The Flip Side of Pop Culture

I would say that most of what passes for pop culture in our society is driven by marketing. Pop culture is something that is bought and sold. If there is a spontaneous eruption of a pop culture event it is soon co-opted by the marketing people. The particular item is snatched away from whoever created it, cleverly packaged, and sold in the marketplace. The marketing people prefer a world of predictability and that is what is brought to you courtesy of television, movies, and music. Most of these creative endeavors today seem more like Catholic religious rituals than art. The lack of surprises in religion is supposed to be comforting. Religion doesn’t ask questions, it gives reassuring answers.

The aspect of pop culture most caught up in presenting rituals would have to be the Hollywood movie industry. I went to the Cineplex yesterday and had to endure about ten minutes of trailers of coming attractions. There were no surprises. The bland fare served up by Hollywood is not meant to inspire thought, it is only meant to be reassuring. The same actors play the same roles: Jack Nicholson as a smiling jackass, Sean Penn as an angry malcontent, and so on.

Whether or not this is what the public wants is beside the point. Leave it to the people in marketing to get the asses in the seats; just don’t rock the boat by actually requiring people to think about their entertainment. A thinking public is a pretty scary concept to the marketing people who prefer to tell people what to think. I don’t remember Catholic priests asking me what I thought during my religious training. They had the answers and I was supposed to listen and take notes.

The forces dictating pop culture are all so incestuous these days that it’s impossible to tell where CNN ends and Time-Warner begins. The New Yorker prints a cheery review of a moronic movie that most of its readers wouldn’t even consider seeing. CNN reports on the Ben Affleck-J Lo romance as if covering a G7 summit. Not only are most of the media outlets hawking all of the industry-sponsored pop icons but there is almost nothing in the way of criticism. Isn’t the absence of criticism passivity? To the priests of my youth any criticism was considered blasphemy.