Ah the halcyon days of the early nineties; a confusing epoch for the would-be Dewey of the slobbering beast called Pop Culture. Decade envy was in the air; the sixties had been swinging, the seventies had been the decade that taste forgot, the eighties had also been the decade that taste forgot but people were also quite greedy, apparently; the nineties needed a superficial tag of its own to properly become a decade. Lazy cultural commentators everywhere searched with growing desperation for any sweeping clich� to define the last decade of the century.
My early nineties ended in October 1994, when I wandered into Screen 1 of the Savoy about five minutes into Pulp Fiction, missing the Pumpkin/Honeybunny sequence. At this remove I can still recall the visceral thrill of the opening credit sequence, stumbling around looking for a seat as the buzzsaw guitar of The Del-Tone's "Misirlou" segued into the sheer jungle boogie of Kool and the Gang's "Jungle Boogie"; the feeling that here was something great and nothing would ever be the same again. The actual film was hugely overrated, rambling although quite amusing sometimes; the soundtrack and poster became the clich�s of a million student residences and society posters, yet Pulp Fiction, and that ultra-hip opening sequence, combining two disparate musical genres would come to define various increasingly predominant trends in pop culture this decade; the emergence of the mass-produced secret, something you feel is your own even though you share it with millions of other people in your exact demographic; it would show that the defining characteristic of nineties culture would be that it had no defining characteristics; and it would help spawn an unholy behemoth called Corporate Irony.
Now, even films targeted straight at the heart of Middle America have a reflexive, would-be cynical smirk. Corporate hipness and corporate irony has even produced its flops as well as roaring successes; a mixed bag which includes "Independence Day", "Men in Black", "The Last Action Hero", the third and fourth "Batman" films, "Cutthroat Island", "The Fifth Element", "True Lies", "Mars Attacks" and all too many more, including the spate of lame remakes of old TV series. Corporate Irony is about safe pastiche rather than satire, a joyless cynicism rather than any sense of love of life. And this pervasive culture of Corporate Irony has spread like nerve gas into other areas of culture beyond film. It destroys any sense of artistic seriousness, which includes what could be called comic seriousness or pure comedy.
Another factor in the global victory of Corporate Irony and its destruction of all human culture and values is the gargantuan proportions reached by the hype machine. Every film that comes out is the subject of an endless series of newspaper articles, "the making of" documentaries, TV shows and trailers. In "Sight and Sound" the reviewer of "The Truman Show" wrote of the pure pleasure of seeing the film in preview, not knowing the slightest thing about it and having to work out for oneself what we all know now even without seeing the film from forests of newspaper articles and magazine profiles. Watching films has become a process of waiting for the bit from in the trailer or the twist revealed in the interview. Film marketing has become a multimedia Moloch destroying all surprise and cleverness in its path.
The playful aspect of postmodernism has become a new language for universal dumbing down. What should be a joyful, creative concept, cross-fertilising between different genres and cultures, has become the ultimate cop-out, an excuse for saying nothing about anything. What's missing in movies today, what's missing in much modern literature, is not intelligence or cleverness or originality, but emotion. The risk of seeming sentimental makes cowards of us all. Films in particular have always touched us in a rather primitive way. Old Hollywood may have been stuffy and old-fashioned in many respects, but in every sense of the term it had its heart in the right place. Films like "It's a Wonderful Life" or even the comparatively recent "The Elephant Man" had enough self-confidence to be openly emotional (indeed sentimental) and moving in ways which most cinema - both mainstream and so-called independent - would never even dream of being. The films of years past often seem sentimental and rather kitsch; of course in many cases they are sentimental and kitsch, but perhaps some of this is in our perspective, and indeed reflects our own lives.
Even in personal relations irony has become the dominant mode of expression, a safe way of saying nothing about what really matters; as Mark Eitzel puts it "our talk is always useless/it only makes us seem clever/while nothing changes nothing changes nothing changes not ever." In this age of alleged openness about every possible topic, the most important things are left unspoken. I don't advocate some kind of high seriousness where everyone wanders around only talking about Significant Things, but the fact remains that Irony wasn't meant to be this way.
Once (or so I'm told) people really believed in films, in books and in something which would now be called somewhat dismissively "high culture", or more precisely they believed in the importance of culture, in its power to change lives. Filmmakers such as Fellini, Godard, the young Scorcese and Copolla, Kurosawa and Truffaut made films that actually defined people's moods and outlook, enlarged their sense of themselves and of the world. Now there are more books than ever before, more films than ever before, more "stunning debuts" and "significant voices" than ever before, yet our culture's fragmentation is such that there are no "must-see" films or "must-see" books that become common experience and integral parts of our culture. As Coyne, the anti-hero cop of Hugo Hamilton's novel "Headbanger", there is too much self-expression these days.
There is no living scientific figure who has made such massive contributions to varied fields as the likes of Descartes or Pascal. Yet science has made vast advances this century simply because there are more people engaged in the scientific enterprise this century than any time in the past (mainly because there are far more people alive now than at any stage in the past) Science is a team game, an edifice built by many many unknown workers. I would hazard a guess that there are more novelists, poets, short story writers, screenwriters, film directors and general creative artists alive now than at any time in history. This certainly is no guarantee of quality. Literature can hardly be regarded as a team sport, and while the cinema by its nature is, there needs to be at least one genuinely creative intelligence involved.
Weirdly enough, "There's Something about Mary" proved a very unexpected breath of fresh air in this atmosphere. This was pure comedy with a certain innocence despite its apparent grossness. The Farrelly brothers weren't aiming for knowingness or evoking movies that did the same job better, they just went for being funny. Another exception to the norm was "The Last Days of Disco", which may have contained movie references aplenty, yet these were part of the characterisation, which again was genuine and true; here irony and knowingness weren't cop-outs but other tools in the box.
And that's the tragedy of the rise and rise of Corporate Irony. Just like a diet of chocolate quickly becomes unbearable, the omnipresence of Corporate Irony had robbed real irony of much of its effectiveness, real satire of its bite, and real emotion of its feeling. It is another step in the desensitisation of everyday life, our dissociation from our feelings.
