The Wall Street
Journal,
Modern Culture Creates Its
Own Escape Routes
There probably aren't 999
people out of 1,000 in the normal world who have ever heard of Vivendi, Bertelsmann, Jean-Marie Messier, Thomas Middelhoff, Tommy Mottola, Robert
Pittman, Steve Case or Gerald Levin. Maybe .005% of the American public can say
"AOL Time Warner" without choking on that gob of syllables. Know
this, however: The men who run these companies are to the culture of our age
what Pope Julius II was to Renaissance Italy.
Julius II employed
Michelangelo, Raphael and Bramante. Bertelsmann
employs Christina Aguilera, Eminem works for Vivendi and AOL Time Warner commissions the art of the Goo Goo Dolls.
* * *
Well, times change. As CEO of
the Catholic church, Pope Julius was able to hold his
job til death. Messrs. Messier, Middelhoff,
Mottola, Pittman, Case and Levin were much in the
news of late for having been corporately defenestrated from atop their
respective media empires.
The empires they erected,
however, endure for now, and while it would be unfair to lay the burden of our
cultural legacy on Christina Aguilera, whose latest album is called
"Stripped," whatever is to become the early 21st Century's version of
the Sistine Chapel will be determined in large part by artistic decisions made
at Vivendi, Bertelsmann and AOL et al.
It's a little unfair to
compare high Renaissance painting and sculpture to the complex phenomenon of
American popular culture, which after all gave the world Mickey Mouse. I don't
think it's unfair, however, to compare the pop vitality of Mickey Mouse, Frank
Sinatra, Elvis or the Honeymooners with the kind of mass-market culture that
these new modern media conglomerates are prone to output.
A few days ago the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that copyright protections, such as those Disney holds for
Mickey Mouse, can be extended indefinitely. Opponents of the extension argued
that a Disney doesn't deserve such protection because it isn't using Mickey to
create anything wonderful and new, like another "Fantasia" (1940).
But Disney isn't interested in employing Mickey to create anything other than
new revenue; it wants him to work his magic in what the new media companies
call a "cross-platform," such as appearing on Happy Meal toys in
McDonald's restaurants, alongside the creatively dormant characters from
"Snow White" and "Toy Story." Britney
Spears -- today a star, tomorrow a Bobblehead.
This is what is known as "cross-market synergy," the Holy Grail of modern
media.
The John the Baptist of this
concept was Jean-Marie Messier, who built a former French water utility called Vivendi into a media colossus making music, films, TV shows
and theme parks. "The digital broadband revolution is going to make all
content -- image, sound and data -- accessible across all platforms and
devices," Mr. Messier said. "You will be able to see a trailer for a
film on your third-generation mobile phone, play online games on your
television or take in a concert on your computer."
The 1% of the population that
follows such things knows that Mr. Messier's career
evaporated when the candle of Vivendi's share price
burned down. But that doesn't mean anyone in the media business thinks he was
wrong. All these guys think the entertainment potential of cellphones
is vast. Just recently the Bertelsmann/Arista hip-hop
group TLC "tied" its new album to an offer of screensavers and ringtones for T-Mobile cellphones.
Ringtones? TLC?
Don't worry if you didn't follow that; the giant minds of media don't care
about you anyway, assuming you fall outside the 18-to-35 age demographic that
these companies believe to be the nirvana of American culture. For instance
much of modern media's "cross-platform" selling today involves movies
(James Bond prominently drives BMWs; Pierce Brosnan
flashes Omega watches). But 80% of movie tickets are bought by people aged 25
or younger.
To put any one
"product" (film, singer, or characters created by a TV show,
videogame or novelist) in front of millions people in as many different places
as possible (say, in Wal-marts) is the reason AOL
Time Warner, Vivendi, Bertelsmann, Sony, Viacom and
the rest bought and now control access to so many "platforms." Thus
"Star Trek: Nemesis," the 10th Star Trek movie, was just awful, but
so what? It extends the Star Trek "franchise" as a platform for other
products.
This is the reason that so
much of American culture seems so dumb, and is getting dumber. Certainly in the
old days movies or music were sold into the mass
market, too. "
* * *
Despite the massive resources
of these companies, the underlying cross-platform idea, dependent as it seems
to be on bread and circuses, may prove to be another unsustainable dot-com
mirage, at least on the scale its purveyors envision. More pertinent, the same
digital wonders that Jean-Marie Messier thought would deliver movie trailers to
cellphones looks like it's going to allow people to
drop out of the whole hypermass culture.
The young people downloading
music with Kazaa are mostly just mixing their own
CDs. Not interested in "Men in Black II"? Netflix
will mail you a Dolby DVD version of Bergman's "Wild Strawberries."
Silentera.com will direct you to the newly restored 65-piece orchestra version
of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927). A satellite radio subscription,
offering every imaginable musical genre, lets you bypass the unlistenable hypermass music on
nearly every radio station. Thanks to technology, you can now assemble and live
on your own cultural island, far from the hypermass
din. They don't want us, we don't need them. Perfect.
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