The Wastedland

How the Seventies Gave Us Our Current Society of Mindless Spectacle

“<magazine illustration> yellow smiley face in the sky with a bunch of wasted apathetic teenage boys and girls basking in its glow,” Midjourney

This past week, the HBO Max app was no more. Now it’s part of an awkward, multimedia conglomerate merger rebrand called Max. That they chose to do this days before the series finales of Succession and Barry is not only a devastating marker of the end of Peak TV but a botched makeover of one of the most beloved brands in history. The Sopranos and Succession are not enough. Now we need MILF Manor.

Though MILF Manor might be the impenetrable rock bottom of trash TV, it is not without precedent. Its family tree goes back to this:

Chuck Barris’s The Gong Show was reviled by critics at the time, but it was especially devastating coming at the tail end of a decade that gave us groundbreaking TV like All in the Family and M*A*S*H*. Though the latter two shows were broadcast in the ‘70s, they have their roots in the consciousness of the ‘60s. The Gong Show was but one of many volleys in the bombardment of shock and awe spectacle that came to ultimately define mainstream ‘70s culture.

In the ‘60s, LSD and a politics of consciousness were the order of the day. By the early ‘70s, with the Beatles broken up as well as Jimi, Janis and Jim dead, Led Zeppelin’s mighty, fantastical stoner hobbit rock and Black Sabbath’s militaristic horror sludge were the order of the day, especially with American teens. America’s dominance was not only undermined by the Vietnam War. The rampant stagflation led to a feeling of impotent rage among disillusioned Americans. Who had time to drop acid and explore consciousness? Joblessness was on the rise. If you were lucky enough to work, better to drink beer and smoke a plantation’s worth of weed after you punched out. On the ride home, why engage with the Jefferson Airplane saying “Up against the wall, motherfucker” when you could just spark a doob and get lost in Led Zep’s “The Ocean.”

The ‘70s was no time to dance in the park or start a commune. That was for aging hippies. If you were under 30, you were a passive spectator. As the ‘70s wore on, even sui generis New Hollywood masterpieces like Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now needed to make room for summer blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars. Tempting though it may be to blame Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, truth is they worked in a Hollywood where studios like Paramount and Universal were engulfed by international media conglomerates like Gulf & Western and MCA respectively.

Since America was not financially secure in the ‘70s, companies were desperate to grab cash anyway they could. In a way, America itself was like The Gong Show. What will get you more cash: sucking popsicles suggestively or holding on to your dignity? In the ‘60s, the youth market usurped the adult market for the first time in history. But they held on to their precious ideals of love and consciousness expansion. Richard Hell may have been referring to nihilism when he wrote “The Blank Generation,” but for studios and record labels that were faced with an enervated youth culture drowning in malaise, they were handed a rare gift: a blank slate. In the ‘20s, mass media was not powerful enough to mold The Lost Generation. Edward Bernays’s psy-op advertising ideas were too new and the youth market was not big or important enough. But in the ‘70s there was a new lost generation that could be led anywhere, from fire breathing rock demons with paint on their faces to working-class Brooklyn youths dancing on LED dance floor lights.

Disco may have been more participatory, with the emphasis on the dancers more than the musicians. But Studio 54 arguably was the biggest spectacle of all, with photo spread after photo spread in major publications of all the major stars that rubbed elbows there:

Andy Warhol

Michael Jackson

Liz Taylor

Diana Ross

Elton John

Cheryl Tiegs

Raquel Welch

Liza Minelli

Cher

Shirley Maclaine

Sly Stallone

Olivia Newton John

Truman Capote

Rod Stewart

Mick Jagger

Stevie Wonder

Donald Trump

Tina Turner

Needless to say, this sort of branding is still all the rage nowadays. Who cares how good a New York City restaurant’s food is? What influencers eat there? That’s the question.

This, in conjunction with the Laurel Canyon soft rock aristocracy of Crosby, Stills and Nash and The Eagles, were what helped rebuild the (neo)liberal consensus of the ‘70s. If the ‘60s saw division among leftists, with Yippies and New Leftists crossing their arms and looking away from each other at the table, the ‘70s saw a reformed Democratic party appeal to aging California hippies and the gay, multi-ethnic idpol soup of the NY disco scene. For a while, the Laurel Canyon granola rockers avoided being major spectacles, but when Jerry Brown ran for governor of California in 1976, The Eagles, James Taylor and his then-girlfriend Linda Rondstadt played a fundraiser for him. Not to be outdone, presidential candidate James Carter had The Allman Brothers and The Band stump for him. Rock had now become part of the electoral spectacle. Just another battering ram in the shock and awe political campaign machine. Even gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was won over by Carter.

Just so we’re clear, this is an examination of mainstream American culture in the 1970s. There was a punk revolution underfoot in the East village in the second half of the ‘70s. But with FM radio dominated by corporate interests, punk had no chance in America. New Wave, punk’s more upper class, ironic sibling, broke through. In many ways, New Wave was the first modern youth counterculture. Unlike the cosmic, exploratory ‘60s, New Wave acts like The Talking Heads and The Cars were seeped and steeped in many layers and coats of irony. Every major subculture moving forward, from indie rock to independent film to grunge to hipster culture, would rely on this sort of smart, knowing, self-reflexive postmodern framework. Songs like The Cars’ “Let the Good Times Roll” were read as sincere party anthems by those who didn’t know better. Only rap music would have the sincere, revolutionary potential. Of course, that got swallowed up in the glitzy disco aesthetic as well.

Frankly, this legacy of bombastic, mind-numbing spectacle for youths versus ironic counterpoint would not be troubling, even in light of the recent stupid HBO Max rebrand. But now we are at a crossroads. Anyone who has even seen any headlines about media, art, entertainment or culture in the past five months has been made aware of how AI is posing an existential threat that hasn’t been as deeply felt since movies had sound a century ago. With the Internet already unstable and out of control, AI could potentially douse the flames with more fuel. As it stands now, cyberspace is an ever-eroding beach strewn with the litter of vapid influencer videos, virtue-signalling Taylor Swift fanatics, ironically redneck dirtbag left shitpost trolls, TikTok videos split screened with Family Guy clips and video games (video games also came to us from the ‘70s) and a heap of porn fueling thinner and thinner desires (porn also having first become a major industry in the ‘70s).

My Substack last week on the hope of AV geeks using AI to make their own short films like a ragtag Roger Corman film school that becomes a New Hollywood may seem to contradict my post from a month earlier on how there is no more art. It makes more sense when we realize we are at a major crossroads here. We could potentially face down the existential threat of AI and ask deep questions of who we are, what we want, etc. The short movies (or even full-length if the tech gets good enough) works we make with AI could be shown theatrically at bars to audiences or even to other fellow AI video makers, forming a potential artistic movement. But make no mistake: this decade might also end up being the bitterly logical, doomed conclusion of all those years of mind-numbing, sensationalistic onslaught. Instead of making videos we actually like and showing them to like-minded audiences and artists in IRL, they could also just be the latest offerings to the algorithmic content gods. Our entire lives could just end up being fodder for dazzling special effects spectacles, devaluing both special effects and our own lives, leaving us maxed out.