Why Books and Movies and Life All Suck Now

One problem with being in your 40s is you can’t tell how far you’re mourning the death of the monoculture and the lack of meaning inherent in the digital siloed world of the culture war, and how far you’re just having a midlife crisis.

Lately I feel trapped by politics, trapped by lack of opportunity, trapped by my past choices. The latter especially is exactly how one feels during a midlife crisis, but it’s also all bound up with the culture war, which only ever seems to escalate and is now so vast you don’t even see it because it is simply the world we live in — as ubiquitous as the sky.

Partly it’s the now barely worth mentioning but never forgotten purge of straight white men, especially from my generation onwards, from virtually every industry. All men in this position resent it more than they will ever let on, no matter how woke they claim to be. Everything gets worse once you remove the SWM, especially in arts and entertainment, because they formed such a large part of these fields, which are now declining in all regards. Publishers put out almost exclusively garbage and don’t even have proper editors anymore, movies have absurd diversity quotas and are generally completely devoid of ideas or energy. And all the things we’ve all talked about a thousand times before.

But it’s also the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It has good aspects, obvs. It means I can have this Substack, for example, with discerning and highly intelligent subscribers. However, for all the benefits of a niche, self-selecting audience, something about this model, and all similar distribution models, drains some of the larger meaning from an endeavour.

Following the death of the ‘monoculture’ (not the one Google says is something to do with agriculture) somewhere around 2010ish, or maybe a few years later, instead of a book everyone is reading, a film everyone has seen, or a TV show everyone at work or school is talking about, we all get exactly what we want at all times (as long as we don’t want anything good, or we cap our consumption at the point before the culture died). And that’s probably not good for us. It’s like a relationship versus porn. The former is something real that is stubbornly itself. It’s not perfect, but it lives and breathes and surprises us in awful and delightful ways. The latter is an ever-evolving attempt to cater to our own protean and sordid whims.

AI, of course, takes this fiendishly easy access to the next level, and also augurs the potential death of all art. If I can say ‘Write me a Bret Easton Ellis novel but set in my hometown and I’m the hero’, what you have is not art or human connection but decadent wish fulfilment. It might be amusing to play with a few times, but very soon it starts to haemorrhage meaning.

Think about those cool dystopian movies that we’re not good enough to make anymore. They often begin in a future world where the protagonist can have everything he desires instantaneously, perhaps via some kind of clunky VR headset. We immediately know it’s all going to come crashing down before long. The hero is going to find it was all fake and weird, and he just needed a nice girlfriend who’s not quite as hot as the fantasy one who turns out to be evil or a robot. We inherently know there’s something sinister about things being too easy, and that administering to all our desires is not necessarily healthy.

Ideally we are supposed to go out and meet art and culture halfway. In a cinema or gallery, for example. I say this as a radically anti-social person who hates museums and galleries and loves the fact that the internet means I’m never bored. I’m never bored, but I am incredibly miserable. There’s a reason it’s not called ‘funscrolling’.

‘Doomscrolling’ is in fact the perfect term: we have chosen our own doom, lured by the siren song of the on-demand world. The promise of infinite freedom has somehow left us the least free we’ve ever been.

Our silo is technological but it is also political. And this of course goes far beyond the mass racist banishment of the SWMs. Every artist or ‘creator’ must now have broadly the same opinion. This is particularly deleterious in media that are by their nature suited to eccentrics and out-and-out maniacs. J.R.R. Tolkien backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Do you think any fantasy writer could do something like that now and have a career? Back then it wasn’t even an issue. Some great writers were hardcore Leftists, like Roberto Bolaño. Others were far Right, like Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot is still revered, but his reactionary views would make him a pariah today. A healthy artistic culture would have popular writers who dig Mussolini, as well as the inevitable slew of communists who happen to be talented screenwriters, directors, musicians, or whatever.

Instead we have conformity of opinion, combined with alienation via technology. A narcissistic Bugman culture: everyone staring at their own bullshit as it reflects back at them from a few inches away. And I’m one of the worst. The most isolated, the most finicky in my endless curated playlists. It’s hell and I want to kill myself.

Most of this has been foisted on us by the totalising ideology of the Regime, plus the death march towards new technology that seems as hardwired into us as a male bee about to get his two-second kamikaze chance to mate before being annihilated.

There are very rare exceptions to all this and they seem to be French. Michel Houellebecq goes on doing his thing as if we were still at the peak of Gen X culture. Controversial, uncompromising and widely read despite being a literary author who will happily go on about Joris-Karl Huysmans in the middle of a dystopian novel about Islam.

Bret Easton Ellis is still around, though lamenting all of the above and sometimes deciding to not even bother writing as a result. After ditching the novel for many years, he did eventually come out with his recent masterpiece The Shards, though he had to set it during his school years, as our current time was too appalling even for the author of American Psycho.

This is the same reason you don’t really see films or shows about the Covid era. I note that even ongoing TV series that had to deal with Covid largely skirted around it. The characters weren’t depicted suddenly all wearing masks, and it was clear to me at the time that we’d either have to drop masks (despite the claims from deranged technocrats that we should keep them forever) or that the world of film and television would have to have a total break from reality and continue in a kind of parallel universe where Covid never happened. There was some talk of ‘Blitz spirit’ around 2020, but unlike the war, no one wants to tell stories about the Covid era, because it wasn’t a heroic moment of national unity, more like a glitch in the Matrix that the programmers are still trying to permanently erase.

We tried to throw out every rule of being human and we have never recovered, and this is all somehow tied to the death of art and culture. During Covid, the Regime tried to install dystopian practices that could never be sustained, yet we were already primed for it by an internet culture that mainly involves lying to ourselves and others about what people are really like. Whether its’s the perfect ski lodge life presented by women with aggressively filled lips on Instagram, or the virtue-signalling midwits of X and (shudder) Bluesky, we like to deny the humanity of others whilst presenting an inhumanly perfect self (or perhaps that should be perfectly inhuman self).

I thought I had accepted all this a while ago, and that it was now just about getting one’s head down and winning this darn culture war. But I don’t see any winning or any real change. There are minor victories, but the other side doesn’t accept them anyway. The two realities, or ‘two movies’ in the late Scott Adams’s formulation, remain firmly intact.

But really it’s six billion movies (the approximate number of people in the world with internet, according to Google). Six billion hyper-individualised monsters who, in a cruel Faustian twist, have actually lost all individuality. The medium has become the message to an ever more radical degree. Although theorists would have told you that was already the case in the heyday of film, for example, there is a big difference between giving our unique take on a shared experience, compared to now, where we are all speaking completely different languages.

I recently did a podcast where we all offered up our favourite music. Yet we were all various ages and nationalities, which meant that our totally different reference points rendered the whole thing meaningless, and something like this seems to be where we are as a culture.

Of course, putting this on Substack is perhaps an example of what one English teacher of mine called “self-betraying irony”. As great as Substack is, the death of the monoculture seems to bring with it the near-death of meaning. At least for me. Maybe if you don’t really care about films, books, music etc. it doesn’t matter very much. But for some of us, it was all we really had.

Or maybe I’m just having some kind of midlife crisis.

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