Here’s another random thoughts post. I have these thoughts sometimes and they can’t be helped, so when I have them I’m just gonna post them, so long as they aren’t deeply disturbing. The ones that are deeply disturbing I’ll save for my journal.
In this post I’m going to be like a crotchety old man though and complain about a trend that I see more and more in our entertainment. I can understand why this trend is occurring, people like what’s familiar, but still have to say that I’m not 100% in support of. This trend is the use and re-use of old ideas. It feels like we have gotten stuck in this kind of entertainment wasteland where many things being made now are rehashes of things we’ve seen before. Is it just me or is there a vacuum of original ideas?
Case and point, how many movies that are made now are sequels to things or remakes of things? I mean, honestly, think about some of the biggest blockbusters over the last little while, we’ve got the new Star Wars movies, all these millions of Comic Book Movies, live-action remakes of Disney movies, and a never ending litany of trilogies. Disney is like 90% of the problem here, but that’s a digression for perhaps another day. The whole reboot and remake thing is really getting out of hand in my opinion. We have a reboot of Roseanne for crying out loud. Something that nobody asked for or wanted, and yet here it is. Do we miss the past so much? Is there such a void of creative thought that we need to clutch to dig up and try to re-animate these fossils so frequently?
Maybe I’m part of the problem though. I must admit, I enjoy superhero movies, I go to see the ones that interest me. I enjoy Star Wars, although the new ones do have some appeal they have fallen a bit flat for me, but I won’t bore you with my critique of them here. Even on Netflix and with some of the successful shows there we see things like a new “Lost in Space” or the “Riverdale” series borrowing from old familiar characters or settings in order to sell us something new. It makes me wonder, are we consuming these products because they’re what’s available, or are entertainers making these productions because that’s what the people want?
Maybe it’s a bit of both. I think that people tend to gravitate towards what they know, what they feel comfortable with. We can see this in our choices of where we eat, what music we listen to, and the books we read. If you’re new in town, you try a few different restaurants normally, but once you settle on a couple favourites that’s pretty much it. You don’t go through each and every restaurant normally, once you’ve found something you like you just stick to it. You don’t often try every option out, the ones that are lucky enough to be the first handful you test normally have a far greater chance of becoming your favourite. It’s the same with authors, or people, or music. Sure, in the first handful of options we may discern what we like most, but we find the “best” out of a limited pool, and then stick to that. As we become more familiar with whatever our choice, our affinity grows. This phenomenon of us developing a preference for the things we’re acquainted with already has a term, in psychology it’s referred to as the mere-exposure effect or the familiarity principle. It’s the reason why people you’ve known for a long time seem more appealing to you. The more familiar you are with something, the more you like it.
Advertisers and entertainers know about the familiarity principle, in fact they use it and rely on it to continue to sell us things and get us to go to movies, it’s brand recognition basically, but it’s a killer for originality and those trying to make new and novel characters or stories.
I think that the current prevalence of remakes and sequels is a symptom of three factors.
The first factor is the overwhelming nostalgia that is found in my generation and to a degree in the generations before me. Never before have so many people been quite so nostalgic. We have this rose-coloured view of the world pre-2000s. For that reason, I think that there is a certain foothold that anything from that time can lock into.
The second reason is the whole familiarity principle thing where we find ourselves kind of naturally drawn to those things we’ve seen or heard of before.
These two factors play together in tandem with a rapidly changing world which is the third factor. People feel uncertain about the world around them because so very many things are more dynamic than they’ve ever been before. Where the world was once fairly static and that encouraged radical thought and imagination, now the world itself is rapidly changing, and so we seek a certain shelter in our leisure time and in our entertainment. That shelter is the built up mythos of our popular culture.
There may also be a certain limit as to how many stories and characters we can find ourselves emotionally invested in. They say that the average adult can only have meaningful relationships with about 150 people. For me personally, this number is about 20. This is what’s known as Dunbar’s Number and it was proposed, presumably, by some dude named Dunbar. Essentially, we are highly intelligent primates, but even our impressive brains have their limits. For meaningful relationships, there is a theoretical max, and that settles out at about 150 people that we can truly know and be involved in the lives of.
But, let’s take this further. I know for me personally, I care about good fiction. When a character I’ve come to love dies (I’m looking at you George R. R. Martin, you dick) it actually hits us, maybe not as hard as losing a real friend, but it hits us nonetheless, This indicates that we become invested in these relationships, even if they are completely one-sided. Therefore, it may account for why some people have to choose Star Wars or Star Trek and can’t just appreciate both. If we have a theoretical maximum for our relationships and investments, then perhaps we can only handle so many fandoms.
So, where does that leave us? I’m not sure exactly, and I wish I could propose some solutions, but one thing I would encourage is that you go out and try to find a new fandom today. Get really hipster about it and try to do it before it’s cool. There are plenty of artists and creators who need your interest more than the bigwigs, and while you may have to kiss a few frogs in the process, there are undoubtedly some hidden princes out there. I’m not saying not to enjoy the things you are already familiar with either, hell I’d be a hypocrite if that was what I’m saying, all I’m saying is that perhaps be more conscientious of your consumption of things. There is a reason why these refried scenes are getting so much play, and it’s because we are still paying for the tickets to them. It’s not a wholesale bad thing either, but it’s important to give new things a chance. While it is agreed upon that the familiar is comforting, it is also widely agreed upon by psychologist and neuroscientists that new and novel experiences are the best for long-term brain health, happiness, and well-being.
Well, that’s my two cents on this random topic. Hope you enjoyed it, thanks for reading, and go try something new.
Bloody Well Write 