***Spoiler Alert!!!! This post contains plot details for several recent films. As with all media, I recommend you do your research on ratings and content to decide what you're comfortable watching.***
I was born in 1981, the year Jean Baudrillard's philosophic take on postmodernism Simulacra and Simulation was published. I graduated high school in 1999, the year The Matrix, a film tribute to that tome was released. From the timely take on changing realities that was MTV's 1981 debut, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles to Cher's blatantly auto-tuned lost-love anthem "Believe" in 1999, my entire life has been an experience of the "postmodern." And yet, in this increasingly chaotic, upside-down world that is 25 years post-graduation, radio is still around and everybody still wants somebody to love.
Welcome to the world of the last vestiges of Generation X, born on the edge of yesterday's generation and bearing witness to the rise of tomorrow's. My whole life, everything has been a reflection on the past and anticipation of the future. But now our culture is fully occupied with the present in a way I've never seen. Perhaps it's the rise of inflation, which puts conspicuous consumerism to the background while real needs (rent, food, safety) rise to the foreground. Maybe it's a disillusionment with technology, as tools regress in usefulness and digital services leave us purposefully unsatisfied. It could even be nostalgia-bait, which gives us a taste of past lives and values almost alien to our postmodern selves. Either way, there's a growing sense that something's missing, and maybe it's the original, aka, the "O.G."
IDEAS AND IMAGINATION
After an era of jukebox playlists and hip-hop style choreography, 2023's Roald Dahl prequel Wonka has an old-fashioned feel, featuring original songs, big-set style dancing, and a curiously timely take on creativity. The story begins when young Willie Wonka arrives in town with only a few shillings in his pocket and the dream of selling his magical chocolates at the Galleries Gourmet. However, this budding entrepreneur soon finds himself penniless, enslaved, and criminalized. After all, the Chocolate Cartel (three wealthy chocolatiers of the Galleries Gourmet) are watering down their morsels for the masses and saving the "good stuff" to bribe chocoholic local officials, thereby preserving their status as the only purveyors in town.
It's a situation that many young Millennials and Gen Z'ers can probably relate to: wage slavery, ridiculous rents, and an unjust system with addiction at the center. Such are the markers of many a Crisis Era or Saecular winter (it's notably winter in Wonka's unnamed town too). Yet Willie Wonka is not a proud, militant social justice warrior. He's a dreamer, a creator, and a kind-hearted friend who harness the power of "Pure Imagination" to vanquish the Cartel, free his fellow wage-slaves, and bring about Spring. In their victory, Willie is briefly reunited with his mother by remembering her words about community, and his bookworm friend Noodle is reunited with her librarian mother amongst a sea of bookish scribbles.
It's no wonder that this film is catnip to audiences, as it tap dances across all the touchstones of the ARTIST generational archetype: kindness, sensitivity, community, creativity. And it will soon be in good company. IF, the story of a young girl helping homeless imaginary friends releases this May. Harold and the Purple Crayon, the tale of a storybook character brought to life by "pure imagination," releases in August. While the culture war over disappearing books in the classroom and bans in the library rages on, it seems that we can all agree on one thing: what captures our imagination is what changes our reality.
SIMULATION AND REALITY
And what exactly is reality?
In Kung Fu Panda 4 (released March 2024), Dragon Warrior and ever-hungry panda Po must step down from his post as martial arts master and step up as spiritual leader, but only after identifying an unlikely successor and defeating the evil Chameleon. Like the Chocolate Cartel of Wonka, the Chameleon lives in luxury built through exploitation and oppression. And, just as the Cartel offered a false chocolate to the masses, the Chameleon embodies false selves as she shape-shifts and steals her way to glory.
This problem of discerning the fake from the real is at the heart of the postmodern experience. Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation explains the evolution of sign (something that represents a real thing) to simulation (something that has no relation to reality). As I pointed out in my previous blog, "The Habit: A Generational Solution to Addiction Culture," addiction replaces what is healthy, normal, and good (reality) with that which is unhealthy, abnormal, and bad (simulation). Gambling isn't entrepreneurship. Doomscrolling isn't researching. Pornography isn't relationship. But for a moment, when the dopamine is flowing and telling our brains THIS IS IT!, we can't tell the difference. That's the problem with simulation: as our experience of it deepens, our ability to return to reality is increasingly difficult.
And yet, like dandelions piercing the pavement, reality will always intervene because simulation cannot exist without it. Perhaps the most poignant recent example of this is Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), the story of a toy doll whose picture-perfect life is interrupted by the intrusion of reality. When curious thoughts of death and other unpleasant disturbances send Barbie looking for answers, she learns that her home world of BarbieLand is a simulation, originating from the imaginative play of doll owners. After a trip to the real world and an encounter with her Creator, Barbie realizes that the simulation is not enough for her and chooses to acknowledge her feminine realness by a trip to the gynecologist.
Does this mean that imagination is bad? That we should eschew all fantasy for the practical, the here-and-now? Certainly not, and here's why.
CREATION AND ORIGINALITY
How does an imagined thing become to a real thing? The answer is the act of creation. Therefore, nothing that exists in reality did not exist as an idea first. Consider Genesis 1:1-3, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." Later, in John 1 we learn that the Word of God is the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Creation that we experience as the "real world" was made through the creative and collaborative act of the Trinity: God the Father, Jesus the Word/Son, and the Holy Spirit.
As creatures made in God's image, we humans are also empowered with the ability to create by the use of our body, our sprit, and our words. Also, given our knowledge of good and evil, we can create things that are both good and evil. Therefore, the problem of simulacra is not that it is a created thing, but that it is a distortion of the good, too far removed from reality. If you paint a window black, is there any difference between that window and a wall? The point of a window is to allow in light, and a blackened one parodies the object's created purpose to the point of futility.
Today, as our culture awakens to the nature of our simulation, artists and creatives are asking themselves what they can do to combat a world of addiction and distortion. In particular, the swift rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has struck terror into the hearts of novelists, screenwriters, and non-fiction authors, who fear their work will be stolen and their jobs replaced by the deus ex machina. I would propose that one solution to this threat is for creatives to be more original-- to return to the beginning, the real, and the true.
So how does one go about being more original? Don't worry-- you don't have to reinvent the wheel. All you have to do is follow the Willie Wonka blueprint: marry pure imagination and excellent craftsmanship to create new and interesting connections. Even the real-life Steve Jobs explained this relationship as crucial to Apple's success:
"Designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new, that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it's that process that is the magic."
Being original can be as simple as the old Hollywood tagline: "Give me the same, but different." There may not be anything new under the sun, but the way you do it can still be novel. For example, director Baz Luhrmann didn't write Romeo & Juliet, but he did use his operatic style, love of pop music, and even memories of his father's gas station in Australia to create a fresh take on the classic story with the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. Likewise, the great English Bard William Shakespeare likely pulled parts of his play from the older Cornish legend of Tristan and Isolde, which in turn resembles the Roman poet Ovid's tragic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe.
These stories aren't stale rehashes like the recent releases from major superhero franchises. Too many MCU and DCCU films have given into simulation, where their photocopy of a photocopy of a comic book page degrades all semblance of character, theme and arc into cliched tropes and stereotypes. Audiences instinctively sense this falsehood, and are voting with their feet. No, what we need is archetypes: overarching templates that reveal the truth and beauty of human existence. Luhrman, Shakespeare, and Ovid all understood that prejudice and hate lead to death, and their expertly-crafted tales of star-crossed lovers exemplify this premise in unique and captivating ways.
Where stereotypes focus on characteristics in a flat and negative way, archetypes focus on character, the positive and three-dimensional aspects of a person as he or she grows and interacts with others. In the space of a few nights, Romeo and Juliet grow from helpless teenagers to married adults full of passion and agency, while their parents progress from hatemongering enmity to a remorseful truce. Peace is yielded by tragedy, a truth founded in reality, not just "because reasons," as simulacra would have it. The same goes for the generational saeculum: when the wages of war in a Fourth Turning Crisis (winter) become too great and the ekpyrosis burns out, a First Turning Awakening (spring) emerges to bring peace and hope for the future.
This is benefit of understanding generational archetypes: writers can tie into truths about the way that people behave, and can also anticipate the types of stories that will appeal to those people. We can bring our uniquely human abilities and experiences to bear in creating transformative work for audiences unplugging themselves from the simulation. It's at that point, when the fitting word meets the fitting moment, that something powerful, magical, and original springs to life and changes the world.
That said, there's only one question that remains: What's your story?
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