One magic pop-culture wish
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com.
Here’s a question courtesy of our own Genevieve Koski:
You’ve discovered a genie, but he has some limitations: He can only grant one wish, and it must be within the pop-cultural sphere. You can change any one thing about popular culture, no matter how big or small, from “I wish Artist X was the bestselling musician on the planet” to “I wish musical formats stopped evolving at vinyl” to “I wish all media was free somehow.” Show your work: Why do you want this, and what effect do you think it’ll have?
Genevieve Koski
I’m going to go big and use my wish for a socialist experiment: I’d like every executive in Hollywood to take a sabbatical—let’s say two years—and let “creatives” take over the industry. It’s such a common refrain among directors, screenwriters, and actors: “The studio screwed the movie up. It insisted on casting or editing changes the director didn’t want, it marketed the film wrong, it buried the release,” etc. Yes, I’m sure this would mostly result in chaos, particularly with regards to funding. (Let’s say, for the sake of this scenario, funding for films is somehow merit-based and committee-allotted.) But it would certainly be interesting to see what filmmakers did working within a system run by their creative peers rather than box-office-obsessed business types. I’m not saying the studio system should be completely overthrown and all Hollywood executives run out of town—hence the two-year limitation—but I like to think this experiment would prove there’s room for change in the way studios handle their movies, and hopefully help evolve Hollywood toward a system that values artistic vision and the bottom line in equal measure. Or it could be a massive, expensive failure; either way, we’d get a couple of really interesting movie years out of the deal.
Tasha Robinson
Maybe for this one, it’s fortunate that GK’s genie is limited to the pop-culture sphere: I’d ask him to eliminate the public’s apparent desire for familiarity in art. No more endless sequels, remakes, adaptations, revivals, and re-imaginings. No more turning a TV show into a movie into a Broadway show and then back into a TV show. No more authors grinding out the 18th book in a bestselling series largely so readers can relive the last 17. No more über-formulaic rom-coms where every beat is spelled out before the leads even meet; ditto no more by-the-numbers slasher movies, where the only real question is exactly how 95 percent of the boring cast is gonna die. No more people bragging that they’ve seen a given movie or read a specific book upward of a hundred times. And no more trailers that show every important moment of the movie five months before it hits theaters. In its place, I’d like to see restless innovation and creativity rewarded, with people crowding to watch/read/hear/buy things based on their uniqueness, idiosyncrasy, and specificity. Granted, we’d also see a huge rise in creativity in marketing, with people attempting to bait a novelty-hungry market via deception, by making those same old rom-coms look like they’re actually about, say, banana-farmer fights over exotic-dog breeding during the Punic Wars. But at least we’d be rewarding creativity instead of attempting to squash it into a series of familiar pigeonholes.
Claire Zulkey
Genevieve’s answer was so noble, it got me thinking about a utopian pop-culture world as well. Mine would be that I’d like women, people of color, and LGBT folks to have as much influence and power over movies as white males currently do. This answer applies to pop culture in general, but I’ll hone in on film. I may be freshly influenced by the Golden Globes, where Bridesmaids was mostly referenced for its poop jokes, and not its writing or performances. But honestly, this answer is as much for my own desire for less-shitty movies as it is for any high-minded or feminist wishes to promote the underdogs. While it would be wonderful if we all saw each others’ movies, if there weren’t “girl movies” and “black movies” that were separate and unequal to most everything else that gets put out, just think of all the crap we wouldn’t have to endure if that were the case. Ideally, the unnecessary sequels and unasked-for remakings of TV shows and board games and toys and so on would become irrelevant, because there’d be demand and room for good stuff from and for everyone, as opposed to good stuff plus a lot of garbage from and for one broad demographic.
Noel Murray
This one’s easy: I would change the way media conglomerates and lawyers interpret and apply “fair use.” I’m all for making sure artists get paid fairly for the songs/pictures/what-have-you they produce, but it’s ridiculous that some old movies and TV series get consigned to limbo (or butchered) because the people who hold the rights to the show can’t use 30 seconds of “Tiny Dancer” without paying exorbitant fees, or because there’s some copyrighted artwork hanging on the wall in one scene. These companies either need to figure out some kind of reasonable flat rate they can charge for rights, or the independents need to be more aggressive about challenging what’s allowable. Let the courts take up the argument: What distinguishes a song used in a movie from a song played on the radio (which does involve a flat-rate system for compensating artists)? Why are some art forms precluded from reflecting the world in which they take place without paying handsomely for the privilege?
Keith Phipps
So much nobility! And here I was going to just wish for a Veronica Mars movie or something. So how about this instead?: A yearlong program designed to break filmgoers of knee-jerk stylistic and formatting prejudices. When I heard about the theater that posted a warning about The Tree Of Life being “philosophical” and not “traditional,” it struck me how much audiences have gotten used to not being challenged. I don’t know how we get there—maybe forced reeducation camps?—but by year’s end, we’ll have gotten everyone accustomed to films with non-linear storytelling, plots that don’t follow a three-act structure, black-and-white photography, silent films, subtitles, and running times that stretch past the two-hour mark. And everyone will be much happier. Or at least I will.
John Semley
This kind of ties into Tasha and Keith’s answers, but I wish people would learn to appreciate honest-to-goodness middlebrow entertainment again. Somehow we’ve come to live in a pop-cultural landscape where Michael Bay’s Transformers 3 and Christopher Nolan’s Batman 3 (or Rise Of The Dark Knights, or whatever it’s called) are viewed as existing on opposite ends of a spectrum. But sometimes it feels like Nolan, and the Wachowskis, and all the other “brainy” blockbuster filmmakers, are the biggest charlatans of all—peddling ideologically overloaded, incoherent spectacles like they’re high art and propagating a virulent strain of enlightened philistinism. It gets exasperating. Meanwhile, the legitimately great genre spectacles of the past decade (Luc Besson’s Taken, Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway—all films which reward more repeat viewings than any cape ’n’ cowl summer tentpole) get consigned to the remainder bins. Where are the exhilarating, original genre pictures? Where are the Prime Cuts and Charley Varricks and A Simple Plans? The closest we get are films like Drive or Machete, which are so caught up in their servile nostalgic boot-licking that they feel more aspirational than original. So I’d want my hypothetical genie to nudge pop culture just a little to the left, knock its on its back foot, and reorient how it views contemporary genre filmmaking. And I’d expect this theoretical genie would probably look a bit like Armond White. Or maybe Tim Olyphant.
Todd VanDerWerff
One wish, Genevieve? C’mon. Everybody who’s seen Aladdin knows you get three, and you can’t wish for more wishes, and you can’t wish for somebody to fall in love with you, and you can’t wish for somebody to die. Adhering to those rules, I wish first that TV networks would show rejected pilots online or in the summer. They used to do this, and though it’s usually immediately obvious why a pilot was passed on, there are always a few gems the networks reject because they’d be too hard to market. I want to see them again! Second: I wish that awards shows would show us the voting totals because I’m a data nerd, and I’d love to know if, like, The Full Monty almost beat Titanic. Third, and in keeping with our data nerdery (and, okay, if I have to narrow it down to one wish, this is the one): TV networks need to give us more ratings data. There’s no area of entertainment statistics more due for a Bill James or Nate Silver-style overhaul than TV ratings. Even if the Nielsens aren’t the world’s greatest system, they’re a good starting point, and knowing more data than we already have would give us a better idea of what networks do and don’t value. Right now, we just have a pretty vague idea that they like 18- to 49-year-olds, so when shows get renewed or canceled, we have to wonder what, exactly, caused that decision. Granted, the networks are spectacularly unlikely to ever do this, but it’s time to change the way we think about ratings from the simplistic TV By The Numbers Cancellation Bear thing to something more nuanced. But to do that, we need more data. And a genie, apparently.
John Teti
I’ll preface this by saying that this isn’t meant as a response to Todd, even if I am thinking about some of the same themes. I’m just coming at it from a different angle. Anyway, I wish we could move past the obsession with reducing culture to numbers. Everything has to have a goddamn score out of a hundred, or marks out of 10, or a letter grade, or a star rating, all of which gets fed into the digestive systems of Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and the like, which turn already insipid, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo into something even more meaningless. Then critics and fans pore over the color-coded entrails of these beasts, like modern-day witch doctors, as if we’ll divine some deeper truth by staring at them long enough. I’ve said this before, but as far as I can tell, it remains true: The more people are talking about scores, the less they’re talking about ideas. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love math. I’m very much into sabermetrics, Moneyball, and the like, but I’m troubled to see how often the lesson that’s often taken away from Moneyball is “we need more statistics!” Moneyball isn’t so much about numbers as it is about truth—it says that a hard-fought struggle for truth can find success against the overwhelming inertia of conventional wisdom. The revolution in baseball thinking was ignited by a renewed focus on a meaningful, true core calculus: Whoever scores more runs wins. There’s no such core calculus for art. As a result, no matter how many data points and regression analyses we might employ in our efforts to quantify the artistic qualities of a thing, it’s all built around a rather hollow center. So as much as I understand the fun of toting up box-office profits, Nielsens, Q-ratings, Metacritic ratings, and what have you, I think we give them more gravity in our pop-cultural cosmos than they deserve—we treat them as a fundamental reality, when they’re mostly fluff. The allure of assigning tidy numbers to complex concepts is pernicious. Culture isn’t a war of numbers; it’s a dialogue of ideas, and my wish is to see a heartier focus on that core truth.
