FLEXIBLE CONCRETE, Part 2

Hello all!

In my last post I gave a broad overview of fiction in the modern era (circa 2024AD), the ‘Entertainment Industry’. It is not (yet) about the meaning of stories or entertainment, but more of the mechanics of entertainment in the USA. I’ll elaborate more as we go—and hopefully I won’t get tired and ramble off at the end. Oh, what the heck, you know I do…

To have a story in the Entertainment Industry, you need a Theme and its Variations, and you need to have an understanding of your target audience, and you need to have a clear enough picture of its genre (and genre is for the benefit of the distributors, not the audience). All of these are, you can say, ‘filters’, to help with searching, understanding, and perception. They’re boxes that help the search engine AND they help to prematurely shape audience expectations.

Entertainment is, now, mainly for ‘public consumption’, and thus has to be either one of two extremes—safe entertainment that spooks nobody, or spectacular masterpieces that make the critics shut their mouths in awe. Sleezy pornos are for the Internet; raunchy comedies—the really out-there ones—are either stage plays/musicals, or are South Park. Tragedies’ and grand guignol* are HBO exclusives. Serious ‘mature’ stories are for Hollywood—don’t look at the superheroes! …And kick-ass action shows (Reacher and Blue-Eye Samurai) are exclusive mini-series for streaming platforms!

[*Grand Guignols, ‘gran-gwee-noll’, from the French (spit), which was a French theater specializing in over-the-top horror shows and plays. They were splatter films before splatter films, and the theatre ran from 1897-1962!]

The Entertainment Industry, as I see it in the USA, has been around for about 100 years—wow, really. Wow, really! The 1920s was the decade where pulp action stories, superhero comics, and Hollywood all hit their strides and kept chugging onwards. 2024 people? It’s gotten old. Not venerable, not respectable, but old and doddering. Why? I think it is because the Entertainment Industry aged too rapidly. Yes, 100 years, that is too fast. It got too old by doing everything too quickly, and because—dare I say it—it did not pick up Themes which are ‘infinitely renewable’. (I must thank my Arthurian college professor for that phrase.) Don’t worry, I’ll explain the factors.

The first, that of Themes Infinitely Renewable. Look, people, whoever you are or what you believe, but the majority of the stories of the past were about God, the gods, or national epics that gave people an identity and purpose. (All you Post-moderns and cynical people, shut the hell up!) If a story wasn’t a national epic, it was a fairy-tale—a micro-myth—or it was a tall-tale about local legends, or it was a, uh, ‘colorful re-telling’ of actual history. That’s it! Those were the stories back in the day. Nothing about the wider world—rather, most stories defined what was the edge, the limit of the world, so that people would then look after the part of the world that they lived in! The older eras respected limits, and were comfortable with the world and God being too large to ever understand. There was a comfort in that, and, the sense of purpose, the sense of being part of something greater. In this context, the only things that truly mattered were the eternal constants of life—love and death and heroism and laughing at your stupid neighbors. Infinitely Renewable.

Why this changed is a whole other story, has to do with bungled Christianity giving rise to secularism giving rise to nihilism.

Now, sure, we can impose our modern attitudes on the older days, and complain that nothing changed, that there was nothing new, and that art became stale. Sure, think that way if you wish. What is important here, is the longevity. The longevity of the stories and national epics. The older days did not experiment with story-making as we do today (2024). Partly, because learning the craft was difficult. Partly, out of respect for what came before. Partly, because there was no realistic way to combine different things. The Internet? Didn’t have that, duh. But, say, the illustrated picture books that show clothing fashions across time and different cultures? Didn’t have that either. Things stayed the same because there was no easy way to inject new things. Oops, and the language barriers! The usual way to inject new things was either conquest or merchant caravans, and both of those were difficult. Change, overall, was difficult! And remember—the imagination is the pulling apart and putting-together of different images. Limited pool of images, limited combinations.

But now! Let’s add our modern mad science to the mix. The first is proliferation. Printing presses, even the ones with tiny letters that you had to move around by hand, let you make books by the cartload. Now make it a modern printing press like a newspaper printer. 1000s of newspapers a day, or pamphlets. The Protestant Reformation used pamphlets extensively. The second is better and better communication, unrelated to printing. Better communication lets authors react to the work of other authors, or to exchange ideas. [First, by reliable mail post, then telegraph cables, radios, black-and-white films in theatres, TV, telephones, Internet…] Better communication lets authors recombine and add to existing ideas, existing stories. Start taking stories and ideas from other parts of the world and mixing them with your own. Cheap paper makes cheap books (in both senses).

Now make storytelling and entertainment a reliable way of living. Now add more people who want to be authors and entertainers because of a positive feedback loop—more communication to more entertainment to more demand for entertainment to demand for more entertainment laborers, that is then communicated for the entertainment of people. Now make it glamourous, and give silly rewards to the best entertainers. Encourages more people to want to be a part of the Entertainment Industry. Instead of a tiny minority group of professional entertainers, now have hundreds of thousands of people try their hand at making stories. 100,000s of semi-professional writers, trying all the same Themes and Variations. Everything gets tried at least once, is put into the public, and then the public reacts. The Entertainment Industry reacts to how the public reacts. And so on.

There is an idea in genre writing*, that every genre has a lifecycle. Even long-running television shows are affected by this. And I think we have a hundred years of evidence to turn this idea into a workable Hypothesis, if not a possible Theory.

[*I take this idea from The Critical Drinker, a film critic, and Jonathan Pageau, icon carver and symbologist; both of them on Youtube™.]

The idea goes that every genre—say, cowboy Westerns and Star Trek as examples—has four phases of life. The first phase is the, well, ‘frontier’ phase. It is the early phase where the genre or long-runner-show gets its feet wet, has a strong core of ideas, but still has early weird stuff in it. In this phase, the genre mostly knows itself. In the second phase of life, the genre hits its golden age. Core themes are solidified and built up to high drama. If a genre makes it to here, it can make a great story in spite of a silly premise. This is the cream of the crop of the genre, at its best, with no weird consequences. It is masterful artifice.

Then we get to the third phase, the deconstruction phase*. This phase serves as the dark mirror to the golden age. It is not that the genre takes an immediate dive into gross, icky, or dark themes, but rather it questions the premises of the golden age. It is a testing of the high ideals of the golden age. ‘Okay,’ says phase three, ‘here is where hard reality and consequences apply to you. How do your high ideals hold up?’ Phase three is not dominated by parody, but the parody begins here. This is the phase where superpowers are questioned, people get hurt more realistically, and darkness begins to creep in. And the deconstruction does not stop. Phase four—parody and death. This is the phase where the genre is seen as a joke and is the butt of many humiliating jokes. Authors won’t touch the genre unless they are well and truly dedicated. For all intents and purposes, the genre is dead and worn out. Though, it may come back, if enough of the public has forgotten. If none remember the shame of the genre, it may have a comeback.

[*Not to be confused with Deconstructionism, a daft style of literary criticism.]

For cowboys—well I don’t know what the early cowboy films were like, I haven’t gone back that far. I can say that John Wayne is the golden age cowboy—though that didn’t stop him from varying up his roles, like when he played a bitter, angry cowboy in the film The Searchers (1956). Then, of course, Clint Eastwood showed up, and is the poster boy of the deconstruction age. Is the cowboy a hero, or an opportunistic mercenary? Now, see Blazing Saddles (1974) for the parody.

For Star Trek, the early age was James T. Kirk, Spock, and Bones. Though, the early Trek years also didn’t mind turning their characters on their heads. Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982) is a deconstruction of Kirk’s character, by making him go through a mid-life crisis.  The golden age of Trek was The Next Generation. My role model, Jean Luc-Picard, was the poster-boy for this age. Next, for deconstruction, was Deep Space Nine* which first took away the exploration aspect of Trek, and then forced the characters to play real politics for all their ugliness. Then, we have Space Balls (1987) and Galaxy Quest (1999) for the parodies. (This does not mention the mess that was Voyager, 1995.)

[*Though I don’t know the whole story, the relationships between the actors on the different shows was night and day. Patrick Stewart, who played Picard, was a stuck-up Brit who had to warm up to the TNG actors, who all got along remarkably well and were a bunch of big goofballs. DS9’s acting crew was…a lot of egos and *ss-holes on the same set. Not pretty.]

What plays into genre-death? A good number of factors, which I think I’ll cover in the next post. As for what to do with genre-death, when one is living in an age of it? What do you intend for stories and entertainment. I know what I think. There’s too many alternatives to sift through. …What need do God and His angels have of drama? It is for human benefit. Entertainment is art, and like all art the best of it flings the soul in the direction of God. In spite of the voices screaming in my head, and same voices whispering in yours, I think we need fewer stories, not more. I know, I know, ‘boo-hiss! Christianity! Boo-bad, it’s tyranny!’ and so on. Let me finish. We need fewer stories, but they need to be much bigger to compensate. The big stories need to be big enough for the smaller stories to nest in, like birds in a canopy. There’s more than this, yet the best stories are like weavers at a loom. They weave together many different threads, and include the large and small, the strange and familiar, the inside and outside, the high and low—and yet, because they are art, they can’t include everything. Only mostly everything! There has to remain things unsaid, so that others may speak, and there has to be unresolved, mysterious things. This is to respect the mysterious and to instill a healthy sense of wonder in people.

It is why genre-death is inevitable, because it is caused by more of the same. I can also say it’s because of the degeneration of human cultures, but that is its own topic. Genre-death runs out of wonder. That is its problem. It loses the ability to excite, and when it does that, it becomes dead weight in the person partaking of it. More dead weight and more dead weight. The marvelous exception is for those rare few people who are always excited by it. Like a long-term spouse, a genre can be perpetually fascinating, if you engage with it. Remember that there are higher things than a spouse though!

Think of this metaphor: The Entertainment Industry is forced, rapid evolution in a self-contained environment, and the ‘stories’ and genres will evolve to fit the environment. You don’t get high drama unless you try and write high drama/national epics, and to do that you need to A) don’t care what other people think and B) keep creating in spite of the Industry bias. The Industry favors quick, cheap, mass-produced and mostly safe entertainment. Well, safe, or at least ‘tolerated’. The Simpsons broke the mold and paved the way for Family Guy; then Family Guy became the tolerated norm. The Industry favors serialized entertainment*, OR it takes big-ticket names that are proven successes (Stephen King and Star Wars and the like) and milks them to death. The Entertainment Industry wants to be safe. That in turn makes a biased environment that favors certain ‘species’ of entertainment over others. See? And, because entertainment makes money, the Industry tries to regulate it all. The Industry (un)naturally selects some things over others and skews the environment more.

[*Cough-cough, buy my serialized story in chapters on Jan. 23rd, cough-cough!]

There will be a need to regulate, but not by the hand of the Entertainment Industry. Rather, my hope is that the big stories crowd out the…unnatural ones. Trust me, TRUST ME. People have been writing sick, pervert fiction for as long as people have had perverse fantasies. Using the law to stamp them out will crush creativity. Creators will be afraid to take risks—but the flip side is that creators have and WILL ALWAYS abuse creative freedom to push sinful fantasies in the name of ‘creative freedom’, to make whatever paradisal Hell they desire. See, for all the mess they’ve made, the Industry has imposed a kind of order. Not a pleasant order, but it is there—if falling apart due to recent political-cultural-spiritual problems, but those are beyond the scope of this blog. I’ll say it again—Fantasy is dangerous! Guard your heart!

To do that, you have to understand what stories you let live in your head, ‘rent free’ goes the saying. You have to understand—you are keeping in your head and heart what destinies you think are possible. You will also be a part of the ‘regulation’. The big stories remain, only if they are maintained. Even small things can eat out the big things, if you let them. If the big and good stories are established, do you let them erode? Do you let them be somebody else’s problem? You have a very special power, and that power is saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’. You banish the unnatural, sick fantasies by saying no to them—‘I am not buying your crap.’ You tell the money-making Entertainment Industry the same—you tell it no, and refuse to give them money and attention, they will wither.

…

I’ll give some other concluding thoughts next post. Stay warm y’all!

More to follow!