The Language of Meme

I have seen several efforts like this video of late, which strive to highlight a particular rising trend that began far, far earlier than the creator of this video suspects.  True enough, the obsession with ironic, self-aware storytelling has become increasingly widespread in mainstream film in the last decade, but it is hardly restricted to Hollywood and it certainly came into vogue with varying television shows dating back to the origin of Saturday Night Live.  Self-awareness is a natural outgrowth of satire, that uses humour, irony and exaggeration to expose and criticise just about every sort of foolishness of which humans are capable.

But this isn't a long deconstruction of the rise of satire, or the evils of self-awareness, because to really investigate these ideals, we'd have to start with Aristophanes in the late 5th to early 4th century BCE.  In The Frogs, during an imaginary contest administered by Dionysius, between Aeschylus and Euripedes, the former is mocking the latter for composing verse in a specific iambic that allow for the insertion of "a little bottle of oil." Aeschylus then invites Euripedes to spew out a few verses, and we get this interaction:

Euripides: "Aegyptus, so the widespread rumour runs,
   With fifty children in a long-oared boat, 
   Landing near Argos—"

Aeschylus: ... lost his little bottle of oil.

Dionysus: What was this little bottle? You'll be sorry.
    Recite for him another prologue, so I can see once more.

Euripides: "Dionysius, who with thyrsus wands and fawnskins,
    bedecked amidst the pines on Mt. Parnassus
    bounds dancing—"

Aeschylus: ... lost his little bottle of oil.

Dionysus: Alas, again we have been stricken by that flask.

Euripides: It won't be a problem. For to this
    prologue he won't be able to attach that flask.

    "No man exists, who's altogether blest,

    Either nobly sired he has no livelihood

    Or else base-born he—"

Aeschylus: ... lost his little bottle of oil.

Dionysus: Alas, again we have been stricken by that flask.

And so it goes on, and on, proving that we all have our little flaws, the greatest poets as well as anyone else.  The Euripides in the play works because he just won't accept it.  Aeschylus makes his point a half dozen times, neatly infecting all of Euripides work with the little bottle, in precisely the same way that he "flaw" of every classic film has been excoriated by the Simpsons and a dozen other popular sources in the last 30 years.

Some of us know about the age of this infection because we played D&D in the 80s, and "self-awareness" is without a doubt the greatest anathema to a game that relies upon engagement through pure imagination and nothing else.  The endless referencing of Monty Python alone had polluted D&D campaigns to the point of immobility.  How many times have I overseen a session where the players became so involved in the self-reflection of how "unrealistic" things could get due to the precepts of the game and sheer happenstance, to the point where people rolled on the floor and couldn't breathe on account of the laughing?

Many times.

Gets to the point where rules have to be made against any anachronistic reference that a player makes, no matter how abstract... because if I get it, and another player gets it, then it's not the D&D game that we're thinking about, but some movie or television show, which doesn't belong within the discourse of a engaged, immersive experience.  I have shouted at players to shut the fuck up, I have threatened to remove levels of experience or to permanently ban such people from the game, because they could not stop themselves from repeatedly singing the song to "Sir Robin" or speaking the words, "It's just a flesh wound."  It's a disease.  The jokes are tired, they're not funny any more, yet for some, it's still a kind of wit to connect something some character said in some bit of media to something happening right now in the game.

There is a word for this sort of comment, made without thinking first of what the repercussions might be upon it being expressed.  I'm certain that Somerset Maugham made reference to the word, but alas, I cannot find the quote.  The word is "snark," which we may identify as a form of hostility against anything that's serious, or might conceivably matter.  Snark is reactive.  It attempts to impose a worldview that replaces thoughts with memes, which is to say, to quote a Canadian, the media is the meme, expressed when it isn't relevant.

The superficiality of snark, with it's capacity to replace thought and discourse with the meme, runs rife through every element of our culture, so it's no great insight to find it infecting the actual dialogue spoken by characters in film.  Like I say, these memes have been a part of tabletop gaming since the 1970s; they have infiltrated into video games, they have become the repeatable soundbite that forms the underlying substance of reality television, they possess the very fabric of political thought, they're all anyone encounters when entering a chat room or a real life coffee shop.  The vast hordes of people do not speak language, they speak "meme," with which they've been supplied in abundance through the internet.  Communication is transactional and shallow, and there is little chance that we're going to see a significant reversal in our lifetime.

Which doesn't matter.  As I have said before, "What do the simple folk do?" is not a substantial, worthy question for anyone who desires mastery of the world.  Creating a video that says, "look at what's happened to movies" is a sort of in-bred joke, like standing in shit up to our hips while pointing and laughing at other people up to their hips in shit.

If we want to do something that rises above these shallow observations and the exchanges they spawn, we must put the conversation behind us and apply to the problem itself.  The world does not produce enough serious movies?

Then go make one.