We can't overestimate the importance of culture, especially those pieces of culture that become the foundation of our perspective in life.
I think for the last 30/40 years, society has been constantly reloading and repackaging what was created decades ago. Today, it isn't hard to find remakes of 80's success – recently, there's been announced that Dune, Scarface, Splash, Karate Kid are ready to be released or in different stages of production. Remakes, reboots, and spin-offs help studios mitigate financial risks, and familiar characters and plots are a safe way to attract current audiences.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, and it seems that the previous generation has something to do with it. People born in the '80s and in the '90s spent most of their younger years without social media. With the arrival and consolidation of social networks and smartphones as the most important and effective way to share culture, late Gen Z and Millenials bombarded the digital space with their formative cultural references. A whole new generation was exposed to their music, books, art, and films, and they began to feed and chew on it. Next thing, they started to regurgitate it back to culture. Since then, there's a massive production of content and cultural trends based on what was produced decades ago. In a way, it is as if we haven't created anything original and new since then. That's not entirely true; something original made out of existing content is still original – just ask Marcel Duchamp.
But I wonder if the constant simplistic recreation of the same also lowers the creativity bar and shapes a more conservative and conformist audience?
Over the years, Hollywood studios, brands, influencers, and artists became more and more cautious of what they put out there to the world. By not taking risks to ensure viewers will "get the message," it feels like we are stuck on an eternal remake, reboot, and spin-off loop. There's a push to transform every piece of content into something acceptable to mainstream audiences. It seems we are continuously referencing the past but stripping off its original context and just keeping its attention-grabbing elements —form without substance.
When reflecting on the London 70's punk movement, Vivienne Westwood, one of the architects of the punk fashion phenomenon of the 1970s, realized that although they thought they were attacking the establishment, they were just part of the distraction. That's because the British mainstream quickly absorbed the punk aesthetics leaving the politically charged message behind.
Take Madonna and today's female pop singers, for example. Early Madonna was a product of the 70's disco era mixed with some NYC punk attitude, black music roots, and lots of sex – she grew up during the 60's sexual revolution, the 70's sexual decadence, and hit the 80's charts in the height of the AIDS pandemic. In the '80s and '90s, Madonna's provocative videos and stand on sexuality were highly controversial and reflected the tensions in society at that time.
Fast forward to 2021, most female pop singers still rock an oversexualized persona, music video, and song lyrics to grab attention. To play it safe, the provocative message has been diluted, reloading the shock value performance that generates buzz without the original context. 21st century Madonna seems to have followed the same formula.
This is happening everywhere. Adding social media to the mix, we are recreating content and feeding it to society at the speed of light, making people instantly famous today, only to turn them irrelevant the next day. The most recent spin is coming from a cancel culture that wants to erase the past to conform with the norms of today's society. As if rewriting history could make up for past mistakes instead of being a reminder of the obstacles society faces in the path of progress. At the same time, it seems that the more extravagant the artistic expression becomes, the less essential the substance is.
And the more we recreate, remake, reboot, and spin it, the shallower the next generation will be.