This Parasitic Culture

I blame French & Saunders.

While I'm in a rich vein of rant, and following on from last night's slightly demented post, I was listening to a podcast today about Battlestar Galactica. If you've watched the new show, you'll know that it's bright, intelligent, confusing and sensual. So how come the most-downloaded podcast about the show was so full of ...

nothing.

It was a two-hour podcast about a one-hour show. In the podcast they debated the merits of an RPG, interjected poorly-sung songs into the conversation, and discussed the merits of a half-remembered movie from the eighties that they couldn't actually remember the title of. When they remembered, they got back to BSG, and provided the most surface-level, numbskull commentary, full of personal anecdote and devoid of critical insight.

Which is when it occurred to me;

Loads of the media is just like this.

It's chatter about chatter.

Last night I was talking about the importance of actual, real creativity - the crystal castle - and the mediasphere of comment, from blogs, to Twitter. But today it occurred to me that, actually, the vast majority of all media is hugely parasitic. The ideas of the few are disseminated and broken apart by the many - and the many make money on the ideas of the few.

(Worried about sounding a bit Ayn Rand at this point.)

This is potentially the biggest opportunity for human creativity that there has ever been. As I mentioned in my last post, the great opportunity and the great problem are one and the same - that there are no barriers to entry for creativity on the 21st century. Meaning that any uninformed idiot with an opinion can broadcast.

Am I stupid to think that's wrong?

So Danny Boyle makes a great, original movie. And gets a well-deserved Oscar. And 200,000 critics around the world write a positive review - and get paid for that positive review. Which might just be "**** - The Sun."

Now that's not a bad thing - Danny (who has made many a cracking movie, and couldn't get arrested when 'Sunshine' came out) makes a few extra quid and so do Indian slum children actors.

But the point I'm making is that the person who wrote for The Sun (and 'The Sun' here is a metaphor for the great tabloid steam train, not the actual paper) made money for that review. Is Slumdog a good movie? Say, compared to 'Battleship Potemkin'? Don't know? Wait a minute - weren't you just paid for your opinions as a film critic?

It gets worse. The person who 'wrote' the metaphorical Sun review probably earnt £80 for those four stars. But what about... the parodists?

I love a good parody. I laugh out loud at a critique which finds its subject, holds it up to the critical maw, tastes it, enjoys it, references where it came from, and then says: "You're a bit 'out' here. Something tastes wrong. Whilst I applaud your artistic achievement, I'm just going to nip here and here and remind you that you're not perfect."


Examples? Wally Wood's "SuperDuperMan". Airplane. Morecambe and Wise do "Singin' In the Rain." That's parody. And those creators deserve every penny, because what they did provided thought and insight into the matter of origin.

But parody is easy. At least, it's easy to do badly. The subject matter is there and obvious. The jokes don't have to be good to make money - they just have to be present. So the 'creators' of "Meet the Spartans" make a shedload of cash from Frank Miller's research and add nothing. Does Frank get a few cents? I doubt it. Peter Kay sings "Amarillo" in a parodic fashion and adds NOTHING - although, granted, the money went to charity.

Which brings me back to French & Saunders. I saw F&S on the first Comic Strip tour, 1980, University of Reading. Everyone was nervous because Rik and Ade weren't on that night, despite being top-billed - one was ill. But they came on, Alexei Sayle rocked the house, and F&S picked subjects they knew about, generally female insecurities, and skewered them.

Fast forward twenty years to French and Saunders, primetime BBC. In which they parody "Silence of the Lambs," "Titanic," and "Thelma and Louise.". And it's the same joke, every time. "Here's Silence of the Lambs but...IT'S A BIT CRAP." "Here's Thelma and Louise but...IT'S A BIT CRAP." That's the joke. That's the whole fucking joke.

I honestly think that they were the first to do it. The first to say, "Here's our amateur remake, just what amateur adults would do - isn't that funny?"

And now, there's a whole Hollywood industry who think that it's the same, but IT'S A BIT CRAP justifies a $20m budget. Epic Movie, Scary Movie...they're just a bit crap.

The people who make the Battlestar podcast are sponsored - they get paid. But the best function of what they do is to provide an aide memoire of last week's episode. They make their money from someone else's creativity. The whole, current, parody industry does just the same.

Here we are, with all these ideas, all this creativity. All these sources (that's you lot...) and many of the best paid of us make a living from quoting and parodying the really bright ones.

So make a vow, you bloggers, you writers, you readers. No cheap jokes. No parodies unless they are VALID. Tell us about you. Every one of you has led a life different to every other person on Earth. Tell us about you. If you have critical insight on another creator's work good -- but tell us why.

Why do I write - at all? Because, as a human being the one thing that I can absolutely never do is be another human being. But, by God, I can imagine it. So tell me about you - thoughts, insights, about where you're from. I don't care about what you think of "Titanic," or what jokes you can make at the expense of James Cameron's creativity. But I might care about you.