The Barbarians

What the British Invasion, the garage bands and the Roger Corman Film School Can Teach Us about Our Current Moment

{Editor’s note: After a heroic, mythical, 36-week writing streak of free yet incisive content, Mo Diggs took a well-deserved break last weekend. Well, that’s his narrative anyway. He deserved the break but that’s not why he took it. Turns out last Saturday Mo trained a Runway Portrait Generator on 15 images of his face in order to generate 100 portraits of him. When he saw the results, why it was just like when you look in the mirror on acid. Traumatic, but a great way to dissolve your ego. This video had him all like “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end…of Momo?”

Due to fear of alienating Mo and our small but discerning readership technical limitations, we can’t upload the video. Suffice it to say, our beatific surveyor of media and cyclical time is here again to guide us through another dark, rainy weekend of the soul.-Ed.]

“the barbarians at the gate, 3-D rendered with polygon graphics and a cyberpunk aesthetic,” Midjourney

Strikes are breaking out throughout Hollywood. And it’s not just writers. SAG-AFTRA is talking about striking, which if it does it would be the first time in 23 years.

The reason why: studios are dumb. They actually think, thanks to AI, they hold the cards. They believe audiences won’t mock them mercilessly for making Runway Gen-2 films with Midjourney posters. Yes, the Midjourney illustration above is incredible for a free Substack. But not for a movie studio. Or a news media outlet. Buzzfeed can afford to take risks with AI because, especially now with their news division gone, they don’t command respect. But Warner Brothers resurrecting Christopher Reeves to play Superman with TikTok-level special effects and filters? You laugh, but why else was The Irishman so hard to sit through?

What they don’t get is that production tools like Midjourney and Runway are best utilized by scrappy upstarts trying to make a sandwich out of one slice of bread, not by multi-million dollar entertainment conglomerates trying to de-age the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Look, I know I’m stalling, but 36 weeks of time travel can make one man sick. Strap in, chrononauts, as we hurtle back into the SIXTIES!

The Barbarians: An Overview

So I have spoken of three types of Sixties. The first two (social justice movement and transhumanists) I spoke of here. The third Sixties - the dropouts - I touched on at the end of this post. Well now I am going to delve into a fourth Sixties that does not get anywhere near enough attention: the barbarians! When we think of the Sixties, we think protests and hippies dancing. We forget how violent the decade was. And not just the contemporary horrors of racial tension, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, etc. Much of the most influential, important art of the era was violent and revolutionary. And it all started with a bloody invasion.

The British Invasion

The Beatles were the cute, cuddly Trojan horse of The British Invasion. Actually, their early music from their Homburg days was every bit as aggressive as their later British Invasion peers, if not more so. But Brian Epstein toned down their image for mass consumption. So we can credit him with building the horse. The acts that came later — The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, The Who, The Yarbirds — carried a thundercloud of menace and danger everywhere they went.

As much as we focus on these bands attacking American mores and attitudes, the British themselves were the most shocked. Prior to the Sixties, celebrities were understood to be extensions of the Queen and her empire. Sir Laurence Olivier, etc. Working-class blokes like The Animals snarling about prostitution and getting high was a complete affront to high society. But there they were, at all the posh parties, hobnobbing with the rich youth, passing them joints and the occasional sugar cube.

The Rolling Stones were not working class. They came from money. This might have had the most jarring effect. Well-to-do men preferring to emulate black Chicago blues men with mythical virility rather than grey flannel British businessmen that helped drive industry.

The idea of British youths disregarding the strictly codified strictures of class and hierarchy through electric guitars with loud speakers (in other words technology used by scrappy upstarts) would be inspiration enough. But what they inspired in America was bedlam for the ages.

Garage Rock

Let’s be clear. Garageland was not born out of American teens aping The Who and The Yardbirds in their garages. It grew out of The Fabulous Wailers from Tacoma, Washington and the independent label they founded, Etiquette Records, which put out bands by several Pacific Northwest behemoths, most notably The Sonics. But the British Invasion turned Garageland from an isthmus to a continent.

It does not need to be said how garage rock influenced punk rock, grunge, and the garage rock revival of the 2000s. We can even skip over the whole part of how the MC5 carried the revolutionary rage of the Detroit-based White Panther revolutionaries. What is most interesting for our purposes are the innovations. Reverb, whammy bar vibratos, minor chords, exotic musical scales, fuzz boxes were all technical innovations that came out of garage rock and teens that had limited studio resources but wanted to express the thrills of surfing, hot rodding, getting high and getting laid. (please read Five Years Ahead of My Time for a mind-bending trip into the mysterious history of this shadowy revolution).

The garage rock narrative has been replaced by the garage innovator narrative. Much of the history of tech innovation comes out of open source software and geeks tinkering in their garage. Yes, now we see Big Tech trying to keep the genie in the bottle but, like it or not, the innovation of AI has and will come out of open-source garages as well.

The Roger Corman Film School

Before Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper and Martin Scorsese attacked the gates of Hollywood and took over, they trained in the dark forest of the Roger Corman American International B-movies. The Godfather, Taxi Driver and Easy Rider were monumental cinematic achievements that expanded the vocabulary of commercial film. But they came after Francis Ford Coppola directed Dementia 13, Dennis Hopper rubbed elbows with Peter Fonda on The Trip and Marty Scorsese directed Boxcar Bertha.

The New Hollywood took many cues from the French New Wave and international cinema in general. But the debt owed to the independent exploitation films many of them cut their teeth on cannot be overstated. And it is this model that suits us the best in our current moment. Imagine a bunch of AV geeks making schlocky horror Internet videos and sci-fi space operas using AI. Then, after the studios sniff them out, they get real budgets and they get to make their Godfathers. Or they use studio backing to make even more high-quality Internet content. Or the geeks even get together and form their own studio, United Artists-style.

Either that or we see a future of aging Margot Robbies and Ryan Goslings with Bold Glamour filters.