OGWiseman Rambles!
On the saturation of media (and everything else), written during a visit to Los Angeles
There’s a show about everything. They’re doing a Bayard Rustin movie, and while he’s certainly a worthy subject of one, I’d bet that the majority of my unusually-educated readership isn’t more than passing familiar with him. In terms of fame, he’s not MLK or Malcolm X, or even James Baldwin. He’s in Eldridge Cleaver territory, and while I loved “Soul on Ice”, I would be surprised if a biopic was forthcoming (though perhaps I shouldn’t be!).
Now perhaps it’s the case that you do the biopic *in order to make them famous*. I actually applaud that kind of cinematic risk, if that’s what they’re doing. But it does occur to me: Who are they going to be making this kind of movie about in another twenty years? Is there still another tier of historically important black activists who are even less famous than your Eldridge Cleavers and Bayard Rustins, to the point that I’m not even aware of them despite my overt effort in the last ten years to become more conversant with the history of black thought in America? Who is the least famous person (race irrelevant) about whom Hollywood could talk itself into spending millions to make a film?
The occasion for wondering this is that I spent four hours in the car yesterday, driving around Los Angeles, seeing people and schlepping between hotels, and good gravy there are a lot of billboards here. It’s not like I live in some backwater without advertising (Tacoma, WA has its share), but every time I come back to LA I’m again struck by just how festooned with advertising is every single available surface and break between buildings.
In those four hours I saw multiple enticements for “Rustin” (now available on Netflix and genuinely worth a watch, he’s a compelling figure). I also saw bulletins for shows from “Love Island Games” and “Deal or No Deal Island” to “Kindergarten: The Musical” to a billboard for a one-night performance by “Sexyy Redd”, a lingerie-clad rap artist playing the Paramount here locally, who, according to the advert, has just added extra shows because of excess demand.
It’s not just that a lot of these are really dumb ideas. They are, but it has ever been thus. There are also a *ton* of sequels and reboots and franchise entries, most of which look dumb but are otherwise actually pretty unobjectionable, in my view. Dumb Movies/TV are not a sin, nor a new phenomenon. Hell, I watched “Temptation Island” in college (reality TV really does love islands).
It’s that the ideas are getting more specific and esoteric. “Temptation Island” was “let’s get couples on an island and see if they’ll cheat on each other with a bunch of hot singles”. Sleazy, sure, but you get the pitch. “Love Island Games” is actually (I’m proud to say I didn’t know this until I looked it up) a spinoff of an earlier dating show called “Love Island”, and this time they’re bringing back old contestants and what’s “new” about the Games version is that the contestants will compete in challenges to determine every single aspect of the show, including who they pair off with, despite the premise of the show being ostensibly romantic.
Like, is that going to make any sense if you haven’t see the first series? I’m sure they’ll reintroduce everybody and have interminable montage episodes, but you see what I mean about things getting weirder and more esoteric, right? It’s just such a strange and specific niche to try to fit a show into!
Part of this is just that absolutely no shows get the ratings that even unpopular shows used to get, so they *can* be so specific that they’re gibberish to outsiders. If you only need a small audience to make your show work, then it’s better to have a dedicated fanbase that is deeply invested in what you’re doing than play to everyone in America who just wants to have the TV on after dinner. “Dance Moms: Reunion” (also out in early 2024) can write off 99.9%+ of America and still be, on some measure, a “success”.
Another part is that, in all arts at all times, and heck in science also, ideas are just getting harder to find. Most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the last 100 years. In 1988, someone walked into ABC with a pitch that was “people send in their funny home videos and we give one of them a prize”, they sold it in the room, and it ran for decades. Now, that concept has spawned 1000 youtube and TikTok channels, and if you tried to pitch it at a studio they’d think you were kidding.
What really gets me is not to bemoan the low quality of TV, though. Boring, first of all, and kind of untrue, second of all. Some people really did love Dance Moms, and for them, this reunion show is going to be genuinely quality viewing, and I actually don’t have a ton of judgment about that.
The questions that haunts me is: “What does this look like in another 20 years?” Extrapolate this trend towards specificity and insularity, stir in the continued lowering of production costs promised by generative A.I., and what does the future look like?
***
Strangeness deepens as I realize that Los Angeles itself follows this same pattern. It’s famous for its “sprawl”, but that’s not the right word. That word implies a haphazardness, a singluar thing expanding its boundaries, and that’s not what LA is—it’s closer to a tessellation. Small neighborhoods proliferate, eerily similar, monotonized by the same dozen architectural touches and building plans that can get through the zoning process in LA, separated by the street-clogging traffic sputtering from stoplight to stoplight.
Yet, unlike Escher, these tessellations aren’t perfectly similar. They have an element of remix, the same stores and styles and stoplights arranged in slightly different order. It’s easy to imagine that every possible configuration exists in some hidden pocket of the city, like The Library of Babel.
Where will LA be in another twenty years? Demand for the climate there is not going away. It’s not a tech hub, but with everything going remote, monied knowledge workers can live wherever there’s strong internet connections. On a long enough timeline, demographic change and the fertility crisis will shrink the overall demand for neighborhoods, but it will be felt in Minneapolis and Detroit and other frigid places long before Los Angeles begins to un-tessellate.
For that matter, where will other major world cities be? They increasingly look like further tessellations of Los Angeles and New York, as the commercial culture the U.S. pioneered eats the world and the capitalism demand for efficiency drives all commerce towards giant companies and their economies of scale. The flagship example is, of course, MacDonalds, which you can now eat in any country on earth that’s safe to visit, but Dior and Nestle and Nike are every bit as ubiquitous, albeit without an exact equivalent to the golden arches calling diners home.
There are, of course, movements in every major city to keep the strangeness, the one-offs, the mom-and-pop character, but the very existence of these Thermidorean reactions only highlights the direction of the overall tide; every combination of commercial elements has been tried, and the ones that “work” are now being recycled in every imaginable combination and magnitude to achieve symbiosis with local cultural and geographic conditions.
And so thus with the Netflix scroll and the Youtube algorithm. It’s easy to imagine that every show already exists, with the same elements—the flawed hero, the precocious child, the redemption arc, parental loss and love reclaimed—remixed in every imaginable genre and flavor and pattern. And whatever psychic real estate isn’t already tessellated with such product is being systematically mapped and filled, with a relentlessness that no longer even has pretension to art (except for the art niche, of course, which has never been more filled with art-ier product).
It strikes me as no simple coincidence that this year’s best film was called “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”. There is something in the zeitgeist that hasn’t been there before, in the early years of the 21st century—a sense not exactly that we’re “running out of ideas”, but that ideas are getting more contingent and losing some essence of originality that Hollywood has been selling since the 1920s. Hollywood has been around just about 100 years, and that round figure, too, feels like no coincidence.
Where does this go in another twenty years? Will it all be remakes and sequels? Will the entire area from the grapevine to the Mexican border, and from Palm Springs to the Pacific Ocean, be almost-identical neighborhoods you can drive across in twenty minutes tessellated into every available space?
***
I understand that people have been saying that Hollywood is running out of ideas for basically its entire 100 year history. I understand that people have been complaining about the traffic in Los Angeles since the 1970s. I understand that being 40 instead of 25 changes a person’s perspective and makes complaining about how bad culture is the default option.
But if that’s what you think I’m doing here, then I haven’t expressed myself clearly enough. I watch lots of Youtube and scroll Netflix with the best of them, and don’t consider it time wasted. There’s plenty for me. Indeed, my native culture is now ascendant, as the Millennial generation hits its peak earning years. And my original point is not that there’s a dearth of new shows or ideas, quite the opposite!
What there is, is a new relentlessness to the process of making things in the creative space. It is a manufacturing process now. The marshaling of intelligence and creativity and pure talent into creative-landscape-tessellation is an awe-inspiring thing in the most literal sense.
And again: Where will it be in twenty years?
One possibility of course is that generative A.I. gets so good that it starts producing—with very limited human input, probably provided by the audience rather than a traditional creator—individual entertainment products for every imaginable viewer.
Imagine a Netflix where it looks at everything you’ve every watched, adds in details from your real life, and comes up with crossover products that only make sense to you. “It’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meets NBA basketball starring your high school crush, with your estranged mother as the antagonist.”
Imagine a video game where you just start playing as a character in a normal setting, and then it generates world content and game rules according to whatever you do. Start killing random townspeople and it turns into Grand Theft Auto, or plant some seeds and it becomes a farming simulator. Want to add some intrigue to your farm simulator? Walk over to the castle that’s part of the background, and the A.I. will fill it with a Lord who just so happens to want your land to build a new stables and is willing to do anything to get it. Get tired of farming? Join the local constabulary for RPG mode, or invent a time machine, or do literally anything else you want, and the A.I. just makes up a world around it, with a higher level of gameplay and design than any human team could achieve with a year’s work.
This is, in some ways, the optimistic scenario to me. They can take down the billboards, then, since there’s no point in advertising things that are that individually tailored. Traffic should get better as more people just never leave their houses. It would in some ways represent a formalization of this trend to filling every available sliver of psychic space with something new that exploits it, and what is formal can be named and understood.
If that doesn’t happen, though—and I don’t think it will, simply because a super-powerful-A.I. future is probably going to be a lot weirder and more amazing than whatever I can currently imagine—then things are going to get really weird by the middle of this century!
END
Thanks for reading my rambles this morning! If you enjoyed this, please help me out by liking, sharing, and commenting. Have a great week, hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving if you celebrate, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story.
I enjoyed this despite not understanding everything.