If you live in LA, you should go to the Modern Millennial exhibit. As soon as you possibly can, too, cuz it’s over in 6 days. I’ll explain where and how to find it in a minute, but first I want to tell you what it is.
Modern Millennial is an art installation / existential performance art piece / media experiment in the spirt of Exit Through The Gift Shop / I’m Still Here, except the theme is about being a person going through the modern experience.
The project was funded, and the exhibit installed, so now what’s happening is during the month of September a dude named Moses Storm is living inside an art exhibit in an industrial loft in #DTLA. The loft is filled throughout with installations that comprise the Modern Millennial exhibit, and Storm, the eponymous modern millennial, living life in said loft, is himself an interactive installation as well. It’s funny and weird and smart and awesome.
Modern Millennial seems, at first, like it will be a lampoon of millennial clichés — and it is definitely that — but it’s also something so much more interesting and introspective and sincere in the process.
“The Modern Millennial,” proclaims the Kickstarer, “Is a game-changing form of immersive performance art in which roaming audiences experience epic insights into a generation.”
But, of course, Millennials are already the most poked, prodded, packaged, positioned, market-tested, focus grouped, classified, and stereotyped generation in history. And of course, the buying and selling of ourselves to ourselves is already part of our Millennial experience, and each of us in the attendee target audience is a full-time object in our own, modern media experiment.
Of course, that’s part of the point. The art and the artist are both keenly aware they are the results of the same generational forces they are ridiculing.
Or maybe not ridiculing at all.
There are, in a sense, three phases to the Modern Millennial exhibit. First, there is the digital precursor that you encounter before the physical space of the show. Then there is the in-person experience of the exhibit itself. And finally there is the digital afterlife of the exhibit, living on through shared photo content and hashtag feeds. Each of these three aspects comes with its own distinct tone and role in the narrative arc of the Modern Millennial experience, and likewise, the modern millennial experience.
Phase 1.
Google “Modern Millennial” and the first thing you’ll find is the Kickstarter.
A typical cocktail of narcissism, hype, and jargon, it’s also unmistakably meta: taking its absurd premise seriously while also mocking itself, Millennials, (Kickstarer campaigns), everything:
Our goal with this piece is to show a different side of Millennials. And prove that not all of us are lazy narcissist who are just looking for a handout.
Some cool stuff happens if we hit our stretch goals.
If reached, we will tour with the exhibit. I am thinking Paris!
Phase 2.
But in the physical space of the exhibit, the the mood is notably different. It’s exposed, honest, intimate. The way things look online is not how they feel in person.
Obviously.
@nimblewill
@morganisthenic
The cynicism and detachment of digital distance break down into vulnerability and sincerity in physical space. So many of the pieces are an exploration of existential yearning for meaning and connection.
@babiejenks
@iamstevienelson
@actressamanda
@shelbyfero
@radojcich
The Wall of Activism, for example, is a usual suspects lineup of viral sincerity eruptions.
@snowcone88
It’s impossible not to view a LiveStrong Bracelet, a Stop Kony poster, a bucket full of ice water (among others), with a cynical side-eye. But when you see them displayed this way, all cataloged together, they are also inescapably earnest. These recurring, massive social hysterias of optimism and the dream of collective empowerment; this ceaseless desire to care.
The most popular piece in the show (based on frequency of Instagram appearances) is also the most inscrutable.
@skiparnold
Is it a comment about being unafraid to come out as an artist? To claim a sincere artist identity in the midst of a storm of irony?
@hoorayjen
Or is it a jab at the pretentiousness of the concept? An ironic joke about such an analog anachronism?
@kmahair
Does such a thing as a “serious artist” still even exist, or is the popularity of the piece akin to that of an endangered animal on display at the zoo?
@peterhinz
Is it for real, or is it a joke?
@taysprizzle
Does it matter?
@alimerlina
Phase 3.
For an exhibit titled, #ModernMillennial, the show itself is remarkably, unremarkably lo-fi. The Modern Millennial is less infatuated with technology than with humanity. And yet the experience is inherently hybridized with digital DNA.
Obviously.
@babiejenks
In 2014, our digital technology is increasingly hurtling towards pervasive invisibility, insinuating itself into our every waking moment with the banal inevitability of electricity. And yet, it’s the human interactions with the art pieces, through the lens of digital media, that turn them on like a switch. Without Instagram, or at the very least the vernacular of Instagram, much of Modern Millennial wouldn’t really make any sense.
“Stand Here Do Nothing” is built to basically only really work once it’s in a photo you’ve posted up somewhere:
@lucifergoosifer
@gardenofart_
Likewise, “Like This So I know You Still Exist.”
@erikaheidewald
@danielcarberry
Taking and posting these photos is at once a cliché and an act of participating in a piece of art about a cliché.
@emilyfaye2
But it’s ok. Don’t worry. You can’t help it. This stereotypical experience — it’s universal.
@cassydbadiiiiiiiie
Modern Millennial sincerely delivers on what its ironic (or not) Kickstarter promised: it captures the truths our contemporary condition. And it does so with humor and humanity. There’s certainly plenty to mock about the times we live in, but we’ve got to have compassion for our predicament, too.
Obviously.
@babiejenks
How to get to the Modern Millennial Exhibit.
In a time where basically everything is accessible online, the show is almost stringently unfindable. You stumble into it like a niche forum from the ’90s. We used to discover things online. Now the only way to access a real sense of discovery is through things hidden offline. So go:
When I was producing music festivals and nightlife events, Facebook changed its membership policy, opening up beyond just the collegiate community. Hundreds of people I didn’t know requested to add me as a friend. At first I balked at the idea of letting complete strangers into a space that had previously been the walled-garden escape from the mess Myspace had already become. Ultimately, however, I came to terms with the benefits of accepting friend requests from potential ticket buyers. Facebook became a sort of digital Grand Central Station that friends, colleagues, business acquaintances, vendors hawking their wares, strangers I couldn’t pick out of a lineup, and the inevitable crazy person talking to himself, all loudly traversed on their daily commutes through my online social world. It was really fucking noisy.
Then, at the end of 2007, Facebook introduced a feature to specifically address this noise issue, as they wrote on the Facebook blog:
Today Facebook lets us connect and communicate with people that we are connected to in all kinds of ways — friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people. They’re all here.
This all begs the question… what does being friends with someone on Facebook mean today? We pondered this for a while, and then decided that there just wasn’t any single right answer.
So instead, we’ve built and launched Friend Lists. The new Friends page lets you create named lists of friends that you can use to organize your relationships whichever way works best for you. These private lists can be used to message people, send group or event invitations, and to filter updates from certain groups of friends.
Pretty much everyone I am connected to on Facebook has been assigned to one list or another depending on the context of the connection. In a previous incarnation, Facebook offered the option of setting a specific list feed to be the homepage view instead of the default friend feed. Later that option was removed, so I’ve created a workaround to simulate the functionality: I have the URL for my preferred Friend List set as a bookmark on my browser toolbar and when I want to go to Facebook, I just click the bookmarked link. Typing “facebook.com” into the address bar hasn’t been the way I access Facebook for years.
So when I heard that Google+, the web giant’s just-launched social network, was based on grouping connections into “Circles,” I was instantly curious. Ever since Friendster first appeared almost a decade ago, there have been certain disparities between being social online and being social offline that we have come to accept. We’ve become so accustomed to these differences, we hardly even recognize they ever seemed unfamiliar. The fetishistic, collectible-card type quality to online “friend acquisition,” for example. This is not at all how we understand the process of “making friends” to work offline — aside from high school, maybe. Online we have learned, sometimes the hard way, that what we do and say is “public by default,” private with effort, the direct opposite of how it works in the analog world. And we have come to accept, despite the paralyzing plethora of privacy options Facebook offers, that we can’t expect control over social context. Online we are in all contexts at once. Friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people, as Facebook lists them, are not only all here, but who we are within each of these different social groups, our identities in each of their different contexts, all exist simultaneously. Online, we are contextless by default.
But what if online sharing worked more like your real-life relationships? That’s the question posed in the video introducing the Google+ Circles feature:
Of course, it’s not a new idea. As I mentioned, this is a functionality Facebook has offered for years. It’s just that the platform has never really cared about it. As Mark Zukerberg, Facebook’s founder, inisisted in a 2009 interview: “You have one identity. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” For Facebook, Lists are literally an add-on feature. For Google+, however, Circles appear to indicate an understanding that context is as important as connection.
Consider the case of an Iranian business-woman shaking hands with her Western male counterparts. In Iranian culture, shaking hands with a male colleague is neither customary nor appropriate. This situation entails behavior that is unfamiliar and also in conflict with deeply ingrained cultural values.
[Or] consider the case of a Chinese student attempting to participate in an American MBA classroom discussion. The norms for appropriate behavior within this setting in the United States encourage and require students to express themselves, as well as reward them, even when their opinions are controversial or conflict with those of another student or even with the professor. Norms for classroom participation in China are quite different. Having been socialized to respect the “wisdom, knowledge, and expertise of parents, teachers, and trainers,” Chinese students are discouraged from voicing personal opinions in class discussion. American norms for classroom participation, therefore, are quite discrepant from Chinese norms for the same situation; these norms demand a significantly different type of behavior than what the typical Chinese student is used to.
Cross-cultural code-switching is the act of purposefully modifying one’s behavior in an interaction in a foreign setting in order to accommodate different cultural norms for appropriate behavior.
But the setting doesn’t have to be as foreign as you think. For immigrants, or anyone of mixed racial or cultural heritage whose identity is inextricably linked to different communities, code-switching is an inherent part of navigating everyday life. To children of divorced parents this will likely sound familiar as well. We actively modulate our behavior even among the closest people in our lives. In writing about the tactics we use to maintain context control while engaging in a public online space like Facebook, social media researcher danah boyd describes “social steganography,” a practice of creating messages that communicate different meanings to different audiences simultaneously:
When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.
“We used to live in a world where space dictated context,” danah writes, “This is no longer the case. Digital technologies collapse social contexts all the time. The key to figuring out boundaries in a digital era is to focus on people, roles, relationships, and expectations.”
Relationships are all about context, but for Facebook, this nuance is something that has never quite made sense. All along, Facebook has staked its claim not by adapting to existing social behavior, but rather by insisting that we adapt to the behavior the platform defines for us. As Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview last year, in regards to the assertion that privacy is dead, “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” As far as the platform is concerned, managing contexts is a nuisance for the user. With every “privacy” violation, what Facebook has actually been attempting to do is outsource managing context to software; to switch code-switching with code. At this point we’ve become so accustomed to the inevitable, resulting intrusion we don’t even make too much of a stink about it anymore. Case in point: Facebook’s new facial recognition functionality — which automates the photo-tagging process by suggesting the names of friends who appear in newly uploaded photos — has caused less of fuss for how uber-fucking-creepy it is, than….. wait, what was the previous fuss about? I forget already.
Facebook’s helpful way of nudging us towards this manifest, post-identity complexity destiny is to devise ever more features to destroy our control over social context. This has created a gap which Google+, with its aim to “make sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life,” seems squarely poised to fill. Not that Circles will be the panacea for online context collapse, but this is the first attempt by a mainstream web property to directly address this disparity between the online and offline social experiences, and offer a way to bring context back to our contacts.
Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, long time in the making. What’s been happening over the past few weeks is not Charlie Sheen going crazy. Although it’s certainly easy to get confused. No doubt, Charlie Sheen wants you to think he’s crazy. After all, the boring recovering-addict Charlie Sheen Show — or the boring functioning-addict Charlie Sheen Show, depending on your preference — is much less interesting to watch than the “Crazy” one. And we are still watching….
In the course of this production it’s hard not to think about the film I’m Still Here, the cinéma vérité chronicling of Joaquin Phoenix’s “retirement from acting.”
.
For a year and a half, the twice Oscar-nominated Phoenix gained weight, stopped shaving, and tried to start a career as a rapper while his brother-in-law and fledgling filmmaker, Casey Affleck, came along for the ride to document this seeming descent into madness. Phoenix even famously came on Letterman in the course of I’m Still Here‘s production, disheveled and incoherent — an appearance that, by the end, prompted Letterman to say he owes an apology to Farrah Fawcett, til then considered his most disastrous guest of all time.
Of course, in the end it turned out this was not just another overindulged celebrity losing his mind. Nor, even after it was revealed that Phoenix’s “retirement” and subsequent actions weren’t exactly the plot of a straight “documentary,” was it all just simply a hoax. Back on the Late Show a year and a half later, now clean-shaven, and charming as usual, Phoenix explained:
We wanted to do a film that explored celebrity, and explored the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves. We wanted something that would feel really authentic. I’d started watching a lot of reality shows and I was amazed that people believed them; that they called them, like, ‘reality.’ I thought the only reason why is because it’s billed as being ‘real’ and the people use their real names. But the acting is terrible. I thought I could handle that. Because you don’t have to be very good. You just use your name, and people think that it’s real.
For a year and a half, Joaquin Phoenix lived the life of a character who shared his name and history and circumstances, both in private scenes and in the public eye. What then, truly, is the difference between what’s “real” and what isn’t? What does “hoax” even mean in the age of “reality TV?” I’m Still Here, along with the context around it, is a philosophical exploration of these questions.
“The world’s first street art disaster movie” tells the story of Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French-born shop-keeper living in L.A. whose compulsive need to record every waking moment, and a cousin who happens to be the street artist Space Invader, combined to lead Guetta to become the de facto documentarian of the street art scene, tagging along on late-night art missions with its luminaries, including L.A.’s Shepard Fairey and, ultimately, the elusive reigning godfather of street art himself, Banksy. About two thirds of the way through the movie, Guetta, who had never previously edited any of the mountains of footage he’d been obsessively recording, goes to the U.K. to present a first draft of his “street art documentary” to Banksy for feedback. Deflecting his true opinion of the unwatchable film, Banksy suggests that perhaps Guetta should consider becoming a street artist himself and sends him back to L.A. with the idea of putting on a small show. Banksy also requests Guetta send him his raw video footage so that he can reedit it himself. And this is where the movie becomes something like an Andy Warhol adaptation of the Blair Witch Project.
A few months before Joaquin Phoenix would be announcing his acting “retirement,” Guetta’s artist persona, Mr. Brainwash, or MBW, had moved from plastering L.A. with his own likeness — an image of a guy holding a video camera — straight to mounting a massive “street art” show, called “Life Is Beautiful,” in a 15,000 square-foot venue. Seemingly overnight, Mr. Brainwash was being positioned as an up-and-comer with the oeuvre of a Shepard Fairey or a Banksy — by then both artists, as well as many other leading names in the street art world, had begun having their art on display inside galleries as opposed to on the exterior of walls — except unlike these artists with years, even decades of creative evolution and refinement, Guetta had no experience. He’d hired an army of sculptors and designers to manufacture the pieces for his show, ripped straight from bookmarks in art books — even the illustration of Guetta holding the camera had been created by someone else.
The day of the show the line to get in stretched for blocks. Four thousand people attended the opening. By the end of the day nearly a million dollars worth of Mr. Brainwash art had been sold.
The story, at face value, seems so preposterous that the question of whether it could truly be real has dogged the film, as well as created the suspense that’s made it even more of a phenomenon. Could an amateur who’d never actually made art himself succeed at pulling off a show that so blatantly counterfeited and so quickly eclipsed those of the art form’s recognized heavyweights? And would they really release a movie about it happening? Or is all of it — the movie, Life is Beautiful, Mr. Brainwash — simply Banksy’s greatest prank yet? Theories abound. The New York Times labeled it as a harbinger of a new cinematic subgenre: The Prankumentary. “The whole thing, it’s clear now,” Fast Company insisted, “Was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy, who has never publicly revealed his identity, with Fairey as his accomplice.” Their conjecture about what really happened: “Banksy… convinced Guetta to pose as a budding graffiti artist wannabe so he and Fairey could ‘direct’ him in real life — manufacturing a brand new persona.” Yet when asked at the end of the film how he feels knowing that he is in part responsible for Mr. Brainwash, Shepard Fairey laughs ruefully, “I had the best intentions. But sometimes even when you have the best intentions things can go awry…. The phenomenon of Thierry becoming a street artist, and a lot of suckers buying into his show and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly, anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe. And maybe there’s some things to be learned from it.” For his part, Banksy, even as his voice is scrambled beyond recognition, conveys unmistakable melancholy as he says, “I used to encourage everyone I met to make art. I used to think that everyone should do it….. I don’t really do that so much anymore.”
“This brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide” could just be an L.A. story simply too bizarre to have been made up, and just as easily, it could all be a fabricated fable about what happens to an artistic movement when it becomes commercialized. From “selling out” to “cashing in” the concept is so mundane it’s a cliché, but Exit Through The Gift Shop‘s treatment is primarily to emphasize the absurdity of the progression of events rather than to make any concrete statement about them. As Banksy’s art dealer says at the end of the film, “I think the joke is on… I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”
Which brings us back to Charlie Sheen. Not that what Sheen’s doing is any kind of joke or “prank.” This is all very much for real for him. And it is also a very deliberate performance. How did we get here? February 28, Charlie Sheen goes on Good Morning America, The Today Show, TMZ, Radar, Piers Morgan on CNN, 20/20 — basically, every celebrity interview news show he possibly can, and attracts a tsunami of flabbergasted attention for bein’ all ka-raaaazy. The next day he launches a social media empire.
which received over 74 THOUSAND! submissions in 5 days. Arguably no other celebrity has “gotten” the way social media works as fast. Even Conan had a slower uptake, though he’s undeniably provided a template for Sheen to work off of. (After getting canned from his TV job, Sheen did like MBW to Conan’s Banksy and announced he’s going on tour — the “Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not An Option” Tour — just like Conan’s Banned From Television Tour last year in the wake of his own network debacle.) And, obviously, Sheen’s not doing it all on his own.
In Sheen’s 11-minute livestream episode, titled, “Torpedeos of Truth Part 2,” recorded on March 7th, 2011 — a week after his “old media” blitzkrieg — a terribly lit, grossly contrasted video in which a curmudgeonly, borderline belligerent Sheen looks like he might not have showered for days prior then rolled out of bed that morning, turned on his lap top, and started recording through the built-in camera above the screen, at 6 minutes, 40 seconds, when he ducks “below the frame line,” the camera moves. This is a recording made to look like it’s being done through a shitty built-in computer camera, but when it moves to follow Sheen as he ducks it’s suddenly clear there may be a camera person involved. If there is someone behind the camera, there could just as easily have been a lighting guy, a makeup person, but No! “Make me look as crazy as possible,” was clearly the direction here. By episode four it’d been announced that Sheen had officially been fired from his sitcom. The ante was upped. Suddenly Sheen, well-lit, made-up, looking as healthy as a marathoner — if not for the chain-smoking — in his sweat-wicking Nike shirt, was performing a soliloquy sounding like some misplaced Hunter S. Thompson diatribe. Clearly some writing talent may have been called in — if it hadn’t been already: consider that basically everything coming out of Charlie Sheen’s mouth becomes a meme — it’s been impossible to escape hearing someone say #winning (a hashtag in Charlie Sheen’s very first tweet) for weeks; then there’s #tigerblood, which is so meme-able it can’t even be summarized properly:
Right now 4Chan, the primordial ooze that has spawned everything from lolcats to Rickrolling to SadKeanu to every other Internet meme you’ve ever heard of, is looking at Charlie Sheen like Woh. The last guy anywhere near this unstoppably memetastic was the Old Spice Guy–
Something else you might notice — Charlie Sheen almost never swears. You have never heard him bleeped in any of the interviews he’s done on TV. There are no R-rated words on his Twitter stream. Every so often there’s some sprinkled in his livestreams, but for the most part The Charlie Sheen Show is all-ages. Where he could say “assholes” or “douchebags,” he says “silly fools” or “trolls.” These Playskool insults are unexpected, amusing, almost benign, yet nostalgically cruel. This is not the syntax of a man out of control.
“I don’t know,” he rolled his eyes, “They’re just words that sound cool together. Stuff just comes out and it’s entertaining and it’s fun and it sounds different from all the other garbage people are spewing, you know?”
Charlie Sheen doesn’t have Tourettes. He is deliberately saying these things to entertain and be funny and unique. And he’s good at it. Bret Easton Ellis — the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, as well as Lunar Park, a haunted house story in which the main character is a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who’s lived the same history as his eponymous creator (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore — publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) or is it, rather, the life he was expected to have been leading? (“What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.“) — writing in an article titled, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” calls Sheen, “the most fascinating person wandering through the culture:”
You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating…. This privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted ridiculer. Sheen has embraced post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity now means. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock and roll. Deal with it.
Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. For my younger friends, it’s no longer rare; it’s now the norm. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity.
It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw and lucid and intense…. We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing. It’s an irresistible spectacle. We’ve never seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing.
It’s the contradiction we could never quite reconcile in I’m Still Here or Exit Through The Gift Shop; one we can accept in Lady Gaga because she’s not using her real name and we’re sort of OK with it when it’s just a “character.” Charlie Sheen is real and not real at once: a spectacle and a revelation. It’s meta-postmodernism. It’s existential performance art. Minutes before Charlie Sheen’s first livestream was set to start, the audio feed came on. You could hear Sheen rehearsing the rant he would perform that night, prompting the question: is this all an act? Of course it is! He’s an acTOR. From a family of actors, who’s spent his entire life performing. There’s no way he’d go on camera ever without rehearsing. Charlie Sheen’s whole life has been a performance, and this now is not so much different, just with a bigger audience and, as we say in the 21st century music business, cutting out the middleman. As far as Charlie Sheen knows, this is what real is. And as far a we know that’s what it is, too.
Ellis writes:
If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) while stumbling out of a club on Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, then you should be a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game, and you’re a fool if you don’t play along. This is why Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians.
What does shame mean anymore? my friends in their 20s ask. Why in the hell did your boyfriend post a song called “Suck My Ballz” on Facebook last night? my mom asks. But nothing yet compares to the transparency that Sheen has unleashed in the past two weeks—contempt about celebrity, his profession, the old Empire world order.
Ellis’s “Empire” is a reference to Gore Vidal’s definition of global American hegemony, which Ellis dates from 1945 until 2005: the era that defined the 20th century. Post-Empire is where we are now. For Ellis, Empire is the lie, the having to hide who you really are, the keeping up appearances; post-Empire, on the other hand, is what Ellis calls, “aggressive transparency.” But his perspective has one flaw: for Ellis, both Empire and post-Empire are binary. It’s one or the other. It’s true or it’s a lie; it’s real or its counterfeit. The post-Empire reality, however, is not the end of the lie, it’s the end of the binary. Sure, “radical transparency” has become a 21st century marketing buzzword. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg believes that Privacy is Dead and has remade Facebook in that image. Sure, I wrote last year, what makes Iron Man the first 21st century superhero? His lack of alter ego; his unconflicted, absolute identity. But that all is only part of the Millennial story.
There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.
Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control.
I’d argue this is, in fact, true of all of us now in the post-Empire. Not just teens. “What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified,” writes Ellis, “Is the moment in the culture when not caring what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy).” Except that Charlie Sheen still very much DOES care. And so do all the rest of us in the 21st century. It’s there in every Facebook photo you’ve untagged yourself from. You had your reasons. It’s there in every location you pulled out your phone to check in at, and then decided not to. It’s there every time you hovered over, and then didn’t click the “Like” button. As tech blogger, Robert Scoble, writes:
The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.
That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.
But then I started noticing that…. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.
See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?
Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.
I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.
This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.
This is the hyper-real version of Charlie Sheen. It is a role that Charlie Sheen is performing. And it is also who he actually is. Because how could he not be? Whatever Charlie Sheen does, that is who he is. This is the only way he has to take control over the flow of his information. For a celebrity in particular, as Ellis points out, that control is virtually non-existent. So how did Charlie Sheen wrest it back? By outdoing TMZ and the news shows and the magazines at their own game. He is no longer just a commodity of the tabloid industrial complex. He is the creator and star of his own show, the Crazy Charlie Sheen Show, and all the press is simply promotion.
Then again, it could be something much more simple. At Coachella 2008, Prince, headlining, kept demanding over and over, “Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella!” And like some epic call-and-response an ocean of 150,000 voices roared back: “Prince! Prince! Prince!” And I realized that if you’re Prince, there’s probably no way you can even get off anymore without 150,000 people screaming your name. Perhaps, if you’re Charlie Sheen, you can’t stay sober unless two million people are following your every move — just over two weeks after his first Tweet, it’s now closing in on 3 million.
“We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks,” Ellis concludes. “Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire.” Like I’m Still Here and Exit Through The Gift Shop, what Charlie Sheen is doing is part of a continuum exposing the now inherent unreliability of the markers we’d previously depended on to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. In some ways it’s as basic as the shift from the 20th century to the 21st; from analog to digital, from binary to exponential complexity. What, truly, does reality mean when it’s photoshopable? Or just another marketing campaign for some new movie? Not that reality doesn’t exist. Things are, out in the world; you can touch them. Earthquakes happen; nuclear reactors break; nations perch perilously on the verge of catastrophe. Reality exists, but it is no different from not reality. From the inscrutably contradictory government statements about radiation levels, from the fake Nuclear Fallout maps that spread like wildfire. Reality and not reality exist in the same plane now. It’s enough to make you go crazy. Unless you’re Charlie Sheen. In which case you’re not crazy. You simply are as your world is.
A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930’s, and in its place offered a vibrantly modern model for the character, reflecting the unique culture, ethos, and mores of the 21st century. True Blood, I’m realizing, is now doing the same for that other undying superhuman trope: the vampire.
Of course, the vampire has been undead for a lot longer. The earliest recorded vampire myth dates back to Babylonia, about 4,000 years ago, and over the millennia it has appeared in almost every culture. But lets cut to the chase: 1922 was year vampires broke ground in film (though, technically, they’d made a few cameos before then). It was the year F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” came out.
Take a good look. That’s what a movie vampire used to be. A creature no teen girl, or anyone else for that matter, would want to see as a lead in a summer mystical romance franchise. In all the silent films that featured vampires there was always a clear and consistent view: here be monsters.
While this original archetype might have undergone a radical transformation over the past 80+ years of cinema — from grotesque monster to, ironically, heartthrob, a result of the only evolutionary force vampires are actually subject to: sexual selection, naturally — don’t be fooled. Just because Twilight’s Edward Cullen or the whatever-their-names-are characters of The Vampire Diaries happen to be getting panties in a twist at the moment, they are not in any way contemporary. Much has been made about the exceptionally “old-fashioned” gender roles in Twilight, but that analysis is basically missing the forest for one tree. Think about it: is there ANYTHING that happens in Twilight that could not have happened just as easily 50 years ago? You could turn Twilight into a 1950’s period piece and basically NOTHING about the major plot points, dialogue, personalities, relationships, or motivations — of either the vampires OR humans in this saga — would need to change. This does not a 21st century story make. In fact, if you’re curious about exactly why Twilight is so popular, the mechanics of this process are actually quite timeless:
Twilight’s preternatural hotties aren’t so much throwbacks as they are completely out of time. The story could be happening in any age; its characters’ capacity to reflect some kind of cultural context is irrelevant, probably detrimental.
The predominant Millennial quality that grounds Iron Man in the 21st century, I wrote, is transparency. In his total openness about everything from his deepest secret to his fleeting impulses he is as “post-privacy” as Facebook would have us all become. To suggest that True Blood’s vampires are uniquely modern because they too, like Tony Stark, have revealed their secret identity to the world, would be easy — it is, after all the premise that the entire show is based on — but it wouldn’t be accurate. For Stark, radical transparency is a way of life. You never have to wonder what Tony Stark is thinking because it’s usually exactly what’s coming out of his mouth at any given moment. The vampires on true blood are anything but transparent. Their secret truths and ulterior motives are consistently obscure. Tellingly, even Sookie Stackhouse, the show’s mind-reader, can’t penetrate their thoughts. Despite a superficial simulation, transparency is not really a quality that connects True Blood’s vampires to the modern age. But you know what does?
Recycling.
These vampires are environmentally conscious! Hey, it’s the the 21st century, caring about the environment is hot! In fact, in the wake of the BP Oil Spill disaster which has affected all the Gulf states — chief among them, Louisiana, True Blood’s setting — there is a subtly startling undercurrent of environmentalism running through this season’s sublot. At one point, Russell Edgington, the 3,000-year old vampire King of Mississippi, a new character introduced this season, rhapsodizes, “I mean, do you remember how the air used to smell? How humans used to smell? How they used to taste?” Earlier, the vampire Queen of Louisiana describes a rare delicacy: “A Latvian boy. Has to be tasted to be believed. Not polluted like most humans. Tastes exactly the way they used to taste before the industrial revolution fucked everything to hell.” When Russell asks rhetorically, “What other creature actively destroys its own habitat,” one imagines these vampires didn’t need to see an Inconvenient Truth because they’ve lived it. They may be blood-sucking fiends but destroying the planet is below even their standards.
No doubt, there’ll be some anecdote about a vampire shopping online eventually. Most likely Eric will get there before Bill, I’m assuming, based on this classic exchange from season 1:
Eric: “I sent you three texts, why didn’t you reply?”
Bill: “I hate using the number keys to type.”
In fact, while Bill might be True Blood’s most conservative vampire (how postmodern!) — his education on how to be a vampire for the 17-year old girl he’s just been forced to turn into one is about as awkward and evasive as the birds and the bees talk from a religious dad — Eric is, arguably, its most progressive. That is, he has no fear of progress. Eric might be 1,000 years old but he’s as naturally at ease with his tech gadgets as any “digital native.” So far, he’s the only vampire I’ve seen use a bluetooth device. Ever.
As the proprietor of a popular vampire bar called Fangtasia, Eric clearly recognized “The Great Revelation” — as the vampires call their coming out to the world — as a great business opportunity. Entrepreneurship is an unexpected quality for a vampire in general — I mean, why bother with such pedestrian concerns when you’re immortal, right? On the other hand, what else would you do with an eternity of nights? Might as well launch a nightlife startup. According the Wall Street Journal, The Great Recession, which began in full force around the time True Blood first got on the air, is churning out ever more entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur.com reports, 8.7% of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in the second quarter of 2009, and they expect to see even more people starting their own businesses in 2010. So it’s no surprise that 21st century vampires would be business-minded. Upon visiting Fangtasia, Russell, himself a semi-silent owner of a werewolf bar in Mississippi called Lou Pines, even tells Eric, “We must talk of franchising.”
If being an entrepreneur isn’t your thing, there’s always the royal route: seizing assets from your subjects. In the vampire Queen’s case, that asset is vampire blood, which she then has other vampires move as black market narcotic. Since selling their blood is a high crime among vampires, it’s initially unclear why the Queen would be doing this. What inscrutable and ominous vampiric motives could she have? By season 3 it’s revealed that the Queen needs the money to pay off the IRS. For vampires in the 21st century, death might not be certain, but taxes are. Indeed, True Blood’s portrayal of vampire culture is more of a bureaucracy than any other cinematic depiction. After a religious fanatic suicide bomber self-detonates at a party in a vampire lair, killing a number of humans and vampires in attendance, there are, literally, forms that the lair’s owner has to fill out in this situation — a sequence that encapsulates the equally bizarre extremes of both the terrorism and banality of our age.
While just last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 initiative, which denies marriage rights to same-sex couples, was unconstitutional, on True Blood, same-sex couple Russell and Talbot have been married for 700 years. Homoerotica is by no means anything new in vampire lore, but gay marriage?? There’s a concept that barely existed in the public discourse before the 21st century. And Russell and Talbot’s relationship is exactly what you’d expect from a couple that’s been married for 7 centuries — anything but erotic. A particularly noticeable departure for the otherwise seriously agrosexual HBO series. Of course, the new phenomenon of marriage between vampire and human — which, though legal in the word of True Blood, is still highly controversial — has, from the show’s beginnings, served as a running metaphor for “marriage equality.” Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, as well as Six Feet Under, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, is not only someone who clearly understands a thing or two about the modern existential condition, he is also an openly gay man. No surprise, then that True Blood’s very opening credits sequence weekly drives home a starkly unfantastical image that connects vampires to that other minority fighting religious opposition for equal rights in the 21st century.
“Alternative lifestyle,” an often-used euphemism for homosexuality, is actually a perfect way to describe True Blood’s approach to vampirism. Even the show’s brilliantly integrated marketing campaigns have sought to bring True Blood’s fictional world off the screen and into reality by treating vampires as an increasingly visible minority with their own lifestyle brands and targeted advertising:
True Blood’s vampires even blog. Well, technically, it’s only Jessica, with her http://babyvamp-jessica.com blog, but as a 17 year-old who just became undead last year she’s the only Gen-Y vampire on the show, so obviously she’d be the one blogging — check out the awesomely pointless first few entries — 1, 2, 3 — this directionless experimentation with a new “toy” is exactly how a teenager would start a blog. (Vampire diaries?? Who the hell keeps a “diary” anymore in the age of social media? Sheesh.)
Overall, there is a deep, underlying theme about progress coursing through True Blood. “It’s vampires like you, who’ve been holding the rest of us back for centuries,” sneers Russell before destroying a Spanish Inquisition-era vampire Magister. It’s the vampires that are most hung up on the past who are some of the show’s craziest messes. The psychotic vampire Queen, who’s stuck in some perpetual 1940’s costume drama, has just been stripped of power; Lorena, whose inability to get over her past with Bill becomes her destruction; Eric’s newly-revealed 1,000 year old revenge obsession for the murder of his father will no doubt promptly lead him into some kind of trouble this season. Godric, Eric’s maker, even destroyed himself in part because after 2,000 years he could no longer bear that vampires had not progressed; that he hadn’t. Unlike the atemporal caricatures of the other franchises, True Blood’s vampires offer a uniquely compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman, relationship to it. We are living in a time when change, whether we like it or not, is coming at us so fast and furious we can barely comprehend it — speaking on a panel at Techonomy last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we now create 5 exabytes of data every two days, an amount equal to all the information created from the dawn of civilization through 2003. Who can really understand whatever the hell that even means? True Blood’s vampires are at once representations of cultural change within the narrative of the show, and, likewise, must themselves confront a new millennium’s progress. Some adapt better than others. Some have more sinister interpretations of where progress should lead, but they, like the rest of us in the 21st century, either accept change, or deny it at their own peril.
In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a relatively new medium called the comic book unleashed a new kind of character into the consciousness of American youth. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, this character possessed superhuman powers and a dedication to using those powers for the benefit of humanity. Often battling and defeating evil as hyperbolic as his own goodness, his iconic name would become the source of the term for this all-American archetype, the “superhero.” In the decades since Superman‘s arrival, innumerable variations on this theme have emerged, but always these characters have struggled under the weight of a concept about who they must be that was invented before television. For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation, as played by Robert Downey Jr., and directed by Jon Favreau in the just released Iron Man 2, is really the first Millennial superhero.
The original Superman prototype possessed a key characteristic, one that his creators, first generation American sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, would have known something about, one that this “Man of Tomorrow” would pass on as part of his legacy to future generations of masked heroes: a secret identity. This trait would become an intractable part of the very definition of a superhero, as much a prerequisite for his mythology as extraordinary powers, or at least a flamboyant getup. And yet, in a press conference at the end of 2008’s first installment of the Iron Man franchise, Tony Stark announces to the world that he is Iron Man. This is where the sequel starts off. The need for a secret identity is gone. The entire world knows — and not because some tabloid uncovered the mystery man behind the mask, but because he just straight up told everyone. In the comic books, it took Stark 40 years to make this move. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoings, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself. But in the 21st century, Tony Stark’s approach to privacy reflects how Millennials now think of the concept.
These days, the kind of stuff kids choose to reveal about themselves online is almost beyond comprehension. The latest social platform eroding the boundary between what was once strictly private and is now exposed to the world is Formspring.me, which the New York Times calls, “the online version of the bathroom wall in school“:
While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.
Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.
This [behavior] has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means. More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name. Why? What’s going on?
While this particular trend is definitely a bit baffling, those of us that have grown up in the digital age have pretty much come to expect that the privacy arc of the internet is perpetually bending more and more towards greater disclosure. Privacy, as Facebook’s Millennial founder Mark Zuckerberg insists, is dead:
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time… But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting [Facebook] now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.
Here’s an interesting visualization of the Evolution of Privacy on Facebook, indicating how the website has let ever more of our information become increasingly public over the years:
Oh… wait a second, no, that last one is actually the arc reactor implant that’s keeping Tony Stark alive. But, no doubt, Skynet… err.. Facebook is intent on catching up to the full-pie version of the chart soon.
Anyway, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker, they were never prepared for this brave new networked world. Their entire way of being simply doesn’t fit anymore. Neither with Facebook and its social network platform ilk, nor the (*cough* relative) sensibilities of the Millennial youth who use it. For Tony Stark, transparency isn’t just relegated to the subject of his super-powered “alter ego,” it’s a pervasive part of his total personality, his way of being in the world. Stark is as blatant as his id, his mobile touch-screen device is actually, literally, transparent, allowing others to see everything he’s doing on it, every surface in his house seems to be equipped with touch-screen capabilities, his browsing activities public to anyone sitting nearby who cares to look. Zuckerberg himself likely couldn’t have dreamed up a more post-Privacy kind of superhero, one less conflicted about the disparate parts of his identity. With the death of privacy, you cannot be one thing in one context, and something different in another. You cannot be Clark Kent at the Daily Planet desk job, and then Superman on the night shift. You are exactly who you are to everyone at all times. Like no other superhero, Tony Stark’s identity isn’t conflicted. It’s absolute.
It has always been normal for kids to have big dreams, but the dreams of kids today are bigger than ever. By the time kids figure out they’re not going to be celebrities or sports figures, they’re well into adolescence, or even their twenties.
High expectations can be the stuff of inspiration, but more often they set GenMe up for bitter disappointment. [The book] Quarterlife Crisis concludes that twenty-somethings often take a while to realize that the “be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do,” mantra of their childhoods is not attainable.
In the late 90’s, Tyler Durden, himself a sort of Gen X superhero — a transitional alpha version precursor to the Gen Y launch model, if you will — said it like:
We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
Even in the throes of the economic crisis, my generation hasn’t really had a Great Depression either — though we did come this close. And even after 9/11 my generation hasn’t had a Great War. The world is now far too mind-numbingly complicated and complex to even have a clear concept of a single, monolithic Evil to fight. The “heroes” of my generation, the ideals that kids look up to and wish to be like, haven’t been men of steel battling evil for a long time, they are now, like Durden says, millionaires and rock stars. And that is precisely what 21st Century Tony Stark is. After he comes out of the closet (or, more accurately, the basement science lab) as Iron Man, he becomes a worldwide celebrity, a household name. Even the migrant worker he stops to buy strawberries from on the Pacific Coast Highway asks, “Are you Iron Man?” like he’s recognized a movie star.
And unlike Superman or SpiderMan or Batman or any other major superhero before him whose truth the world was not yet ready to handle, Tony Stark answers casually, “Sometimes.”
Perhaps that’s the other side of what allows a 21st century superhero to be transparent. The modern world can accept him as such. Gen Y is a lot more tolerant of lifestyle differences than prior generations, after all. The X-Men didn’t hide that they were different, either, but then again, they COULDN’T hide it — looking like Beast or Nightcrawler, or having Rogue or Cycolps’ particular mutations, you couldn’t just “pass” in normal society — and the humans the X-Men fought to protect could never accept them for being what they are. Not so in the world of Tony Stark. He’s no mutant. No outcast. He’s the most popular kid in school. The late DJ AM even spins at his birthday bash. The 21st century Tony Stark reveals to the world he is Iron Man, and the 21st century world says…. Awesome!
In the past, being a tech entrepreneur-slash-engineer, as Tony Stark is, would have made him a nerd, or otherwise Bruce Wayne, still stuck in the previous millennium, putting on a show of irresponsible playboy-ness to deflect attention from both his morbidly serious crime-fighting alter ego and his humorless tech geek underbelly. Like, remember when no one would have wanted to sit at the lunch table with kids who talked about stuff like “augmented reality”?
Yeah, not so much, anymore. In the 21st century, being a tech geek no longer detracts from the image of a bad-ass or a dilettante. James Bond and Q have combined into one seamless character. It’s 2010, and geeks are cool! Hell, we’ve even got one as President.
While both Wayne and Stark are surrounded by high tech everything, for the 20th century hero all the gadgetry is just a means to an end. Even the Batmobile is ultimately just a flashy tool. Same could technically be said about the iPhone, but who would? In the post-iPod era we have a very different relationship with our technology. Our favorite tech objects aren’t just for utilitarian application, they’re obsessed over, fetishized, loved. It’s why Gizmodo would pay $10,000 for an exclusive scoop on an in-production, “lost” 4g iPhone, and why an enormous global audience would give a crap. When Stark says in the movie that the Iron Man suit is a part of him, that he and it are one, we all intimately understand exactly what he means even if the rest of us don’t actually literally plug our gadgets into our chest cavities.
After a raucous birthday party in which we see Stark, in full Iron Man gear, getting shitfaced and acting the fool, (he’s dying at the time, and feeling a bit of the nothing-really-matters mortality blues — being dissolute and apathetic, itself, unusually postmodern behavior for a superhero), S.H.I.E.L.D. agency director Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) “grounds” the hungover superhero by sequestering him in his house with all access to communication with the outside world cut off until he solves a theoretical physics problem. This superhero’s punishment is having his phone and internet privileges revoked and being sent up to his room to finish his math homework. There isn’t a single one of the 60 million American Millennials that doesn’t relate to this.
When Favreau was looking for a 21st century industrialist corporate executive to use as a model for his and Robert Downey Jr’s interpretation of Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk, co-founder of paypal. Musk even has a cameo in the movie, chatting Tony up about an electric rocket, a concept referencing Musk’s current endeavors, Tesla Motors, which produces fully electric sports cars that rival Porsche in performance, and SpaceX, a private aerospace company working to invent the first reusable rockets, which would dramatically reduce costs and eventually lead to affordable space-travel. This dude is the inspiration for the 21st century version of Stark.
So what’s Tony Stak’s inspiration? Why does he do what he does? There was no childhood trauma that drove him to caped crusading. He wasn’t raised by adoptive Earth parents who imbued him with a strong moral compass during his formative years on a farm in the American Heartland. Sure, ok, he underwent a certain crisis of conscience in his 40s after escaping from a terrorist hostage situation in Afghanistan, shutting down the weapons manufacturing division of Stark Industries and all, but still, why does he take it so much further, going so far as to “privatize world peace.” …. For the thrill of it! As he himself says, he keeps up the good fight at his own pleasure, adding, “and I like to pleasure myself often.” Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to, and most importantly, he GETS what he wants. Sure he has to work for it, but unlike with, say, Peter Parker and Mary Jane or Clark Kent and Lois Lane or even Buffy and Angel, what he wants isn’t perpetually out of his grasp just because he is who he is. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.
The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun.
You can’t get any more Gen Y than that.
Welcome, 21st Century superhero, my generation has been waiting for you.
@babiejenks
@babiejenks
Image: Culture Wins
