Chuck Klosterman: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think there’s a break point. Maybe it comes at 9/11, but since then, everything has felt weird, and a lot of aesthetics hasn’t changed very much. Music doesn’t go through phases the way it used to. Movies intensify, maybe, in terms of special effects or number of superheroes, but they don’t evolve the way they used to. The ’90s, to me, was the last part of earlier history. Well, I think it’s possible — very easy in fact — to argue that the ’90s were the last decade of the 20th century, but also the last decade that was this immutable framing of time. One thing I talk about a little bit in the book — maybe I should have talked about more, but I wanted to get away from seeing the past through the prism of the present — but this guy, Mark Fisher, who’s dead now, had this idea about the slow cancellation of the future. I feel like that’s one of the most profound ideas that I’ve come across in the last 10 years of my life, and it seems so palpable that this is occurring. An example I will often use is, if you take, say, 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with no major actors, and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous, and you show anyone these 10-minute clips, they will have no problem whatsoever figuring out which one came first. Even a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other. But if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020 — again, an obscure film where you don’t recognize the actors — you’re just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second. It’s almost impossible. This phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture. This idea that everything, to a degree now, is somewhat retro, and certain natural evolutions that happened because culture was lost or forgotten or just moved beyond, doesn’t really happen now. It’s so easy to access the recent past that it all becomes pushed into the same gumbo or whatever. The ’90s, to me, signal the end of when you are able to look at certain things or certain qualities or a certain vague sense and identify it as from that period. I fear that that may be over, although I’m not sure why I fear it. Why did it change? What happened? When did we sense the flip there? What drove that difference?…

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