2023 Was the Year of Hype
“The cultural critic, along with the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.” – Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
I finally saw Oppenheimmer last week. It was a perfectly solid film that is unlikely to go down in the history of cinema, and arguably Nolan’s second worst effort after Tenet, in which Nolan got tangled up in the strands of a pseudo-intellectual web of his own making (though I cannot blame the man for trying to push the cinematic medium to its limits). I imagine that after the self-indulgence of Tenet, Nolan needed a shot at something straightforward, and as humans tend to do, he overcorrected.
The most extraordinary thing about Oppenheimer was not contained in the film itself, but outside of it; namely, the collective frenzy whipped up by our culture leading up to and upon the film’s release this past summer, leading Oppenheimer to gross a billion dollars in theaters and to engender silly paeans about how it will save cinema, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As little as five years ago Oppenheimer would have been received in a measured way, instead of being hailed as some era-defining masterpiece that will change the course of civilization.
The same nuclear level of praise was heaped on a two-hour commercial for a mass consumer product for children. (As Anthony Lane, seemingly the only film critic left with his marbles intact, pointed out in his New Yorker review, why do a product placement in a movie, when you can make an entire movie about a product?)
As the two films came out, the conversation (not to be confused with discourse) around them reached fever pitch, spurred on by the mass media (in case of Barbie, aided and abetted by the mass fashion media, because pink for girls), and by social media. The fact that two films had absolutely nothing in common did not preclude our downtrodden civilization from creating a dumb Barbieheimer moniker, which surely drove nuts anyone who tried to take a serious film by Christopher Nolan, a (self?)serious director, seriously.
But the crux of the matter is that we live in the age of hype where content and intent don’t matter. The only thing that matters is maximizing revenue via relentless marketing. In the tsunami wave of hype that surrounded both movies the only important thing was hype itself, because it drove record numbers of people into movie theaters.
Creation of hype, of course, is the purpose of marketing, and has always been that. After all, any adman will tell you that there is no better marketing channel than word of mouth. First, hype is free. Second, and most importantly, hype is autonomous. Praise turns into hype the moment it acquires autonomy, meaning it exists independently of the marketers’ efforts and just rolls on its own.
This year it did feel that hype had reached an apoplectic apogee. How else to explain Taylor Swift being crowned the Time magazine person of the year, an honor hitherto reserved for Nobel peace prize winners and vaccine inventors? But why now? That is the billion-dollar question that is not easy to answer, though it does seem that 2023 was the year in which an unprecedented number of people were extremely online through a confluence of circumstances. One, was, of course, that the pandemic pushed people to the Internet in record numbers. (The fact that these people had to be, by default, the least Internet-and-social-media savvy, which may have made them especially susceptible to hype, is worth considering.)
At the same time Instagram has been joined by TikTok in fanning the flames of collectivized forces of influence. Taken together, this has created a truly mass culture. In the world where there is more choice than ever, most people – probably because there is more choice than ever, which leads not to freedom but to paralysis – are driven to consume the same information from a handful of sources (witness how far the New York Times has pulled away from the rest of the newspapers in terms of readership). And as journalism becomes increasingly minutely measurable and algorithm-driven, it is no wonder that the same handful of cultural phenomena end up at the top (see my last post about the 1% culture).
Psychology also plays a part here. In our climate of political polarization and culture wars we forget that it actually feels good to agree with someone, and it does not feel good to disagree with someone (who wants tension between friends or at the family dinner table?). And if we cannot agree on our political values, isn’t it wonderful to agree on how great a movie is? And as pop culture has achieved full cranial penetration, our most intimate conversations that used to be about deeper things now tend to form around discussing this TV show or that pop song (something that Baudrillard already saw in 1980 when he wrote Simulacra and Simulation).
Couple this with relentless poptimism and you have a recipe for cultural mediocrity carpet bombing our lives. Critics seem to have largely thrown up their hands in the face of mass cultural hysteria and its attendant fascistic optimism that has resulted in their own marginalization. And, truly, why bother? You write for an audience in order to have an intelligent conversation with it, so why make an effort to speak to someone who doesn’t want to hear you, or who, worse, brands you as a hater?
In such a climate, it is no wonder that we have entered the era of collective cultural hypnosis, in which we assure each other that something mediocre is absolutely amazing!!!, and if anyone disagrees with mass opinion they are looked at with the same pity a leper received in medieval Europe, because what can be worse in the age of hype than not participating in mass culture, in not speaking the same language as everyone else?
In his 19th Century novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain brilliantly described a village that is taken in by P.T. Barnum-like con men who stage two performances for its denizens. On the first night one half of the village goes to a show and in the middle of it they realize that they are being put upon. But instead of telling the other half of the villagers to not bother going the night after, and together driving the impostors out, they remain mum. Why? Because why should the other half of the village get away with newfound wisdom, making the first half of the village look like fools? Twain’s scathing masterpiece that took aim at vindictive, bitter philistinism of the common folk remains one of the most accurate and damning pictures of America. It is relevant because it describes exactly the state of our culture today, a village full of willing participants in the great hype con.