🔒 How Memes Stalled Western Culture

Here’s a video that explains a lot about what’s wrong with culture at the moment:

This is doing the rounds on Twitter, and it’s an AI-generated (like most visual media on Twitter and Facebook) video of the characters from Seinfeld interacting with characters from other 90s and 80s franchises. “I love you,” Princess Leia tells a shirtless George Costanza in the bed they are sharing. “I know,” he replies, followed by a string of Costanzean quips in a flawless generative mimicry of Jason Alexander’s voice.

 This isn’t just about AI. In this case, AI isn’t the source of the problem. It’s merely an enabler. It’s making it easier than ever before in history for us to satisfy an urge that our brains seem weirdly addicted to: Cultural recursion.

 Did you notice that we stopped changing our clothes as soon as the internet arrived? People in the 50s looked completely different to people in the 60s. It was different again in the 70s and different again in the 80s. Land in any given decade of the 20^th century and a photo of someone in either direction would look like an alien. Then the internet arrived. If you’re under 40, you haven’t seen a meaningful change in the dominant mainstream fashion in your entire life.

There are always those who want to flaunt their individuality but looking stylish in the 2000s wasn’t about innovation. It was about mashups and it was about retro. Mixing and matching the present with the past. Rockabilly with sleeve tattoos. Creative, yes, but more recursive.

 1999 is regarded by many people to have been one of the greatest years for American mainstream cinema. This is the year The Matrix was released. It also gave us The Sixth Sense, The Mummy, The Blair Witch Project, Payback, Office Space, Cruel Intentions, 10 Things I Hate About You, American Pie, Eyes Wide Shut, Deep Blue Sea, Runaway Bride, The Iron Giant, Mystery Men, The Thomas Crown Affair, Double Jeopardy, American Beauty, Three Kings, Bicentennial Man, Girl Interrupted, Any Given Sunday, Dogma, Galaxy Quest, The Green Mile, Magnolia, and Fight Club.

 But the most anticipated movie of that year, by far, was Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. It was very unusual for the most successful movie of the year to be a sequel or a franchise. Usually the biggest movies were summer blockbusters with original scripts.

Later this year, Robert Downey Jr will return as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. A different character played by Downey was killed off in the previous Avengers movie, but fans couldn’t let him go.

 Also returning is Chris Evans as Captain America, a character who was written out of the story in the previous Avengers movie via a one-way time travel gimmick, but fans couldn’t let him go.

 Also returning are Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, James Marsden, and Rebecca Romijin as the X-Men. They don’t belong to this franchise or even the studio that’s producing Avengers: Doomsday, and some of them did not survive the previous movie they were in, but fans couldn’t let them go.

 Almost certainly returning is Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Don’t play coy with me, you know he’s going to be in this fucking movie.

Every year that one of these lumbering behemoths of a movie comes out, social media turns into a rolling feed of all the characters you think you might remember from previous movies and wouldn’t have noticed if they never came back but now you know you can’t do without them.

Characters from one franchise interacting with characters from another franchise isn’t something Marvel invented and it’s not even a recent invention. Freddy vs Jason and Alien vs Predator are just the Millennial revival of a gimmick that began when Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein in 1948. But man is it on overdrive at the moment. In 2023, DC studio tried to one-up Marvel’s current nostalgia-maxxing model with The Flash, a movie that tapped not only into nostalgia for old movies, but also nostalgia for movies that were once in development but fell through. In it, Barry Allen’s Flash teams up with the Michael Keaton version of Batman from Tim Burton’s 1989 film, but also later meets a Superman played by Nicolas Cage from a cancelled 1998 movie that was also going to be directed by Burton. 

Burton’s Nic Cage Superman exists now as a meme, from various photos of him in costume, and also a famous anecdote by the movie’s screenwriter, Kevin Smith, in which he recounts being heavily pressured by the studio to include Superman fighting a giant spider in the climax. This battle is also portrayed in The Flash.

 I’m far from the first person to complain that every movie is a sequel or part of an existing IP these days, but I don’t know that there’s ever been a convincing explanation for why that is. I don’t know if there’s been a convincing explanation for why we’re wearing the same clothes today that we were wearing to the Phantom Menace premiere. I do suspect that it’s not a coincidence that culture began to get really recursive when we started feeding it all into this box on our desks.

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