Feel free to label me a needless contrarian should you desire to, but I’ve always looked at some of the cultural trappings of mine and subsequent generations with the same kind of quizzical exasperation as demonstrated by those of generations before mine.
I’ve always been reluctant to embrace that which is notably popular and wide-reaching and label it “definitive” of a given category, which seems counterintuitive at first until you realize that one of the greatest losses of ages past is that only the pop-friendly stuff really had any sticking power, and that one of the best things about growing up in an age in which information, art and creativity are so freely (exploited) available is that the cultural aspects that we can only infer and conjecture about in generations past are now freely and easily chronicled today.
With all that said, I see things like the new Scott Pilgrim film and wince when people suggest it’s representative of a generational paradigm. Now granted, I haven’t seen the film, and my critique of its social implications and/or import is of an entirely aesthetic nature, but it seems to exemplify all the things about post-boomer culture that I find distasteful, the things that people seem to be convinced are the things that define so-called “Generation X” and its increasingly shortsighted, short-tempered, short-attention-spanned followers. It looks like, well, partly like a video game, but mostly like a cultural mash-up that’s really less of a cultural anything and more of a pastiche of superficial trappings of cultures cut-and-pasted together by a generation too lazy to be technical and instead relying upon talent.
[Time’s up, but I’m going to continue:]
I’d like to think that the film is much like its literary counterpart, a direct homage to a very idiosyncratic art form which is, in turn, a compartmentalized aspect of a very rigid, clearly-defined (almost to a fault) culture. I want to think that, mostly because I’m a literary critic and want it to conform to some paradigmatic rubric I can quantify and understand.
But actually, I’m afraid Scott Pilgrim the film truly does represent a culture captured onscreen, a culture of disparate influences collected under the auspices of inclusiveness and progressiveness but is, in actuality, the lazy hiccuping of generations that grew up with technological babysitters instead of active, functional parents. Even without having seen the film, I worry that the credibility that comes with the approval of those who catch the myriad in-jokes will somehow elevate it from the realm of kitsch to that of art in the minds of those that dictate history, because it will invariably have missed the point, just as the people who only dig Tarantino films for the violence, just as the people who mindlessly consume the insubstantial flash of Zack Snyder films, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown novels, Adult Swim, etc. all miss the point.
Call me old-fashioned, call me needlessly linear, call me conservative, call me neurotic or cynical, but somewhere along the line, after endless jump-cuts, hyperactive camera angles, over-edited chapters, and über-compressed drum tracks, our generations have forgotten what those stylistic trappings were intended to subvert and redefine, that the experimental has always been meant to exist on the fringe of a culture, that, just as technique for technique’s sake results in a culture standing in place as time passes it by, style for the sake of style results in a culture with no legs on which to stand.
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