Junk Culture Hoarders

I was watching TV the other night, and like any good child of the 80's I had it on in the background with my iTunes playing and at least six tabs open in my web browser. Now my gut says it was Cake Boss (they make cakes...on TV!), and there's a fair chance it was that lottery winner shit-show, but after awhile I looked up and noticed that not only was I tuned into TLC, but Hoarding: Buried Alive was on.

Hoarding is my nightmare. I can barely keep a calendar for twelve months without fighting the persistent urge to throw it away, much less comprehend the compulsion to keep everything. After two-hours of free-fall through a Hoarders wormhole, images of stuff run amok haunted my visage for days. Narrow walkways carved into walls of consumer debris. A woman's pristine toy horse collection nestled in her fort of chaos. The nervous shift in their eyes when the threat of trash bags moves in. I'm frowning so hard right now I have to stop, but during the show my nails were dug into my desk to keep from howling at the TV "Just f*cking throw it away already!". But for whatever reason, it's not that simple.

So flash-forward in a context free digression, but I'm at work. Work has some nice tidy piped in music set to Hot FM or some other pleasing name they've conjured up for it, and 80's cover song 'X' came on (does it matter?) and as I drifted away on her comfy strains, my hoarding daymare terrors seized and I was felled with a paralyzing realization. I, we, have become junk culture hoarders.

Nothing ever goes away anymore. When the lens of exposure was much more narrow, things had a life-cycle, a parabolic arc of acceptance and dismissal that was critical to forward progress. A movement starts as a generations underground, it becomes a generations mainstream culture, and then the next generation rejects those values with a new subculture. But in the post-internet/24-hour-cycle universe, fifteen minutes of fame feels a lot more like ad infinitum.

Junk culture hoarding is remakes and reboots, it's ironic tees, it's memes, it's mash-ups, it's decades old tongue in cheek references, it's lousy 80's TV shows, it's the detritus of pop-culture, and the piles are stacking up at an alarming rate.

So before this devolves in to one of my little "talks", I have a confession to make...I'm a junk culture hoarder. I have devoted countless hours to write not one, but two screenplays that are simply ham-fisted nerd genre ploys turned inside out. I have chased down novelty records like a junkie after drugs (It's a vinyl copy of Pac-Man Fever by Buckner and Garcia! Get it?!). I sat through all of Zardoz just so I could use the reference to its full snarkitude later. There is no album too un-listenable . There is no title too obscure. There is no allusion deep enough in the cut. There is never enough. It's cost me money and time and isolated me from others, but I'm trying to understand my addiction, and let the healing begin.

Of the top 100 grossing films of 2010, 15 (15!!) were remakes, reboots, or 80's TV takeoffs. If you count franchise sequels, that figure swells to around 30ish. So let's say 20% of the films that were gobbled up in 2010, which of course sets the tone for what studios will greenlight next year, were recycled ideas.

Girl Talk has 33 upcoming shows where thousands of people will pay money to watch a guy play tracks from a laptop, tracks of which he has not created a single iota. Because it's that one song I know...and that other song...together!

The hottest new fall show, or so the talking box tells me, is Hawaii 5-0, a remake of a 70's TV show. And don't you worry, a Wonder Woman reboot is in the works.

A literary classic hewn from social mores and the aching repression of class versus the passions of our humanness had zombies plugged into it and sold over 1,000,000 copies. And Hollywood has called for the movie rights.

I don't want to belie the effort of these individuals. In fact, its the marvel of output and creativity that causes my jaw to grind into a meaty pulp. If you can wield a sword, why cut down daisies? (yeah...I know I make that reference like every article...but...still) Would the unseen artistic endeavor be more fulfilling than fast-food art admired by millions? I can't say. I can't speak to the artistic character of anyone, but I will say this: it's a lot easier to be famous than talented. The path of least resistance slicked with pop-culture's poisonous nostalgia is easy to exploit, but when a creative individuals artistic onus is reduced to "Get it? You remember that one thing? Nudge, wink, am I right?" the burden is passed back only to the artist themselves. Their own sincerity becomes their worst enemy. The moment an unproven idea is offered up, genuine frailties on display, there is no more illusion to live behind. The flash point pops and the legion of admirers who foisted them to notoriety expose them as either the contributor an artist strives to be, or a circus act hammering out a familiar tune on a toy piano as amused onlookers toss pennies into their cup.

It's an irony bender that has become an addiction, our insatiable love/hate of popular culture collapsed in on us. There is an harrowing and poignant beauty to the shit heap of what was once cool and fashionable, but alas, a landfill is still where we put our garbage. We're beginning to forget how forgettable things are. We're losing sight of the fact that the beatification of the pop-culture that cobbles together the cable-TV-generation has more to do with some idealized version of our youth than those things being works worthy of merit. Nostalgia has become a stand in for quality. Familiarity is being confused for brilliance. We've become so bloated on pop-culture-in-references that they are beginning to eat their own tail. As Patton Oswalt (in an excellent article well worth your time) calls it, ETEWAF or "everything that ever was available forever". There will never be a time when we aren't picking strange bits from the pile and trying to mask and reinvent them through our creative lens, but when do the looming spires of junk arch so high above us, that we can no longer find the creative spark buried in their ruins?

But of all the strangeness in this post-ironic reality, the most grave might be that every one understands exactly what's happened. Hoarders know their lives are in ruin, but they justify the reason for every piece of litter that forms their prison. My fear is we've conceded the point that there are no new ideas. The focus has been pulled back to infinity and every creative notion you've cherished as your very own is a Google search 100 pages deep, and this is our illogical, extreme reaction. Since we can't have original ideas, we revel in the easiest to digest of the re-used ones. Sure, it's satire and the crass commercialism of a bygone era turned against itself and the boorish realities of genre spun on their heads, but it's still junk, and seriously... just f*cking throw it away already.