Uncanny Valley

Conrad Flynn with a guest post following up on the idea of Quentin Tarantino as video store clerk auteur and meta-movie maker. Conrad relates QT  "the king of junk culture re-appropriation" and pioneer/ populariser of a "How many movies has this guy seen!?!" pomo-pastiche style of mash-up-movie.....  to a condition (at once spiritual and in many cases literal) of growing up in the Valley., i.e. near to Hollywood but not in it.


The internet's effect has been to make the rest of the world feel like the Valley.

The closest thing you could've had to the internet experience, in terms of a gluttonous diet of porn, and movie and music history....  before there was the internet was growing up in the Valley, and that Anything Goes aesthetic that raised  Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow and others... that embarrassment of riches -- and junk -- meant multiculturalism became a-culturalism, because there's no perspective passed on to you -- just a Hollywood library -- and it can create a cynicism and exhaustion because it burns you out if it's not given a context, or if that's all you ever feasted on.

Regarding the myth of Tarantino working in a video story and seeing everything....  His father had been an actor in Westerns in the 60s, and Tarantino was already a film-fanatic - that's why he was at the video store to begin with. It was correlative, not causative.... 

Tarantino's sensibilities are Valley even if he technically lived somewhere else in the Los Angeles area. [He did take an full time acting class in Toluca Lake, in Burbank, "the media capital of the world" and an incorporated city within the Valley]. That somewhere else was always just on the outskirts of Hollywood or L.A., it seems, so he was a nose pressed to the window, which ties into the Valley sensibility anyway.

The three tent pole characteristics for the Valley are nostalgia, kitsch and pornography. Susan Sontag technically graduated high school from North Hollywood High. Her own interests in camp and pornography in the 60s are relevant here. Camp being a form of deviant or subversive form of nostalgia and kitsch. And, of course, the aesthetic relationship between kitsch and pornography has been noted before many times. Some even going so far to say that pornography is a form of kitsch; certainly an ersatz form  of sexuality.  There's that Milan Kundera quote:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

"The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

Also Oscar Wilde on sentimentality, relating to kitsch:

"A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

That can be tied to the retro/nostalgia culture's superficiality: how it wants to enjoy the past or be sentimental but not pay a price for its indulgence. Similar to the pornographer wanting sexuality but rejecting an emotional intimacy and the price that comes with an actual connection. And with all this there's the degree of separation: making movies about other movies, music about other music, Kundera's kitsch shedding a tear over a previous tear. It can be tied into your own Retromania theories about current pop culture feasting on dead cultures and things that are no more. Not bringing them to life or adding them somehow, as a good revival of something might do, but making the corpse dance. You want to say to a lot of young artists "Yes, but what about your experiences and life? Don't you have anything of your own?" That question was leveled against Tarantino 20 years ago, and I'm sure even earlier against other artists, but now, as you've written, it's an aesthetic and a tag for a generation. The internet is a non-stop "Look what Junior found in the attic!" showcase.

Judd Apatow went to school in NYC but he lived in the Valley early on in his career, and had a failed TV pilot he created called "North Hollywood" that was about the vagaries of trying to make it in the entertainment industry and living in the Valley, on the outskirts and being an outsider who's almost made it.
 
So with all these directors [see also Paul Thomas Anderson, Burbank-brat Tim Burton] they were enamored and obsessed with entertainment from an early age, and had a knowledge of "the canon" and even the anti-canon in a way that was hard to pull off pre-broadband.  They all had family in the business as well. It's Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids" about the people who made movies of themselves.

Back to the meta-ness of their films: movies that are about movies, the history of movies, or are about entertainment and don't really reference anything outside of it. Religion doesn't factor in any of their lives -- not even peripherally or superficially. That's something you notice about the Valley: you wonder where people would even go to church, or if anyone, outside of the Latino and presumably Catholic population, even does. LA's conservative demographic moves to either Orange County -- heavily Republican -- or to Santa Clarita (where a Mormon represents them in Congress). A lot of other Christians moved east to Colorado or out of state. So the Valley, again, just being Hollywood's less-glamorous sibling, also pre-figures and puts a landscape to America's changing religious map that is increasingly irreligious, if not atheist. 

That's another thing that pre-figures the feeling you get when you go online or watch media and think there's something like a 7-1 agnostic to believer ratio. There's even the angle that the religious impulse, being so absent in the Valley, transmutes into a worship of entertainment. As much as anything else it's the post-religious atmosphere in the Valley, and the greater LA area, that was prophetic. It's not that Malibu, Brentwood, and the richest areas of the county and country are more religious, but they have ways of putting some glamor into their religious impulse, and what they replace it with. Whereas in the Valley you'd see a young man who is a monomaniac about something. 

Monomania: that other great characteristic of the internet. If you lived in Topeka, Kansas, in the 70-s there was a limit to how much film culture, or any culture, you could take in, but in LA there's a bottomless pit and history. So we're dealing with "the archives" and the "But wait! There's more!" element that the internet would bring to the rest of humanity years later. And there were other people in LA, who could enable you in your subculture and obsession, something that the internet would give you later but wasn't around for the rest of the country.

On ILX, years ago, I started a thread where you had to compare a director to a band, aesthetically: Tarantino's band was Pavement. They were both historians of their form, had the same breakout year (1992), and would steal from their idols and reference works every chance they got. They both flatter critics by putting in references that only critics and fellow buffs would appreciate -- they're the ideal artists for cinefiles and record collector geeks in the Nineties and Noughties. It's ultimately all nihilistic because you feel if you took their record collections and films away they'd have nothing important to say. Entertainment about entertainment.

That's the feeling the Valley gives you: entertainment is to it what Catholicism is to Vatican City. In many ways it's just Hollywood with its make-up worn off. Filled with has-beens and up-and-comers. There was a women who, when this friend of mine introduced himself to her and said he was living in North Hollywood, she said "North Hollywood? Are you on your way up or on your way down?"

patternwork

Phil Knight at The Phil Zone picks up on the post here about Beck and Flaming Lips doing remakes of classic albums, in relation to the difference between art (discovery, vision, bring something new into the world) and craft (doing it correctly, replication, perpetuation of the tradition etc). He mentions Spengler, who

"had a term for precisely this kind of process, which he called the descent into patternwork. An archetypal example of this is the Persian carpet, whose complex interwoven motifs were originally intensely meaningful expressions of sacred geometry (our old friend phi and its fractions), but are now churned out merely as decoration by people who have no idea what the designs signify, and if they do, view it as merely anecdotal. What once was high art becomes a kind of autistic self-replicating craft. Much of what we now consider to be ethnic styles of pottery, textiles etc. are simply the endless reproductions of art forms whose meaning has long since withered away."

I am sure I've come across this idea before -- almost certainly it was something Phil posted somewhere or other, or maybe a comment he made in a comments box at one of the Decades Blogs.  I made a mental note to do something with pattern work here, but naturally forgot.

This thought of Phil's struck me as particularly acute: 

"Most interesting from our perspective is that the lubricant for the passage from art to craft appears to be irony. It's when the replications start to be produced by people who don't get the in-joke, and this will surely happen, that the true inauguration of the long, long era of patternwork begins."

Yes, the irony phase, which in rock sets in among the cleverer sort of bands from
the mid-Eighties onwards: Butthole Surfers, Red Kross, Urge Overkill, Zodiac Mindwarp, Gaye Bykers on Acid,  Monster Magnet, White Zombie, Royal Trux (to an extent),...  later on it becomes more mainstream and less-clever The Darkness...     you also have something like Andrew W.K..  There's a urge to rock, to have that kind of scale and epic-ness and the mass response that came with it, but it's checked by an awareness that kind of ye olde rock is ludicrous and passe, and also, more significantly, what it signified in the late Sixties and pre-punk Seventies in terms of rebellion, a lifestyle of freedom and excess that was counter-hegemonic and anti-normative, that was no longer tenable. Indeed it had become hegemonic, normative, cliched. The way to deal with attraction to cliches that are no longer valid or timely was through parody, a form of equivocation.

Then you had bands, concurrent with the ironic "we just wanna rock" bands in the alt-scene, who were deadly earnest about it (Sunset Strip glam metal -- Motley Crue, G'N'R, etc), and not parodic, so much as self-caricature, or mannerist maybe.

And somewhere exactly in between: The Cult, who managed uniquely to give off the aura of presumed irony but were as far as I can tell absolutely earnestly dead-serious about it (and so succeeded in the commercial American context more than the genuinely ironic meta-rockers)

Rick Rubin seems to have some crucial place in this fake-real, becoming-patternwork of rock. He believes, with all his heart; but what he touches comes out, despite that, with this sheen of air quotes. 

Andrew W.K. reminds me of Rubin, there's a sort of Zen aura....

(Def Leppard belong in here somewhere. At some point they go from being the real thing to being the pomo thing)