The entertainment business is a cultural carpet-bombing operation. But it’s got one point of vulnerability: what if people should stop caring? Like most American businesses, it needs to keep the customers craving and buying newer and newer disposable and unnecessary products. Dead poets and blues singers–hell, even live poets and blues singers–don’t contribute much to the new Market Patriotism, in which lasting value seems un-American. Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but today’s ULWs are the entertainment-media-information conglomerates: AOL Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp., etc. Needless to say, they keep a beady eye on what little of the Zeitgeist they didn’t create themselves; ever since a bunch of foreign crazies bummed our trip back in September, the creative side of the business has been trying to dream up amusements that will resonate with whatever America’s new mood is. But nobody knows whether people would rather be whipped up into a populist swivet against evil (Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll”) or reassured that it can be brought down with barefoot pluck and special effects (“The Lord of the Rings”). Moreover, with evildoers still at large, you could find yourself in a Zeit with an even worse Geist by the time you get your product to market.
So the ULWs have apparently decided that the best they can do for now is get back to business as usual–minus a few movie scenes that show uncomfortable stuff like plane crashes and whatnot. So in 2002 we’ll see more of the recycling that’s been going on almost as long as America’s had a culture to recycle. Hollywood will offer “The Time Machine,” “Scooby-Doo,” “Men in Black 2,” “Stuart Little 2,” and–let one stand for all–“Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones.” And at the end of the year, part two of “The Lord of the Rings,” called–too weird, huh?–“The Two Towers.” The big Broadway shows will be revivals: “The Sweet Smell of Success,” “Oklahoma!” and–recycling the recycled–“Mack and Mabel,” Jerry Herman’s 1974 musical about the pre-talkie filmmaker Mack Sennett. Music? New releases from once exciting (and still young) performers whom the ethic of disposability is already beginning to render suspect: Beck, the Chemical Brothers, Alanis Morissette. Television? Must we? OK, how about “That ’80s Show,” a spin-off of “That ’70s Show.” (Honest.) Or how about that new series starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, another of the no-hope “Seinfeld” alumni to try going it alone? The one exception is the world of books. The “Left Behind” series of postapocalyptic Christian novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins is going to keep flying off the shelves faster than a crypto-Satanic Nimbus 2000, and there’s certainly nothing nostalgic, backward-looking or pop-fluffy about the End Times. If these books aren’t still best sellers in May or June, it’s because there won’t be a May or June.
Well, we’re making 2002 sound pretty grim, and it’s not even here yet. But the best stuff is either something so new that you don’t see it coming or so old that you take it for granted. (Another masterfully enigmatic Bob Dylan album? Wasn’t his comeback story supposed to be over in 1997?) With a little luck, somebody will blindside us again next year. And the unacknowledged legislators of the world will just have to co-opt another insurrection. They know how.
