IkeSouth wrote:
hes got punchy face and a stupid voice. i agree i really have no idea why the big push for him.
From what I've managed to suss out of this media blitz, it's that he has an "earnestness and enthusiasm" that's really supposed to "resonate with millennials."
First of all, fuck the word "millennial." I hate it, especially since it's supposed to be my generation. Second of all, fuck millennials.
One of David Foster Wallace's most important essays is "E Unibus Pluram." It's long-winded and dense, even for him, but it's necessary as kind of a thesis statement for his entire body of work. To sum it up, the point is that our television culture has created this sensibility of irony built upon irony built upon irony to the point that no one can send nor receive any communication at face value anymore, and that the way to zig where the rest of the world zags will be to speak, write, and act with sincerity -- to say what you mean and not have these layers of irony and snark to dig through. I like that.
Now we have the opposite problem: people so committed to what has apparently become a generational ethos of sincerity and positivity, such that even the people we expect to be professionally funny have less edge than a fucking butter knife. And that's pretty much where we are with Jimmy Fallon. Just as David Letterman and Bill Murray were kind of the guiding lights for Generation X, where people and conventions were just a bunch of bullshit to be ignored, subverted, or treated with outright contempt, now I guess "we" have Jimmy Fallon, where celebrities are just gosh-darn great and it's so cool that there are people who do things and let's all just have a good time and maybe we'll
go viral with it, because everyone knows there's no greater achievement in today's world than to Go Viral. Conan O'Brien waded in this shit-water when he got fired and gave that stupid "aw shucks, guys, don't be cynical!" speech, but I suppose he still has some vestigial edge-cred from doing that bit with the masturbating bear.
What DFW wasn't able to tell me was that as emotionally draining as a world of perpetual reflexive irony is, a world of unflappable optimism and earnestness wears your ass right out in quick fashion, too. (Spend time around kids from a Bible college and you'll really know.) When there's so much Being Real defined as being in opposition to Being Detached, especially in the entertainment sector, it's not hard to start seeing them as the dragons rather than the dragon-slayers. Take Jennifer Lawrence. Same principle (but with a much nicer rack). You see her on E! or whatever going on about "ahhh I love to eat, all I wanna do is eat, lol food is the best am I right, FOOOOOOD" and then everyone talks about how
refreshing she is, how she shows that you can still look like, act like, and be like a Normal Person and be famous, and I just want to scream at the top of my lungs (but not today; I picked up some nasty bronchitis back in WPB)
HAS THIS WHOLE WORLD GONE MAD?!? I don't care how much her all-star team of publicists -- and don't think for a second they're not in on this -- tells her to talk about eating, she's still considerably thinner than any average cute girl you're going to see in and around Chicago (though again, nice tits), still impossibly better-looking than average cute girls, still able to place a higher premium on health and beauty than any normal person whose job
isn't to be photographed at 24 fps, and so there's nothing
refreshing about a skinny person prattling on about stuffing her face just like normal girls do, because she isn't a normal girl, she never will be, and I don't appreciate the efforts to position her as Someone Our Generation Can Really Get Behind (though again...) because those of us who caught the tail end of Gen-X eye-rolls and sighs still have our bullshit detectors, even if they do catch a few false positives from time to time.
Authenticity is great, don't get me wrong, but sometimes life calls for being authentically skeptical, authentically mean, authentically above the bullshit. Politics and entertainment are two places where you really have to keep your dukes up, because no matter how much Hot Young Millennials talk about being sincere and genuine and hope and change and all that shit, these are sectors where fundamentally, all people want to do is sell you something, and no generational shift in attitude is going to change that.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.