At a recent screening of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the director, Niels Mueller, showed up for a question and answer session. It quickly became apparent that his questioners didn’t care so much about the film’s story as what it was like to work with Sean Penn and how Mueller got his movie made. How did he get the money? How did he get the script to Penn? How did he get producers on board? Mueller was modest, and almost sheepish, because as it turned out, the story of making his film was a remarkably trouble-free Hollywood fantasy, except that it was true.
A few days later, an essay about the current state—or rather, statistics—of moviemaking backed up the unlikelihood of Mueller’s experience. Writing in the New York Times, Adam Leipzig, who runs National Geographic Feature Films, contended that while making a movie has never been easier, getting it seen is harder than ever. A lengthy string of dispiriting numbers served as evidence: submissions to the Sundance Film Festival have nearly doubled from six years ago, from 1,325 to 2,613; the number of scripts registered at the Writers Guild of America rose sixty percent between 2001 and 2004, to fifty-five thousand; Guild-approved agencies that will look at unsolicited screenplays receive about four hundred each month, to which they respond positively to just one. “The numbers may be against you,” Leipzig concluded, “but hang in there. Because in Hollywood, the dream of being number one keeps the whole town going—even if it happens only 0.3 percent of the time.”
The dream, of course, isn’t limited to Hollywood. Last year, an NEA study reported that “the number of people doing creative writing increased by thirty percent, from eleven million in 1982 to more than fourteen million in 2002”; at the same time there was an overall decline in literary reading. What’s more, “the number of people who reported having taken a creative writing class or lesson decreased by 2.2 million during the same time period.” How many of these unknown writers hope to get a novel published, only to find that the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts at publishing houses is obsolete, as most editors simply don’t look at anything that doesn’t come to them from an agent? As for getting an agent—well, see the statistics above for screenwriters. The plight of Miles Raymond in the film Sideways was all too real; no wonder everybody’s blogging.
Aspiring writers may be eschewing instruction, but enrollment at visual art schools is up. The number of undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota has risen from 297 in 1997 to 478 today. At Carleton College, students must compete to get into studio art classes—for spring term, some 260 students applied for 180 slots. As for pop music, the fact that American Idol is now a cultural fixture should say enough. What about alt rock? Forget stats; as my genuinely bewildered mother once asked, “Why is everybody in a band these days?”
“Self-expression in fashion always triumphs, regardless of circumstance.” So proclaimed a vodka advertisement in a recent edition of the JC Report, a fashion e-letter. “Suffer for your art, embrace the sacrifices—do anything to do what you love,” it continued. “There’s an unwavering compulsion to get your message out there … . Unleash your creative spirit. Unleash the Raspberri.” (Unwavering compulsion … Unleash the Raspberri … Is this some unwitting statement about Tourette’s syndrome? Are the copywriters making fun of us?)
However overwrought, the advertisement merely reinforces beliefs that have dominated American culture for the last half-century. Creativity is good. Conformity is bad. We’re all unique! And it’s not just our right, it’s practically our sacred duty to freely express our uniqueness, whether it’s through a tattoo or painting or blogging or making digital movies. We take this as an article of faith, so much so that it is hard for a modern person even to conceive of a world where only a few truly gifted individuals are allowed to “express themselves” creatively. For example, poets in ancient Rome had to earn patronage from public officials by dedicating their poems to them—and only a handful could do so. They were the pop stars of their time, but there was no Roman Idol, let alone open-mike nights or poetry slams, where amateurs could hope to get discovered. When it comes to maximizing the number of people with the time, money, and desire to act on creative impulses, to express ourselves as individuals, there’s no time like the present.
Two recent books by Canadians consider the implications of unfettered self-expression, extreme individualism—and their ties to rampant consumerism. In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter take down the myth of fighting “the system” by daring to be different. While they build a solid, if somewhat academic, argument focused around sociopolitical theories, Hal Niedzviecki, in Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, explores the myriad ways in which we dare, with increasing urgency, to be different. Niedzviecki assays the backyard amateur wrestling scene, the making of a new boy band by Lou Pearlman (of Backstreet Boys fame), a guy who’s fighting to have his own local TV station, fan fiction, the mainstreaming of tattoos, and much, much more.
Both books, in fact, are bursting with research, referring to a long tradition of social criticism, from Thorstein Veblen and Gustave Le Bon in the late nineteenth century to William H. Whyte, Guy Debord, Georg Simmel, and Michel Foucault, to contemporary critics like Todd Gitlin, Juliet Schor, and Thomas Frank. (Heath and Potter even track the origins of counterculture back to eighteenth-century Romanticism.)
It is the mode of recent consumerism to celebrate individuality as a matter of style (a development covered recently in Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness); thus, we consume in a way that is supposed to underscore our individuality, and attack conformity. But that assumption is simply wrong, say Heath and Potter. To the contrary, they argue, the rebellion against concepts like “mass society” and “conformity” is one of the more powerful engines driving consumer capitalism (Postrel would agree). “Consumerism is not an ideology,” they write. “It’s not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another.” (Or maybe even inflict on each other—consider products like SUVs.) Because consumerism is both competitive and interactive, it’s essentially both a way to attract attention and to distinguish ourselves. But that hardly constitutes a rebellion.
While Nation of Rebels focuses on the interplay between the individual and the market economy, Hello, I’m Special goes down other paths to document rebellion-as-individualism. Niedzviecki documents the myriad ways in which we are encouraged to nurture our individuality and express ourselves. Parents insist that their children can “be anything they want to be” and urge them to “follow their dreams”; they’re backed up by well-meaning teachers and a host of profit-seeking industries and entrepreneurs—like the founder of the Hard Rock Academy, a “boot camp where would-be performers can see where they stand.”
“Who will discourage the youngsters of today from pursuing their pop dream?” asks Niedzviecki, a question that seems more than a little cantankerous, especially since, as he writes elsewhere, “Millions of otherwise ‘normal’ citizens of the Western world harbor the notion that fame of some sort awaits them.” These dreams of being special are an extension of the theory, which has been around at least since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that we potentially restive moderns must be placated by entertainments; now, however, we do no
t merely wish to consume them, we wish to be part of the system that creates them. And if you apply the supply-and-demand equation, it follows that we should require more “creatives” (to borrow a term from advertising) and supporters-of-creatives of all kinds. Event promoters. Makeup artists. Audio book narrators. People who write subtitles for Bollywood films. But then the NEA’s findings—more people writing; fewer reading—give rise to the question of whether we are approaching the point where there are more producers of culture than there are consumers of it.
Niedzviecki’s man-on-the-street research, plus his personal revelations and self-deprecation, make Hello, I’m Special the more readable book, but ultimately the author is rather defeatist. He has no proposals for mitigating extreme individualism, and so, falls back on the idea of fighting “the system” with various countercultural means. Heath and Potter are more prosaic, and while their cultural criticism can become tedious, they do ultimately offer some striking observations, as well as hope. With every reiteration of his theme—that our attempts at expressing individuality are in fact conformist—Niedzviecki seems unconsciously to be making a case that awareness of the problem will lead at least partway to a solution. Meanwhile, Heath and Potter point out that these attempts at individuality drive the very consumer capitalism that sophisticated liberals and aesthetes (hyper-individualists, to say the least) often say they despise.
So where does that leave us? Might there be a kind of conformity that could usher in a new counter-consumerist era? Maybe it’s not so much conformity as a certain type of modesty, or reserve, a sacrificing of our desire to be noticed. After all, if we believe in ourselves, as we’re so often encouraged to do, isn’t that enough? Heath and Potter point to the characters on Star Trek as part of a political allegory in which “citizens of the Federation have found a way of being individuals without being rebels, of wearing uniforms without succumbing to a deadening existential uniformity.”
They also suggest a way to foster counter-consumerism: legislative action. (Remember, they’re from the country that has tried to pass laws requiring a minimum amount of Canadian cultural content in the arts.) It’s not as sexy as a WTO riot, but Heath and Potter believe that a simple change in the tax code, ending the fully tax-deductible status of advertising expenditures, would create a “devastating blow” to advertising. In other words, they propose strangling or smothering advertising, rather than trying to subvert it with “culture jamming” that inevitably goes ignored or unseen—or worse, simply becomes part of the overall spectacle (as protests have, says Niedzviecki, in another example of individualism gone awry).
Some things, of course, come down to individual action. Heath and Potter prescribe “clearing away some of the consumerist clutter and introducing a bit more uniformity into our lives. Instead of ‘daring to be different,’ perhaps we should dare to be the same.”
We might also look at the flip side of their notion about the two-way nature of consumerism, as “something that we actively do to each other.” Think of it in terms of a pair of squabbling siblings. Heath and Potter say that consumerism will continue, like the bickering of two children, unless there’s some incentive to stop. But what happens when no one is on the receiving end—no one to reinforce our consumerism, to admire our individualism, to up the ante and make us respond in kind? What if we did as our mothers counseled: Ignore the irritating sibling so that he’ll go away? With decreased numbers of people putting themselves on the receiving end of self-expression, it would force creative types to be that much more persistent about success. A form of Darwinism might eventually replace the supply-and-demand equation with respect to arts and entertainment, whittling down the number creatives-per-capita. Fewer people might go desperately seeking fame in Hollywood, or on websites like iwannabefamous.com.
In fact, the experience of one Gary Brolsma could be a portent. Brolsma had briefly become famous, thanks to an Internet video showing him chair-dancing to a Romanian pop song. The New York Times published a story about him on its front page a few weeks ago—not to dwell on his fame, but rather his abrupt rejection of it. Disenchanted, the nineteen-year-old had stopped taking media calls and canceled major television appearances. His friends and his family couldn’t imagine why. Perhaps Brolsma simply discovered that some things are best kept to oneself, and perhaps the Times was trying to spread the message?
Consider the advantages in cutting back on our self-expression. We’d have time and energy to do more. Plant a garden. Play with the kids. Teach someone to read. Read more ourselves. Maybe the word “hobbyist” would even become chic. With less expression in our lives, we could turn inward and hone our perception of what’s going on around us. We’d find connections and commonalities with each other, at the same time short-circuiting consumerism. After all, relentless capitalism can’t sustain itself on inner peace.
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