Has the Mainstream Run Dry?

  • (2 of 4)

    As the war in Iraq showed, social and cultural fragmentation can mirror and even abet each other. Normally you can count on war to bring a country together, as happened for a while after 9/11. But Iraq quickly found the U.S. divided, both within itself — Michael Moore at the Oscars and the Dixie Chicks vs. Toby Keith — and against much of the rest of the globe. There was a corresponding theme of us — or rather U.S.--against the world in 2003's pop culture. Overseas artists critiqued America for the way it reacted to 9/11 (in the short-film anthology 11'09"01 and at "The American Effect" at the Whitney) and for its pop-culture excesses (in the London opera Jerry Springer). Joe Millionaire 2 featured a fresh-scrubbed cowboy from Texas romancing 14 worldly European bachelorettes under the pretense that he was a multimillionaire — a devilish if inadvertent satire of U.S.-Europe relations, playing off each side's worst stereotypes of the other (the lying cowboy vs. corrupt, chain-smoking Old Worlders). Maybe the most plangent treatment of American isolation was Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as Americans in a Tokyo so alien, it might as well have been Neptune.

    And in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, there was no Walter Cronkite to speak for the great middle. Ratings for cable news shot up, while big-network newscasts stayed level or even dropped. Some viewers' media choices became a kind of political secret handshake. Pro-war, you watched Fox News, learned that the war was a rout and disdained the liberal big media. Antiwar, you watched BBC News — or al-Jazeera on satellite — learned that the war was a quagmire and disdained the jingoistic big media. Pox on both your houses, you watched Jon Stewart.

    Or you voted none of the above. What network did the most people watch the night the ground war began? NBC. While ABC and the Fox network went with war news, the Peacock had the sense, bravery and civic responsibility to air ... Friends.

    In an overentertained, overmediated society, mainstream culture becomes more and more a secondhand experience. We are less influenced by books, movies, CDs and plays — who has the time?--than by what we hear about them through the media. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for instance, helped prompt a national seminar on gay-straight relations — even though only a couple of million of us actually watched any given episode. Only so many people were technologically intrepid enough to track down the Hilton video online — but the so-called scandal (which was what, exactly — that a woman had sex with her boyfriend?) helped draw millions to her reality show, The Simple Life. We may not have watched the MTV Video Music Awards — but we all knew about Britney tongue-wrestling Madonna.

    Amid all this media-generated controversy, it could be difficult for a creative work itself to stir up the culture. In 1994 Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction generated volumes of discussion about movie violence. In 2003 Kill Bill Vol. 1--which made Pulp look like Toy Story — landed nearly as softly as villainess Lucy Liu did when she collapsed bloodily into the snow in its climax. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, involving a theory that Mary Magdalene may have been Jesus' wife and the mother of his child, intrigued readers and sold millions of copies, but it was ABC News that really took religious fire when it raised the same question in a prime-time special. In fact, it was easier for a work to provoke discussion if no one saw it. Possibly the most debated works of 2003 were The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's unfinished movie about the Crucifixion; The Reagans, a TV biopic that no one outside CBS saw before the network canceled it under protest; and Daniel Libeskind's World Trade Center rebuilding design, which spent most of the year on the redrawing board.

    This dichotomy — between the buzz culture and the culture we actually consume — also created two kinds of celebrities: those we wanted to see on the screen or hear on the radio and those we just wanted to read about in Us or PEOPLE. Occasionally, the categories overlapped, as with Beyonce, who conquered the news racks and the CD racks. But in other cases — notably Ben and Jen and Gigli — fame and commercial fortune were, if anything, inversely proportional. And whereas 2002 gave us famous has-beens, like Ozzy Osbourne and Anna Nicole, 2003 was the year of famous never-weres. Ally Hilfiger and Jamie Gleicher of MTV's Rich Girls, for instance, seem to have been created out of thin air so we could envy and sneer at them at once.

    Notoriety still paid in 2003, to an extent. Rapper 50 Cent parlayed a tabloid-lurid story — he has been shot, he claims, nine times — into the year's top-selling album. And Demi Moore helped her celebrity profile by hooking up with Ashton Kutcher — more, probably, than she helped her summer flick, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. But whom did we actually want to see in a movie?

    1. 1
    2. 2
    3. 3
    4. 4