Dumber Equals Better?

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.

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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. "Casablanca" was mass market, and so was Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. But those discrete markets aren't big or broad enough now to support the massive quarter-over-quarter revenue needs of a "cross-market" media giant. So they've created a world of hypermass. It's a formula alright: Hypermass=dumber SUPERSCRIPT(2). By definition, you target the lowest common denominator -- then think lower. Thus we get the "reality" TV show "Joe Millionaire" now on FOX, which makes the original "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" on ABC look like Masterpiece Theater. The hit "Analyze This" degrades into the bomb "Analyze That."

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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.

Updated January 17, 2003