Marvel Studios has ‘revolutionised’ cinema. This hyperbole is often a substitute for the more accurate descriptor, influenced. More accurate because it’s without the historic connotations of revolution which make applying it to such a commercial juggernaut fallacious, galling even. Not that anyone is seriously comparing Marvel’s impact on popular culture to uprisings of the working class. Outside social upheaval the word generally applies to Avantgarde offerings which otherwise disrupt generic convention, establishing a new precedent.
In this respect ‘revolution’ is correct (sort of). But only in as much as the specific revolutionising of Marvel has been not so much a rupture as a synthesis, a gathering together of existing parts; each respective component more or less belonging to canon, tried and true commercial formulas which deliver a larger spectacle when synergised in the long-form of an Extended Universe.
Under the tutelage of that behemoth Disney, both Star Wars and Marvel are having their universes not just expanded but also synchronised to a roster of profit, their respective worlds driven forward in maybe only inadvertently dynamic and innovative ways; inadvertent because obviously the studio is merely interested in developing properties for the company’s sustenance, as opposed to having critical or cultural incentives for doing so.
This said, the attention spans and interests of the public are fluid things, which the company seems to finally understand can’t be duped with tired recyclables. As so often happens, the interests of profit are being forced to coalesce with the more artisan interests of storytelling and mythology and (dare I say it) good writing. Which is to say, the company seems to be reckoning with an audience which is already so exhaustively invested in it’s properties that experiment is not just a less risky proposition, but also a necessary one (see Marvel/Disney’s Wanda-Vision).
Of course to some extent ‘experiment’ without the risk of failure or the gestative ground of necessity is not experiment at all, simply the horizontal expansion of markets sniffing out uncharted windfalls in the commercially neglected thoroughfare of the abject, the uncanny, the non-linear; by which I mean ontologies/themes/provocations that have historically resisted cooption by the commercial production line, which have either fallen outside public sensibility or been incongruous with the more ideological agendas of commercial fare. These things are now fair game.
The irony here is it’s often commerciality itself which conditions public preferences. Obviously not singly, but certain conventional biases in mainstream cultural output cannot at this point be understated, nor their gradual effect on paradigmatic trends generally.
Important to note that popular culture and ‘commercial culture’, if such a thing exists, are not the same thing. Certainly popular culture can be heavily influenced by commercial offerings, but popular culture has a more collective fluidity and can be susceptible to influences outside commercial kilns, or even to forms and phrases resuscitated from antiquity; mostly on a programmatic cycle of ten to twenty years, but sometimes quite literally (Egyptology?).
If anything has made popular culture even more fluid than it already inherently is, it’s the internet. Culture has always been technologically dependent, having a somewhat reflexive relationship with it’s medium; a subject on which much literature already exists, perhaps most famously Arthur McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. Streaming services are without question how the majority of us consume television shows and movies these days, there being a socialised convention of binge watching unique to the streaming platform; whereas classic network television saw the citizenry waiting for weekly episodic feedings of their favourite shows. The rate at which we consume and keep commentary on media now has accelerated, the ability to consume entire seasons in a single sitting meaning gestational periods of critical response (if any) have shrunk and arguably suffered as a result. The expectation with a general acceleration of consumption habits is that consumer stances/preferences are rapid and positional, algorithmic, becoming practically systemic as the platforms themselves harness data to curate suggested content to a conveniently narrowed aperture.
Counting views/likes and giving you more of the same.
Where classic television offered a deliberately limited range of choices to negotiate ratings, creating singular content for viewers broadly, the intimate accessibility of content via streaming means the way those ‘broad’ interests are met now is by matching laboriously mapped consumer habits with equally numerous and detailed content options.
With the rise of the personal device, media itself has proliferated so that each gadget might act as a window into profoundly customised worlds in which users (FKA viewers) can feel ‘seen’ with content that strongly reflects their own preferences and settings; the trade off being a comparative isolation, where scheduled network-instalments made for more collective viewings (even if synchronously separated by household).
Which isn’t to say a collective element doesn’t still remain in streaming/binge-habits. If anything, the replication of images and phrases from a show or a film synthesised with some higher (lower?) meaning and disseminated as a meme via social media platforms, is an intensely collective vector.
Differently so.
Where watching a film in a movie-theatre is obviously more collective than watching something at home, streaming did one better and rid us of scheduled programming for the sake of convenience; allegedly, but in hindsight it was probably to make consumer-relationships with media even more habit-forming than they already were. In this way our entertainments are accessible through the same personal devices by which we participate in social media, the social finding itself uncannily infiltrated by pictographic idioms spliced from popular movies and shows, a bespoke language being hobbled together (against copyright laws) premised on a sort of positional-criticality, in which one opinion or worldview is as valuable as another; which is to say not valuable at all, or only ephemerally. Because memes have seasons, phases, a moment of primary circulation and only two options when this comes to an end; termination, or recruitment as a popular format.
If the latter the meme finds itself enjoying a second life as a whorish canvas passing through various users and being adapted promiscuously, the best of these showing their versatility by being plastic enough to host a wide array of (exclusively positional) stances and themes.
I can’t help but see the economy of memes as an urgent swan-song of what Frederic Jameson termed pastiche-culture, in which the possibility of radical rupture (the entering of the properly New) has been subsumed by a cut-copy compulsion, where even those offerings alleging themselves as novel are actually ideologically same; meaning that novelty is often merely cosmetic, because properly subversive material is anathema to the self-preservation of industry, whereby under neoliberal rule individual corporations are given the same rights as the citizenry.
In reconciling consumer freedom with the need to regiment against critiques of itself, a commercially minded cultural-complex has become a fluidly adaptive commodity-making mechanism in which anything and everything (including anti capitalist sentiment itself) can be repackaged as benign. With the right marketing (basically anyone with a phone is a PR expert these days).
A story; I was trying to find something to watch because ‘something to watch’ is idiomatic in itself. A culturally mandated practice; tapping into the visual archive of entertainments which in their fluidly digital dissemination have become so much more than entertainments. They are identity. They monitor life by running alongside it, measuring it. They are modern day cave drawings, carrying their own sacredness; especially those nominated for canonisation (no matter how fleeting) as meme. An ever changing mirror, shifting and phasing indistinguishably with life itself until there’s no knowing who or what is the progenitor and who the acolyte. Are we the mirror, or have our delights taken up a greater residence than we thought them capable of?
What meaning do our delights have, how contained are they in the wider cultural stream? From where and what in history have they sprouted, like a multi-coloured mould spore? If we pulled them apart what surprises might there be, in the rolling credits, in the aspirations of respective parties coming together to execute the technically collaborative procedures around making movies and television?Collaborative yes, but ultimately so compartmentalised as to be like a headless machine depending on the competence and omniscience of the director. A heavy institutional precedent exists by which these things practically make themselves.
But then what of the occasional leaps and bounds within otherwise generic fare?
Could the machine have a ghost?
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