Our culture is a black hole

On all the shrouded corners of culture that we can't see

Pop quiz! What is the top grossing film of the decade so far? No Googling. Ready? It’s Avatar: The Way of Water, which, despite doubts, absolutely smashed expectations at the box office. Have any of you seen it? I didn’t see it.¹ I asked my parents and a few family members while I was in town and they didn’t see it. None of my close friends have seen it, even the ones who seem to have bought into the meme that the original was some sort of powerful anti-capitalist/anti-colonial statement (it’s not, Cameron is a hack). It’s not that I don’t think anyone actually saw the movie and that the numbers were all fraudulent—although, hey, I wouldn’t dismiss the thought—so much as I think it shows how hermetically sealed off I am, how most of us are, from huge swaths of the media-consuming public.

[Whatever this is has over 500 million views].

Sam Jennings touched on this in a piece last month in The New Statesman about the fact that he hadn’t heard of Netflix’s biggest movie of all time, KPop Demon Hunters. The thing is, I don’t believe KPop Demon Hunters got to those heights organically, as cultish K-pop fans famously run entire campaigns to cheat their favourite artists onto the Billboard charts²—I find it impossible to not come to the conclusion that these same psychos probably just left the movie going on-repeat or something out of a desire to get something K-pop-flavoured some mainstream attention. So there, mystery solved, right? And yet that doesn’t explain how, like Jennings, I’d nonetheless never heard of Red Notice, the film KPop Demon Hunters dethroned, either. What the fuck is Red Notice???

I first started to feel this creeping unease about a decade ago, right around the time I read something from Jayson Greene about how he, a man who pays attention to music for a living, had somehow never heard of one of the biggest bands in America, Twenty-One Pilots, until they were selling out Madison Square Garden multiple nights in a row. How is that possible? What the fuck is going on?

In literature I suppose you could argue there has been an analogous situation to this for even longer. I read a lot. I read enough that I run a whole regular blog about the books my friends and I read. You’re reading it. And yet, looking it up just now, the biggest selling novel of last year was something called The Women by Kristin Hannah. I don’t know what that is or who that is, but it doesn’t bother me that I don’t know what that is or who that is. I’m used to it. It doesn’t disquiet me. The year prior, the best selling novel was something called It Begins With Us by Colleen Hoover. The name causes a dim light to flicker uncertainly in my brain, and I suppose it should at least do that much considering her Wikipedia page tells me that Time magazine referred to her that same year as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The main love interest in her book is a man named “Atlas Corrigan” and that already helpfully signals to me that this is not a book for me, much like I’m sure if a fan of Hoover’s were to open one of my favourite books and see a name like “Tyrone Slothrop” they’d get about the same idea. But this feels… different now, right? More totalizing? It no longer feels like a world where we simply have divergent interests, but instead simply have worlds completely distinct in and of themselves.

It reminds me a bit of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—worlds beyond our own leaving faint traces of themselves for us to find, the full picture always eluding us. Where does our world end and theirs begin? What causal relationship does one bear to the other? In Franco Moretti’s influential essay “Slaughterhouse of Literature” he referred to the state of literary production and preservation with the titular phrase, an adaptation of a phrase from Hegel describing the human brutality of historical processes. What Moretti was alluding to was the way in which cultural forces slaughtered the livestock of previous generations’ literary output to make way for the new. He proposes the frightening figure of at least 40,000 British novels which came out in the 19th century, of which he estimates that 99.5% have been tossed into oblivion for their place outside the selection of the canon. When we consider how the forces of cultural production have ramped up at least one-hundred-fold, we can begin to imagine the bloody runoff of a slaughterhouse beyond comprehension, a sheer literary Holocaust. And yet on the flipside, the algorithmization of content to create individual marketing niches for every person on earth makes room for billions of cultural sanctuaries in which any manner of this dross might accumulate and persist. In Borges’s story, he eventually encounters a man who collapses and dies on the street, and in his possession is found an object which suggests his origin in, or at least his communication with, the increasingly plausible-seeming parallel world of Tlön. Such an experience could now occur just by ripping the book out of a stranger’s hands on the bus or jacking their airpods—every independent cultural ecosystem produces its own entire cultural ontology, its own world, its own Tlön. Everything is now the iceberg below the surface of the water.

The people who walk alongside me on the street—are we really on the same street? Are we even denizens of the same planet or are they ghostly apparitions of parallel realities, totally alien and incomprehensible to my own? This goes beyond what culture journalists refer to as “cultural fragmentation”; it has the effect of a “cultural black hole,” an event horizon past which nothing can escape or reach our eyes. These glimpses of activity are nothing compared to what lurks behind that dense, impassible darkness.

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And now for something completely different.

A less terrifying (maybe more terrifying?) anecdote about media outside our understanding, though largely independent of the previous rant: I have a cousin who told me once that she had received a publishing offer for a book she was working on (she was not a writer, but the inspiration had struck) called From Sad Bitch to Bad Bitch, chronicling how she had escaped the despair she felt after her first major breakup. “I think it’ll sell,” I said, which was just about the only positive thought I could muster about the prospective project. She ultimately didn’t finish the book because, in spite of the name, its conception was transparently a product of the fact that she was very much still a “Sad Bitch” and it was thus a massive work of cope. Once she was actually over it, the project dissolved.

Strangely, she encountered this ex again—her first boyfriend—ten years later and they grabbed a coffee. They are now getting married, and I’m going to the engagement party in two weeks. I’m going to ask her if she’s ever told him about the book project.

And speaking of culture you haven’t encountered…

Have you ever read Darius James’s Negrophobia? Read our piece on the sadly-forgotten masterpiece below and why you need to read it immediately:

1. I even thought right until looking it up to write this that it was called Avatar: The Shape of Water. Also, holy shit, James Cameron made the top grossing film (worldwide) in three of the last four decades.

2. Ed. Note (Sire): You know who else does this kinda shit? Scientologists.