It's quite common for people to cite particular books, pieces of music, films, sporting events, and so on as major influences on the course of their lives - even as revolutionary moments. "I saw Meat Loaf performing 'You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)' in Slough in the spring of '81 and it changed me, man!"
I have my share of these, many of which are, with the benefit of hindsight, revealed as awful cliches or appallingly cringeworthy. (First picking up and reading The Two Towers as a 10- or 11-year-old; first hearing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on a dodgy cassette player on my mate's hi-fi circa 1992; seeing Nina Simone a few years before she died at the Liverpool Philharmonic; first seeing a live football match, Tranmere Rovers 3 - 0 Preston North End - an FA Cup tie around 1988; first watching Goldfinger; first reading a Fighting Fantasy book; first reading Michael Oakeshott; first listening to August and Everything After by Counting Crows as an impressionable teenager on the recommendation of girl I fancied; etc.)
These experiences are usually remembered because of their essentially affirmative qualities. In the case of The Two Towers, for example, reading the first chapter of that book at the time I read it probably set me up for a life of being positively predisposed towards fantasy literature. I didn't know what I was reading, really (I had no idea The Fellowship of the Ring even existed), but I knew that I liked it, and I still remember the feeling of being swept along in the company of Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas, three characters I had not encountered, and not knowing who they were chasing or why.
More rarely, we remember such experiences because they were so negative they turn us off something for life. To this day I cannot enjoy the music of the Rolling Stones, for example. This is because, as a child, when I was laid out with severe flu, it so happened that Rock and Roll Circus came on the little black-and-white TV my parents had put at the foot of the bed. I had such horrible half-awake, half-asleep nightmares as a result (something about Mick Jagger in a top hat chasing me around with a horde of donkeys) that to this day I just can't bring myself to listen to the band. It's not a phobia; I don't break out in a cold sweat. I just hate them.
What very few people talk about are the dark twins of these formative experiences: the books, pieces of music, films and so on that provoke what I will call a "positive negative reaction". My example of this is The Force Awakens. I think I had already reached a point of dissatisfaction with popular culture in general at that point, but something about The Force Awakens really made me want to retreat to a 'monastery of the mind' and never come out. I don't know if it was just the fact that it was so clearly a lazy retread of Episodes IV-VI, or the forgettable dialogue, or the blithe disregard for there being any requirement to have a coherent or plausible plot or backstory, but there was something profoundly wrong with the heart of that film, in my view, that trumped the (admittedly considerable) entertainment value of watching it. It felt somehow corrupting. All that money, all that effort, all that creativity, all the cumulative hours spent in front of a screen for all those millions who watched it - wasted.
That negative experience, though, had what was in retrospect a positive influence on my life. It had an inoculating effect: ever since, I've been completely uninterested in nerd-hype. Whether it's anything Star Wars related, the Marvel films, whatever the blockbuster or boxed set of the day - I'm "double-jabbed". Not interested. You would be better off trying to get me to sit down and watch dressage.
This has been extremely freeing, this feeling, akin to being told to go home early from school on a snow day. We live under intense pressure, I think, to always be watching the latest film, the latest boxed set, the latest series, and it's only once you're out of that mindset and you feel the sense of immense relief that comes with it that you realise that there was something unhealthy going on. I'm very happy I saw The Force Awakens, because it was a positive negative event; I've not been the same since.
Of course, the question then becomes: can there be a negative positive experience? Will I reach my death bed with the realisation that enjoying The Two Towers all those years previously harmed my life prospects in some fundamental way? Stay tuned.
Although I remain a Marvel fanboy, I had a similar epiphany watching Lost years ago. I got a few episodes in, and just... couldn't be bothered. The palpable audience-manipulating artifice of it was too much. I've never really worried about staying abreast of prestige/genre TV since, and it has saved me So. Much. Time.
ReplyDeleteThis is the thing. If I ever feel tempted to watch TV or a film I just tell myself: Nobody gets to their death bed, looks back on the life, and says, "I wish I had watched more TV."
DeleteHa! Words to live by!
DeleteHonestly, I try to make every negative experience a positive negative experience. That might sound pretentious but I try to always ask myself, "Why is this experience bad? How can I learn from this?"
ReplyDeletePersonally I have been away from the intense pressure of latest "What's hot right now" for years. I don't know when that happened, probably when I went I started College and realized that I only had time for stuff that I actually cared about and I searched for things that were trying to say something to me or made me feel a deep emotion. It still was a while before I was out of "the latest thing" Catch-up.
The "Latest thing" Catch-up is horrible, it has created a culture that is vapid, shallow, and has no attention span. I actually believe it is something that is politically and spiritual destructive.
Join me in the monastery of the mind. More and more people are doing it!
DeleteI've had a similar experience. I remember reading Fellowship of the Ring when I was 10 and it changed my life in a positive way, I found D&D about the same time ('79). With the way movies are now (Force Awakens is a great example), current boxed set, etc.. I'm thoroughly disinterested. Double jabbed if you will and that's not a bad feeling.
ReplyDeleteTFA is pretty damn lazy (say what you will about TLJ, at least it TRIED to do some stuff, however often it faceplants). But I can't really divorce my brain from the nerd hype since my kids are older than yours and they've really grown up on the current cycle of mainstream nerd shlock. And your kids really loving something can be so infectious, especially when there's just so damn much of it these days that they don't subject you to watching the same stuff over and over and over.
ReplyDeleteKids are also useful for piercing nostalgia filters. You know it's not just nostalgia that makes an old 80's movie good if your kids constantly quote it.
Yeah - I wrote a post about this, but while the prequels were terrible, at least George was trying to do something interesting. That's more than can be said for TFA.
Deletedressage is fucking poggers tho fr
ReplyDeleteWe are talking about the equestrian thing here, right? The word hasn't gotten some new meaning I've missed out on that I shouldn't look up at work, has it? Urban Dictionary has done some dreadful things to our language.
DeleteWell, I was talking about the equestrian thing, at least!
DeleteI had something similar happened with diablo 2. I remember feeling like a hamster on a treadmill. The vaccine metaphor is perfect. When I started looking into mobile games I was really surprised by the cheap manipulations that seemed to be effective on so many people.
ReplyDeleteIt has lead me to question every piece of entertainment I was engaging with. Which made me come back to ttrpg after a ten year interruption.
The volume of Marvel film production is almost scary. There will probably some good spin-off made. But at this point it is really hard to find those.
Yes, I went through the same process. This is what I mean by the 'monastery of the mind'. I don't watch new films, TV series, Netflix stuff, listen to new music, or read new books. I am totally divorced from popular culture. And I like it.
Delete"New music" is not equivalent with "popular culture". I go to gigs, pick up records, stumble upon whole bodies of work online etc. weekly by exquisite artists who would be considered "new" by the above standards, I suppose - i.e. were born after 1980 or even 1990, or are older but have the audacity to start their careers later or come up with relevant work in their advanced age.
DeleteSame with so-called "books" - contemporary authors keep producing great stuff, though most of that would be "artsy" or "high-brow" lit by nerd standards. I'm sure there is plenty of cool new sf&f out there, though I don't follow that much these days (have way more things to read already).
The whole third trilogy reminded me of the old joke about prisoners who memorized a joke book and can make each other laugh just by calling out page numbers. We, the fans, are presumed to be the prisoners, willing to respond to unearned dramatic moments that kind of resemble the old ones. Anyone else not living in a cell must wonder what the hell is going on.
ReplyDeleteThat is such a good description of it.
DeleteI refuse to believe that the plot of TFA can be made to make sense. But then the same is true of most JJ Abrams ventures. There's such contempt for the audience: None of this needs to make any sense because it is shiny and has lots of cool things in.
The nerd hype is real. And I'm not even sure I'd call it nerd hype anymore. Just ... social hype. Hype hype. The nerd culture I think has become so popularized that it's not even the nerd culture anymore, it's just pop culture.
ReplyDeleteI, sadly, have started to feel this way about D&D. I played it some as a kid, then as an adult picked it back up thanks to Titansgrave and then Critical Role when it was young. Introduced some family, and then my kids, to D&D. But now it's every celebrity plays, hype up any YouTube show with some celeb trying to gain nerd cred for their next film project who claims they played but it becomes pretty obvious they have no clue.
For me, the more popular things become the more lazy the writing feels to be and the more hype they need to get the masses to pay for the over priced tickets and popcorns for. I saw TFA and became quickly disinterested in any character. They were poorly written and didn't connect. Afterwards, I just waited until they were out on DVD and rented them. Family movie nights we'll watch Episodes 1 - 6 and pretend 7-9 didn't exist in that universe. One of my kids said, "Let's just pretend it's a multiverse and those only exist over there ..."
Yes, it was the poverty of character development that I found most corrupting of all. The concept of Fin (a stormtrooper who turns good) is an interesting one. But he is a complete cipher. He starts off like a good-hearted doofus (in which case, why was he a stormtrooper?) and ends like that as well. Rey starts like an ubercompetent badass and ends that way. No acting, no character arc, no nothing. And these are supposed to be the centre of the plot. Honestly, George Lucas did a better job with the characters in Episodes I-III. At least he understood that there is actually such a thing as character development.
DeleteI can only share a similar positive sentiment from my seclusion from mainstream pop-culture. I have traded in my Tor paperbacks for Mythology, my netflix for blogging, my tv for Thucydides and the world has never looked greener. In the rare event I will try contemporary works they are almost always from dissidents, small-time publishers or they are foreign, japanese animation, indian action-cinema. There is a vast world out there to be discovered that has not been tainted by the sickness of modernity.
ReplyDeleteNegative positive experiences are generally revelatory in nature. They are transcendent in beauty but at the same time they destroy our capacity to look at whole swathes of things with the same eyes. We who must bear the burdens of revelation sometimes yearn back for those more innocent days, and ask ourselves in moments of doubt if we were not better off then.
There are some bloody good Tor paperbacks out there, though.
DeletePost 2014 not so much, but Peter Watts, John C Wright, Glen Cook and the older stuff like Greg Bear is still good!
DeleteI can't truly empathize with this. While there are certainly things I've moved past - haven't seen a movie (any movie) in a theater since Phantom Menace, for ex, nor do I buy single issues of comics any more - I can't see myself deliberately isolating myself completely from any element of the culture I live in. I still watch the occasional modern film online, usually long after release. Some are good, some are bad, and some manage to surprise me despite the endless spoilers out there. I still read some comic stories in graphic novel format, again with mixed results - and I actively pursue quite a number of web comics in a far broader range of genres than my old print-book habit ever included.
ReplyDeleteI'm as immune to the hype train as you are and FOMO marketing fails utterly on me, but I'm also still willing to give new stuff a chance to entertain me. It often doesn't - Sturgeon's Law is as applicable as always - but the occasions when it does are still worth the time expended in consuming the media involved - although I'm less willing to sit and wait for something to "get good" than I once was. So maybe that's narrowed my world a bit, as I won't generally reach any clever twist endings or stunning third-act reveals.
Yeah, I tend to take the approach that I would rather discover old things than new ones, on that basis that if something has been around for 30+ years that's probably a good indicator it's worth reading.
DeleteOh, so many thoughts.
ReplyDeleteIt's not often that I've had these "inoculation" experiences, but looking back I definitely see them. With regard to SW specifically, #7 was a killing stroke to my interest, but #8 was the actual last exhalation. I saw #9 for "completeness" (I am a completionist) and had almost no emotion at all for the thing...it simply did not interest me (emotionally) anymore as a story, just interesting in its technical choices. It elicited nothing.
Over the years I can look back at similar, once-joyful things that have been killed for me. Computer RPGs. Those live-action movies based on The Hobbit (never bothered to watch any after the first). Star Trek (killed sometime in the first season of TNG)...though I personally thought the Chris Pine films were fun (they were the first ST movies I watched since 1985 or so).
Unfortunately I cannot divorce myself completely from television as it is precious to my spouse (I lived for years without a television before we were married). And much as I try to opt out of "pop culture" I cannot, for the sake of my marriage (she already thinks me hopeless with regard to most pop culture, but insists that I remain "informed" of what is going on in the world).
Still, sometimes television proves a delightful distraction. Downton Abbey, Stranger Things, Cobra Kai, and Ted Lasso all proved wonderful for their first couple seasons (before they started feeding on themselves, rehashing and milking the same dramas that fed their initial popularity, becoming self-parody).
And I simply cannot quit Dungeons & Dragons. Well, not the older edition versions...I long ago "quit" all the WotC-published stuff. It continues to inspire, astound, amaze, and entertain despite such "inoculating shots" as the Unearthed Arcana, Survival Guides, Bloodstone modules, etc. As with Star Wars, I suppose one can still choose to compartmentalize the AD&D franchise, cutting it off at 1982 (the same way folks cut off the original SW series with Return of the Jedi). And so long as you can do that, the game remains fresh and fantastical.
Well, for me anyway.
I'm in the same position with TV. If I had my way there wouldn't be one in the house, but sadly I have to compromise on that.
DeleteNice post. Interesting points. I mainly want to express how envious I am that you saw Nina Simone. I had not know she performed into the 2000s!
ReplyDeleteI got the date slightly off - I looked it up and it was 1999. She was still pretty spry and even did a sensual, erotic dance across the stage at one point.
DeleteI had a similar experience with Avengers: Age of Ultron. I was watching the film for the first time when it came to basic cable, and I found myself thinking, "I'm not enjoying this. I am watching this movie not for entertainment, but as an expression of some misplaced sense of duty."
ReplyDeleteUnlike Noisms, I have fallen off the nerd-media abstinence wagon from time to time. E.g., I caved-in to friend's insistence that I watch The Mandolarian with him. I admit that I enjoyed it in the same "curate's egg" way that I've come to appreciate The Phantom Menace.
S’funny, I once started making a podcast where I would interview people whom I really respect about the things (more specifically media and people) which marked a turning point in their lives (for me: my grandma, Woodcraft Folk, Viriconium, Bill Laswell, Prof Sue Blackmore, Festival 23/Discordianism, and a few lesser ones). I find it a fascinating way of getting into why people are who they are, as well as unearthing life-changing forces that one may be unaware of. I hadn’t considered positive negative reactions, and am less interested in them, but when I dropped the "life-changing things" question into my interview with Patrick, and didn’t explain it very well, he launched into tales of where his life went wrong before grokking what I meant and changing tack.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough one part of my Viriconium experience is that it provoked in me the same outcome as The Force Awakens did for you. I’m less of an arsehole about this than I used to be (but still quite an arsehole): leave Star Wars to the kids, The Lord of The Rings to the teenagers, and Marvel movies… eck. I think that superhero culture is actually evil (Alan Moore has said some interesting stuff about this, and obviously his love/hate relationship with the genre was what birthed Watchmen). And there’s a lot of stuff in the RPGsphere that makes me feels similarly crotchety.
Oh and the first Star Wars film (err, movie) was called Star Wars. Renumbering the whole lot was a dick move. Come fight me nerds!
Adults should IMO spend as much time as they’re able appreciating things that are complex, and difficult, and ultimately - ideally - transformative and world-changing. I feel as though in the last 30 years or so we’ve become a neotenous species (although I have complex thoughts as to why this is, and try [and fail] to avoid blaming the kidults for remaining kidults).
Or am I just an old man shouting at clouds? Again.
(Contrariwise, these days I learn most of the really good shit from people much younger than me, as with the young 20-somethings who got me back into D&D. I just wish they didn’t all then turn to talking about Marvel movies. I am SO FUCKING LOST when it comes to today’s popular culture).
(Awkwardly like other commenters I have a wife who, while not a nerd, likes more pop-culture than I am comfortable with. Fortunately we have just donated our TV to charity and moved somewhere where it’s a lot harder to watch things. She’s reading deeper books. The prognosis is good).
Related: Why Grow Up? by Susan Neiman: not a great book, but a decent one, and obviously has a lot to say on the topic.