Hacker News Reader

Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

What I find exhausting is having any systemic criticism of the movie/music industry met with arguments along the lines of: "It was just different, you're merely nostalgic/you have golden age syndrome", and have a hard time answering back with anything except: "It really was better, sometime things do get substantially worse".

While technologically everything has improved, creativity feel like going from the golden age of the greco-roman world to 8th century Europe, where indie bands/movies are like the churches that preserved some measure of past glories. What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression?

View on HN

> What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression?

Maturing industries lose diversity as they trend towards optimization. This is something that is bound to happen regardless of industry. America has far fewer automotive manufactures than it 100 years ago and diversity has suffered; same goes for soda manufactures, etc.

With about any industry, you can gauge how mature it is by the diversity it has achieved. It starts with one or two who demonstrate the viability of the market, then there is an explosion of interest as many people break in, trying different strategies to gain market share, then the few winners consolidate the industry. Sometimes, the big players rest on their laurels and an upstart takes hold, but they are usually acquired by the establishment or their strategy is emulated then they are crushed by the inherent resource imbalance.

The big movie studios know what works and they are going to stick to that. Occasionally a Pixar will come along and disrupt the market, but when that happens, a Disney is going to step in and acquire them and change or adapt their formula to prevent another upstart.

> What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression?

First, you will need to give examples of what kind of movies you find "creative" that were done in the past and there is no current equivalent for that level of creativity.

"Jojo Rabbit", "Parasite", "Blade Runner 2049", "Coco", "Lady Bird", "Arrival", "The Nice Guys", ... that is the past 5 years with one almost missing because the pandemic. Is any of that any good for you?

What do you think that it was so creative in the past and has no comparation today?

Thanks for reminding me of The Nice Guys. That was well-done... all of these were.

Still haven't seen Blade Runner 2049 ... which is the only sequel on that list, so I perhaps that's why!

It is a sequel, but it's really good, with the caveat that it could have stood to have a ruthless studio executive insist the director cut at least thirty minutes. :)

They're wrong, and the reason they believe it is because they're stuck on older mediums. In music, the radio and the record store defined the market. You had a small window so you invested big and mainstream stuff tended to be pretty good. Now music access is decentralized and you can chase a long tail of niche personal tastes. Music is incredibly healthy right now. There's so much great content going in myriad different directions, but you'd think otherwise if you're only listening to the radio which has tripled down on non-differentiating hyper mainstream blandness.

Movies are largely the same with streaming. The movie theater model is rough. Even before streaming the vast majority of movie tickets go unsold, and to many people there's a sort of social group requirement to justify going there. So you get mass appeal as a requirement. But the actual space of film has more richness than ever before. People who say the only films are marvel films just don't know about the other films being released.

I think both you and the GP are conflating the movie and music industries a little too much, but I agree with your points more. Music is indeed going through a renaissance, and tech has very much helped with discoverability of indie artists. Movies I feel are a different medium as they are more capital and resource-constrained. It's more difficult to cultivate a long tail of indie films that can match those of the blockbusters (whereas music quality between major label and indie is far more fungible).

On the other hand, if one was to lower the definition of "movie" to moving pictures entertainment, there is a bonanza of content on YouTube and other video streaming services. But they are not in the same format of traditional movies.

I'm with you on music, but movies? These streaming services are all making the same type of content, and browsing any streaming service for content just feels like looking at a wall of direct to video films at your local video store from 20 years ago + cable TV shows.

Maybe it's because trying new music is so costless compared to new movies/tv shows and I'm ignorant? Maybe it's because good music can be made for a lot less money? IDK but this hardly feels like the beginning of a golden age of long tail movies.

The plural of medium (in this context) is media.

It's hard to refute, cause it really is true that everyone's most instrumental pop culture experiences happened when they were 10-25 years old. I think one thing that is fascinating is how popular iconography and music/films from 20+ years ago still is. Like I see teenagers wearing t-shirts with NOFX or Van Halen on them, instead of Billie Eilish.

https://www.hottopic.com/tees/music-tees/?cm_sp=LP-_-TeesGri...

Ultimately the post WW2 period was the birth of mass media youth culture, this was a truly revolutionary thing culturally speaking, and everything else has been a series of progressively less meaningful waves as we have 75 years of music/films artfully expressing what it means to be young.

> Like I see teenagers wearing t-shirts with NOFX or Van Halen on them, instead of Billie Eilish.

Same as it always was. (SPIN magazine, April 2005):

https://books.google.com/books?id=3ftHVmAonmoC&lpg=PA107&dq=...

> A few days after the Orange Bowl, I saw the video for Simpson's "La La." In one segment, she wears a vintage Adam and the Ants T-shirt; later, she wears a Motley Crue shirt. I suppose it's theoretically possible that Ashlee Simpson honestly likes those bands. But within the context of this video, her identification with them does not feel remotely organic; it feels like somebody put a lot of thought into whom Ashlee should align herself with. All young artists do this, but some are less subtle than others. I once saw singer/songwriter Leona Naess perform in Cleveland wearing a ZZ Top T-shirt. "I don't even know who this band is," she said between songs. "I just like this shirt." Naess played Minneapolis on the same tour, but this time she wore an Aerosmith T-shirt. "I don't even know who this band is," she said between songs. "I just like this shirt." Obviously, this was an attempt at cultural positioning: Leona Naess wanted to appear like the kind of girl who (somehow) had never heard of ZZ Top and Aerosmith, just as Ashlee Simpson wants to appear like the kind of girl who's intimately aware of Motley Crue and Adam Ant. Yet both artists failed in their attempts, and that's because even a child could tell they were trying way too hard. And people hate that.

Throughout the COVID-19 restrictions, I've been writing little games that run on the Nintendo 64. I was born in the early 1990s and liked to play video games as a child, so the platform has some nostalgia now that I'm older.

What's surprised me though is the amount of times I've received questions from teenagers about how to make Nintendo 64 games. Given their ages, I would have thought something like the Nintendo DS might have been more interesting to them.

It reminded me of when Nintendo was marketing repackaged 1980s NES games to me as a child. [1] I remember being interested in them partially because of being exposed to nostalgia from others online. Part of me wonders if a bit of institutional momentum can help give a brand more of an edge for some audiences.

[1] https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Classic_NES_Series

I find the cure to this frustration is to accept that everything I love is obsolete and that it's OK. As you say there are historical periods we now look back upon and say objectively they took a step backwards in terms of skill and artistry in many areas. But we don't know if this is that period, because maybe the creativity is shifting into something we can't yet observe clearly.

It's more like, the spotlight has shifted away from the medium and creative people have left. Old movies, like old books, are by definition more important. Looking at the highest grossing movies of the past 2 decades almost all are based on older stories/franchises, from star wars to marvel , to LOTR, to harry potter (newest one).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com