I realize that I chiefly consider The New York Times to be The World’s Best Newspaper because of its new analysis essays and its coverage of popular culture. It’s really hard to write about something inherently frivolous and ephemeral in a serious way, but their writers do it week after week.
Ginia Bellafante’s article (A Bleak Show for Bleak Times) about the apocalytic and even messianic imagery in Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles (“one of the most resplendently grim hours on television”) got me thinking about other ways in which death, pessimism, and doomsday scenarios are making their way into popular culture.
It seems counter-intuitive that mass culture could be such a downer. I think in many way it speaks to the sophistication of modern audiences that they are seeking some kind of catharsis through entertainment. How else can you explain the success of The Dark Knight? I have the feeling that future historians will point to it as a defining view into our times, like Rambo or The Matrix.
The other area where I see this trend very clearly, oddly enough, is in men’s fashion. Skulls on everything but everything. And not stylized flash art Ed Hardy-style. Macabre Khmer Rouge-style piles of skulls on T-shirts, waistcoats, suit jackets. Definitely not my taste.
