The Great Flattening

Culture Homogenized by Global Capitalism and Tech

There used to be a potent specificity to a nation’s culture, whether expressed in high art or pop music and movies.  I’m reminded of this whenever my mother-in-law recounts seeing Some Like It Hot when it played at her local theater in Minsk in the 1960s.  At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets were notoriously anti-Hollywood, opting to release Bollywood fare instead (which explains why my mother-in-law can still sing Raj Kapoor’s Awaara Hoon after all these years).  Even so, Billy Wilder’s gender-bending comedy managed to squeak past the censors and onto screens.

How? is the question.  One theory is that the censors determined Some Like It Hot unintentionally painted the United States in a negative light and hence served as a useful bit of propaganda. Allegedly, the censors thought the mafia-murder sub-plot that prompts Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to disguise themselves in drag portrayed America as overrun by violent thugs.  And Marilyn Monroe’s barely-there costumes – so tight, she had to be sewn into them, for God’s sake – showed American women were sexually crass and vulgar.

While intriguing, I don’t buy this theory.  It just doesn’t add up.  Imagine you’re an apparatchik on some Soviet Censorship Committee, circa 1959.  You screen Some Like It Hot and watch Marilyn shimmy in her Orry-Kelly cocktail dresses, the black one and the infamous, scandalous nude one.  That sheer netting does nothing to conceal her bountiful breasts; in fact, if it weren’t for the most strategically placed bugle beads in history, she’d be naked from the waist up.  Yet for all that va-va-voom! she seems oddly vulnerable and sweet, like someone you’d want to protect.  Funny, too – as if she’s in on her own joke.

Why in the living hell, then, would you want to expose legions of Soviet men to an American sex goddess who was as charming as she was voluptuous, as lovable as she was sensual? Seriously, this is how you convince your movie-going public that America is evil incarnate?

I maintain that the censor who pushed for the release of Some Like It Hot was secretly working for America.  It was a brilliant ploy: The film was immensely popular.  My mother-in-law remembers the laughter that filled the theater, and how women left the screening wanting to look like Marilyn.

As for my father-in-law, Some Like It Hot was yet another reason to bolster his conviction that he should find a way out of the U.S.S.R. and to America. So, while still a teenager, he concocted a plan to escape through Finland.  He got lost in the woods, picked up by the authorities, and sent home. (His alibi was that he “was hunting for mushrooms.” He was lucky he was just a kid.)  Some time later, he tried scaling the wall of the American embassy in Belarus, which earned him a lengthy stint in an insane asylum.  Eventually he and his family made it out with the help of an Israeli youth group.

Now, I’m not saying my father-in-law risked his life because of Some Like It Hot.  But I am saying it played a very small role in his hard-fought, hard-won emigration because of its expression of an American humor and viewpoint, one rooted in time, place, and people.  Some Like It Hot pokes fun at the mob, at male vs. female sexual dynamics, at wealth – and only those who are free are at liberty to poke fun at themselves.  What’s more, the movie is giddy to the point of being frothy.  It’s easier to be giddy when you’re increasingly affluent and on the ascent. It’s easier to be giddy when you’re enjoying a pretty damn successful post-War run.

In other words, there is a cultural particularity and specificity to Some Like It Hot, albeit a loose one.  And in this age of global capitalism and tech, we’re jettisoning the kind of particularity and specificity that gives cultures their depth and appeal. We’re losing the contours and shapes of time, place and people.  We’re flattening – or thinning, if you want – under the steamroller of multinational corporatism and virtual “interconnectedness”.

The Death of the Other

Because I’m an old crone, I remember when the very draw of foreign movies was their cultural specificity. You went to a French or German movie for an unflinching look at life, sometimes nihilistic, always without a tidy narrative or ending.  On Saturdays, you tuned into your local UHF channel for insanely entertaining Kung Fu battles, like the showdown between the Chinese and Japanese masters in Heroes of the East. (The unexpected benefit of UHF is that it forced you to watch niche genre films, both famous and obscure, because – well, because nothing else was on.)  You went to Blockbuster to rent an Italian farce, always involving sex and/or the mafia, and always winking at the mores that governed the bedroom and the mob.

Personally, my favorite culturally specific moment in film is the scene in 1962’s Mafioso when Alberto Sordi takes his elegant, blonde, Northern Italian wife and golden-haired daughters home to Sicily to meet his hirsute sisters and mother.  You don’t even need subtitles to get the joke (and that’s in no small part because Alberto Sordi was a comic genius). 

We all know what happened.  America started cranking out blockbusters (thanks, Lucas/Spielberg) and those blockbusters found foreign audiences – first through movie screens, then VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray, then YouTube and a bazillion streaming services.  The result was that, as of 2019, the international box office accounted for more than 70 percent of Hollywood revenue; I don’t have the most recent figures, but it would not surprise me if this percentage remained stable or rose significantly in the years since.

And so, when a Chinese team released The Battle at Lake Changjin in 2021, it was impossible not to notice that the trailer for this anti-American production looked in all respects like an American action film.  Same sweeping aerial shots; same CGI explosions; same slow-mo annihilation of victims; same soundtrack trick of using discordant bass for drama and mournful violins for pathos.  I didn’t watch The Battle at Lake Changjin, but I’d bet good money it contains a memorable Hollywood-style catchphrase or two.

Lake Changjin is a Chinese movie that is aesthetically American.  If you really want to split hairs, it’s aesthetically Western globo-capitalist.  Which begs the question: Is it even a Chinese movie?

I think the philosopher and essayist Byung-Chul Han would answer “no,” and I think I’d agree with him. Han is a trenchant critic of Western “consumer society” as driven by global capitalism and aided and abetted by the internet.  For Han, both eros and art must have the focal point of an Other to flourish: an object of fascination and desire that is exterior to the self/ego.  The Other is distinct from ourselves and indescribable; in that sense, it is “negative” to us. But consumer society seeks to erode and eliminate the Other. It endeavors to make differences –those prickly points of negativity – “positive” to us by making them palatable and consumable, like familiar processed snack foods. Such an endeavor is narcissistic in that its aim is to make what is outside of and not us nonetheless resemble us.

The end result is that “everything is being flattened out into an object of consumption.”  The internet not only provides easy and instant access to what used to be considered “foreign” and Other, but reduces it to a thing to be purchased – as a ticket to a Marvel movie, a new BTS release on iTunes, a Louis Vuitton bag eligible for eBay global shipping.  You name it, the internet will find a way to put a price tag on it. And the homogenizing effect this has on art is nothing short of disastrous:

When borders and thresholds vanish, fantasies of the Other disappear too.  Without the negativity of thresholds or threshold-experiences, fantasy withers.  The contemporary crisis in literature and the arts stems from a crisis of fantasy: the disappearance of the Other.  This is the agony of eros.

The fences, or walls, that are being built today no longer stimulate fantasy, or fantasies, because they do not generate the Other.  Instead, they extend through the inferno of the same, which obeys only economic laws.  As such, they separate the rich from the poor.  Capital is what is drawing these new frontiers.  Yet money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same.  It levels essential differences.  As configurations for shutting out and excluding, such borders abolish fantasies of the Other.  They no longer constitute thresholds or transitions leading somewhere else.

            From The Agony of Eros (2017)

If you find Han a bit impenetrable, then join the club.  Luckily, though, a recent quote-post on Twitter basically reiterated Han’s philosophy for us plebes.  In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, a character in another global blockbuster involving genetically revived dinosaurs:

This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death . . . Mass media swamps diversity.  It makes every place the same.  Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street.  Regional differences vanish.  All differences vanish.  In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest.  But what about intellectual diversity – our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees.  But we haven’t figured that out so now we’re planning on putting together 5 billion people in cyberspace.  And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time.  Global uniformity.

            Michael Chricton, The Lost World (1995)

Not too shabby a prediction, Dr. Malcolm, and made well before hi-speed internet and smartphones, no less.

Don’t get me wrong: A little cross-cultural pollination can inspire outstanding expressions of art.  When American slave music met West African and Caribbean rhythms, then collided with traditional European instruments, it birthed jazz.  And when the African step-dancing traditions of Southern blacks melded with the jigs and clogging of the Southern Irish, voila! Hello, tap dancing. 

Still, though, the pollination that gave us jazz and tap was regional, rooted in different peoples occupying the same time and place.  Living amongst one another meant disparate cultures noticed the other, took notes, and borrowed to generate new forms.  That’s a little different than the Chinese Communist Party dropping $200 million to basically make a Michael Bay movie, not to artistically improvise or experiment, but simply because people like action and things that go BOOM! and are willing to pay for them (The Battle at Lake Changjin grossed $913 million worldwide).

Action and things that go BOOM! have little in the way of cultural specificity or particularity.  Neither do cartoonish good-vs.-evil showdowns, predictably snappy dialogue, or CGI settings that resemble another globo-capitalist phenomenon, the video game.  It’s this very lack of cultural specificity and particularity which makes it all so marketable, whether in Chicago or Seoul or Mumbai.  Hence the interminable reboots of prior hits and interminable superhero franchises that dominate American cinema today. 

Perhaps this flattening, this contagion of sameness across media, is one reason behind the popularity of Japanese anime – especially for Millenials and Zoomers, who were born into globalization and virtual interconnectedness. Granted, anime’s wide-eyed characters are a nod to Walt Disney’s.  But the visual style, the tropes, the willingness to explore darker and adult themes through a medium the West regarded as primarily for children? These all speak to a satisfying Japan-ness that, hopefully, won’t entirely lose its contours and shape as it expands its reach and inevitably goes mainstream.

It’s Hard to Stop a Steamroller But You Can Avoid Its Path

So what’s the prescription? How to save art by reinvigorating it with eros? How to stop all culture, all “Otherness” as we know it from flattening under the steamroller (especially now when, after decades of globalization and leaps in tech, the steamroller appears to be self-driving)?

The answer is surely not AI.  AI doesn’t generate art, but pastiche.  It can be a masterful mimic, as the video below proves.  Check out the track by the AI “band” AISIS (get it?) at 2:05; it definitely has a Liam Gallagher sound and vibe.  But in acting as a masterful mimic, AI simply aids and abets the steamroller.  It mines data for similarities to produce similarity.  And as its data-mining capabilities become faster and more robust, I predict it will flatten culture from pancake to paper levels of thinness.

What will save art, I hope, are auteurs: Artists who are ferociously particular, not only to their cultures but to their own vision.  In cinema, I’m thinking of directors like Charlie Kaufman, Nicolas Winding Refn or Park Chan-wook.  In literature, writers like Cormac McCarthy.  I’m largely ignorant about the current state of the fine arts, but Jonathan Pageau is a good example of someone giving an old art form rooted in a specific culture (Eastern Orthodox Christianity) modern resonance. I’m spit-balling here – I’m sure you can supply many great examples of your own of artists whose visions are so stubborn, so uncompromising that their contours and shape are resistant to flattening. 

I listed artists who already have a respectable global following and prestige. Most ferociously particular artists, because of that very particularity, struggle to find those willing to produce and receive their work. This is one area where tech, happily, can offset homogenization: by networking niche audiences and giving them the means to fund the art they want to support. Surely patronage risks constraining any artists to the will of his or her fans, who can be rabid. But patronage is a better alternative to the AWESOM-O world I fear is coming, where we’re all at the mercy of an AI Eric Cartman, spitting out one derivative screenplay/novel/canvas after another.