EPISODE 448: DOWN THE YODA HOLE
This Decade in Pop Culture, Gripey Remix; Baby Yoda Takes Over the Internet
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
After I hit send last week I had many regrets. A whole episode about the Star Wars prequels? Really McDermott? It seemed like the five minutes of every Watchmen episode that is dedicated to Jeremy Irons, i.e. vicious, unnecessary, a punishment.
For anyone who felt that way I just want you to know, you did nothing wrong. And I am not going to do that to you again (or at least not until next week, when I will almost certainly feel like I need to share things with you before my childhood resolves once and for all for good or for ill on December 20th, please don’t hurt me, J.J. Abrams, I am resilient but also I am fragile).
I was actually on a podcast last week talking about Star Wars; the guy interviewing me had an interesting take on Skywalker’s seeming Return of the Emperor plotline. The original saga might have redeemed Anakin, he argued, but it didn’t deal with all the damage he and the Emperor had done. The First Order is all that unresolved rage and hatred created by the Empire out in the wild; and facing it really means facing in some permanent way its source and nightmare engine, Big Daddy P.
Love that explanation. If you want to hear more, check out the AMDG podcast sometime in the next week or so. We had a super fun conversation.)
Okay so that’s it about Star Wars this week, I promise. Except for this:
Have you noticed that everyone seems to be posting “Best of the Decade” lists? I can’t really remember this being as much of a thing as it seems to be a thing right now.
But desperate to conform I have come up with twenty thoughts about pop culture in the last decade: ten this week about things I don’t understand, and ten in a couple weeks about things I’m grateful for. Your mileage may vary; also, things in the mirror may be closer than they appear. Let’s do this.
Ten Pop Culture Things from the Last Decade That I Don’t Understand
1) Most People Still Don’t Read Comic Books: In the last ten years comic book movies have taken over Hollywood. And not only the characters themselves but the stories everyone loves are usually taken right from comic books – sometimes very recent comics. Yet for the most part that has not translated into more comics sold. Is there still some sort of stigma about reading comics as an adult? Is it that people do not know how easily you can put issues on your iPads (and how great it looks)? Or are the comic book companies doing something wrong? I do not get it: A great novel becomes a movie and sales skyrocket. With comics, not so much.
2) Tell-All Books about the Trump Administration – Actually, what am I saying, of course I understand tell-alls about the Trump Administration. It’s crazy all the way down. What surprises me is the endless breathless reviews insisting we have got to read each new book about it. These are people blackmailing foreign leaders, trying to force the world to stay in the family hotels and locking children in cages. At this point how could anything really constitute a surprise?
3) The Ubiquity of AI Home Assistants: Alexa, Siri, Facebook Portal, your coffee-maker/refrigerator/speakers/game consoles/headphones are all allowing companies we mostly do not trust to listen in on our private lives. Why are we okay with that? (Also in this thread: Letting Apple talk us into using our fingerprints or facial scans. What do you have on your phone, the nuclear launch codes? Fuggedaboutit.)
4) Netflix’s Full Season Drop Model: As Succession, Watchmen and Mandalorian have each demonstrated in recent months, a great show released once a week can still take over pop culture conversation, generating more interest, more eyeballs and more money. Meanwhile Netflix tosses out full seasons of shows like little kids toss aside the Christmas presents I spent weeks searching for, and most of them are forgotten within a few weeks. So why release them like that?
5) Morgan Freeman: Eight women have accused him of harassment and assault. Others witnessed the acts (a rarity in these kinds of cases). But still last year he was in a Disney movie. This summer he portrayed the President. (I realize the stock in that office has taken a real drop, but still...) And on a similar topic:
6) Uber: Their record on sexual harassment of riders is horrific, they treat their employees like garbage, the wait times for non-white riders are as much as three times longer in some cities (in other places they regularly have their rides cancelled by the drivers); and yet still most people use them. C’mon, America.
(Also, I know tech doesn’t exactly sound like pop culture, but with how it’s all blurring together I’m taking some liberties. See: Next.)
7) iTunes/iOS Updates: At some point this decade Apple decided to start constantly pumping out updates that mostly just screw everything up. (Case in point: Changing iTunes from one reliable service into three different platforms, the TV/Movie version of which is almost impossible to navigate.) They do these things without warning, explanation or guides to problem solving. It’s the kind of stuff a tech business does when it’s run out of ideas. (See: Microsoft at the turn of the century.) Stop rearranging the deck chairs, Apple. Face your crisis.
8) Network TV Development: The last ten years have seen the development of television shows change in radical ways, except on network TV, where each network still buys tons of scripts, makes tons of pilots, and then greenlights a much smaller number of series, which mostly fail. As a writer, I love the opportunities this creates; I just don’t understand that business model in the current landscape. Especially when again, so many of the shows developed this way fail.
9) The Explosion of Streaming Services and TV Series: I understand the impulse to build a streaming service. I just don’t understand the existence of 207 of them. You’re strip-mining audience, basically. And even as I want them all to want to employ me the insane proliferation of new series also seems to be hurting the overall industry. No one can keep up, binge watching now feels like homework, and rather than more shows meaning richer variety, there seems to be basically the same level of variety packaged around a lot more vanilla.
10) Grey’s Anatomy: The show’s in its sixteenth season. It’s a completely different show than it was in its early years. And yet it’s still in the top 20; in the top 10 if you don’t include football. Also, it’s still pretty good. How is that possible?
Runners Up: The fact that Hollywood still has not cracked how to tell Stephen King’s Dark Tower, one of the great modern sagas; Vulture’s obsession with SNL comedian Pete Davidson, which seems more and more intended to trigger his mental health issues; and the fact that people think Anthony Hopkins getting shouty seems even remotely like Pope Benedict, who by all accounts just wanted to sit in his room dressed like Santa writing books and playing piano for his cat.
WATCHED
The Crown Season 3: Not sure what you want for Christmas? Give yourself a week of cuddling up with the English royal family. If that sounds preposterous – it did to me before I started the show – start with episode 303, Aberfan. You need no context of what’s come before. Just trust me.
The best written series on television by a large margin, and also a deeply poignant story of mostly good people trapped in a difficult reality they cannot escape.
Watchmen ep. 108: One episode from the finale now, and a lot of mindbendery about the relationship between the past, the present and the future. As viewers of this series we’re really all Dr. Manhattan, aren’t we, different time periods running simultaneously for us. I just wish more of them were happening in the present, and that they did not involve whatever is going on with Jeremy Irons.
Also – a thought from someone in my community – Jeremy Ironsland is basically Brexitverse, isn’t it? A utopia fantasyland where everyone is a (white) (cookie cutter) character from Downton Abbey and it is infuriatingly empty.
I have so many questions for the finale, but they are spoilery, so I am going to hold my tongue, other than to ask this: Is the show going to justify making Jean Smart such an incredibly cool character and then barely using her? Can we please get a moment where she says all the things about Adrian that we’ve all been thinking for weeks?
A Marriage Story: Kylo Ren and the Black Widow star as beautiful people who get divorced. The film does not forge much new territory when it comes to the topic of divorce, but it has some pretty powerful scenes nevertheless, as well as maybe the best use of Stephen Sondheim I have seen in anything that was not written by Stephen Sondheim. (Also pretty much the meanest take on Los Angeles I’ve seen in a while.)
Also it just came out this weekend and people are already doing this:
And speaking of that…
THIS WEEK’S HOT TAKE: MEMES
(From comic book writer James Tynion IV)
Twitter feels extra broken, lately. Maybe it’s just me.
There’s this memetic decay that feels like it’s happening faster than ever. An idea is posted. A takedown of the idea is posted. A takedown of the takedown of the idea is posted. A parody of the takedown of the takedown is posted. And so on. What used to take weeks or months feels like it happens in an hour. The internet descends, ravenous on any morsel of viable, pliable information thrown its way, dismantles the information into parts, every component part is then dismantled and analyzed from every possible vantage point, and ultimately it is discarded.
It’s like a very quick demonstration that any words can mean anything to anyone. In time you can almost do the work yourself. You see a tweet, and your mind goes rapidfire through what all the different takes on that tweet are going to be, and then if one of them strikes you as honest or funny enough, you post it. You become part of the thing, a part of the process. Part of something that feels living and breathing, and we get a little charge out of it. a little thrill.
If you view twitter like an organism, it’s like we’re a host of digestive enzymes breaking down the food for consumption and sustainance. We live in the stomach of the organism. Each of us memetically primed to serve a purpose dictated to us by algorithms that we can’t comprehend working on us, every single day.
I would love to see a visualization of this. I bet it would be terrifying.
Twitter gets scarier when you have more followers, because you start seeing how many people respond to the same thing in the same exact way, often phrased with the same words. It makes it all a bit more obvious that we’re weird meat computers, not advanced enough to actually process how the machines we built are rewiring our brains.
We are become pod people, programmed to digest and break down information, to sustain the life of a memetic organism that we’re all going to have to rise up and murder someday.
All this said, I am a huge proponent of Baby Yoda.
Right there with you James.
THREE TWEETS
Schedule for the Week
A Tweet I Wish I’d Written
Pope Francis Lets the World Know What He’d Like For His Birthday Next Week
OMG, THREE MORE BABY YODAS?
I know, enough with the Baby Yodas. Then I saw this:
Unsurprisingly, there are (very satisfying) variations:
Including a Special Patrick Swayze 80s Remix:
THREE TRAILERS
It was a VERY BIG trailer week. I’m only giving you my three favorites, and they don’t even include the new Bond.
Black Widow aka The Movie We Had to Convince Marvel To Do
I’m absolutely convinced my life would be more exciting if it was accompanied by that electric guitar riff.
Free Guy, aka Ryan Reynolds Happily Deconstructs Hollywood/Life Today
Wonder Woman 1984, aka Lasso Action, aka Worth Watching Just for the 80s Remix
The UK election is next week. Sending lots of hopeful thoughts to everyone out there.
The Guardian had a wonderfully brutal takedown piece of the candidates by comedian Frankie Boyle. Even if you don’t get all the references – I certainly didn’t – the ending is really worth reading. And so I offer it for you here:
I’d like to share with you my two favourite quotes. The first, is a really famous one. Kurt Vonnegut asked his adult son what he thought the meaning of life was, and his son replied: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The second is what David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, said about the ending of the final episode:
“Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we all should be thinking – although we can’t live that way – is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we’re here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe, but here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that it’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.”
Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defence. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
I can’t think of better sentiments. Until next week, let’s help each other get through this thing.
See you then.
