Douthat: What will it take to make pop culture great again?

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

When “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” debuted together late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success “Glicked”; a reference to the portmanteau of “Barbenheimer” that described the joint cultural triumph of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in the summer of 2023.

It was painful because the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a famous doll, but no less creative for all that) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate.

Whereas “Wicked” and the “Gladiator” sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays; through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments. Neither is as egregiously mediocre as “Moana 2,” the other blockbuster of the season: The musical numbers in “Wicked” and Denzel Washington’s Roman scenery-chewing lend energy that’s absent in the Disney empire nowadays. But neither is anything like the expression of mass-market creativity that we used to call The Movies.

I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seems to have moved into a new dispensation; more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’ villainous Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” is supposed to be cultural ferment: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

There are certainly signs of ferment out there, in technology, religion and intellectual life. But I’m worried about pop culture; worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck.

Or maybe not stuck so much as completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.

Certainly that’s the feeling I had reading a lot of “best of” lists from movie critics this year. The films the critics really loved often felt incredibly marginal, more microtargeted even than the old art-house circuit. But the reviewers weren’t being unusually snobbish (my own favorite movie to date, “Anora,” has only made $13 million in North America); the list of genuinely commercially successful movies was just an incredibly dispiriting round of sequels and spinoffs and reboots.

The decline of The Movies was supposed to be made up for by the rise of novelistic television, but TV is still recovering from the collapse of the streaming bubble, lacking even ersatz versions of its prestige-era peak. (The FX miniseries “Say Nothing,” about the Irish Troubles, was the best thing I’ve watched lately — but only the first half really worked.) In music, as critic Ted Gioia has documented, the age of the algorithm has been great for musical hitmakers from 20 or 40 years ago, whose music plays on rotation while newer artists languish. And novel reading, even more than reading generally, is in obvious eclipse: There are (some) good novels but hardly any that seem genuinely important.

It’s possible that the idea of an “important” work of popular art, like the idea of movie stardom, simply can’t survive the transition to the digital era. Journalist and novelist Ross Barkan has done interesting writing on this theme, borrowing from Bret Easton Ellis’ concepts of “Empire” and “Post-Empire” to describe a shift from the post-World War II culture that gave us big stars and big movies and Great American Novelists to a culture that’s too fractured for any artist to matter at that kind of scale. (Barkan argues that the brief cultural dominance of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce was a fleeting throwback, like the last light from a dying sun.)

But I would like to believe that scale is still possible. When I look back on “Barbenheimer,” the movies themselves and the cultural reaction, I see proof of an enduring hunger for a certain kind of popular art; a kind best embodied by the movies but once available in TV, music and books as well. Examples of that art have flared in the past few years the way Taylor and Travis flared, usually associated with a handful of directors — Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig and Denis Villeneuve — or, in “Top Gun: Maverick,” with the eternal power of Tom Cruise.

So if there’s more ferment, experiment and extremity in American culture going forward, why shouldn’t we hope the flares become more frequent and burn more brightly; until they become what our culture used to promise us, a panoply of stars?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.