the cynical Adam Sandler remake. Successful comedies are always hard to make, but a culture like ours makes producing them even harder. Judd Apatow's latest movie, Funny People, is a tragedy in disguise.
We need our sense of whimsy back, and our sense of humor. We need songs and books and movies that make us grin without insulting our intelligence. There is a market for it. Two of the best, most popular movies of 2009 were the creatively insane comedy The Hangover and Pixar's magical cartoon Up. Nobody does humor and whimsy as well as Pixar does these days. No wonder everybody loves them.
I am not advocating a decline in serious works of art, or saying that we need to stop being mature and responsible consumers of art. What I am saying is that there is a reason we use the word "entertainment." Up is a masterpiece, the product of equal parts hard work and artistic genius. It just also happens to be entertaining.
We need to realize that seriousness, realism, grit, world-weariness, minimal lighting, heroes with dark sides and scripts full of ironic condescension are only one way to make movies. We need to realize that it is okay to love entertainment, whimsy or a good time that isn't excessively meaningful or hopelessly stupid. Serious artists, as Chabon reminds us, need to learn to trust in entertainment again.
In other words, it's time to go back to Oz. It's time for Michael Scott to hire Lucy Ricardo. It's time for diners to have model trains suspended from the ceilings again. It's time to put the ram back in the rama lama ding dong.
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