The end of the Vietnam War produced a number of paradoxical results. Although the U.S. was seen as defeated by an Asian people’s army, what followed was nothing but the flooding of American capital into the Third World at unprecedented scales. Culturally, this capital walked into ritualistic developmentalist capitalism producing a huge consumerist boom but marked by sacrificial conservatism. Politically, the Americans systematically bypassed bourgeois political nationalisms and backed traditional forms of local power to create new kinds of populist insurgencies that is now called ‘terrorism’.
In between all this, the U.S. followed a drugs-for-guns trade-off that was the ‘unofficial’ element of the Reaganite economic boom of the 1980s. America took over the international drug trade for selling arms to insurgents across the world. At home, drugs were pumped into derelict lives inhabiting post-industrial ruins. So drastic was the decay of American cities that the 1980s saw punk rockers turned into sweet social workers. Such were the fallouts of the end of revolutionary bourgeois history through the 1970s.
Lowbrow kitsch populism
A new world was built from scratch on the derelict ruins of the past. This world was largely marked by cultural populism to match the political populism of the 1980s. The pop avant-gardism of counterculture was replaced by high-end commodity consumerism for the baby boomer middle class. More significantly, a new cultural texture became mainstream — lowbrow kitsch populism for the classes that had been marginalised by earlier histories.
The films emerging from the Spielberg stable or those of John Hughes or comedies such as the National Lampoon series would play on the charming ironies of middle-class consumerism. Joe Dante’s Gremlins or Spielberg’s ET were middle-class consumerist clutter masquerading as sci-fi. Populist cinema by contrast was grubby and grungy, catering to the lives of service sector workers/ the unemployed. James Bond’s cosmopolitan thrills gave way to the derelict testosterone of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Noir became soft-porn thrillers with muscled seducers, corrupt policemen and betraying blonde femme fatales. Porn became mainstream through video rentals, as did sex comedy and slasher horror.
Endless popcorn sequels were as indicative of the stasis in the lives of their consumers as they were of the apocalyptic breakdown of middle-class values. Indeed, 1980s’ lowbrow cinema is marked by powerfully sexual women (more often than not wielding the car like a weapon to loot capitalism) leading to masculine anxieties supplemented by guns of all shapes and sizes. The rise of feminine curves swaying to romantic muzak seemed to corrupt any masculine resolve towards civilisational patrician purity. Lines were blurred between crooked villain and policeman, neighbourhood Lothario and middle-class lover.
Video was the single greatest medium to break the base of American morals. The medium went well with the politics of populism, accessible to ordinary people at an unprecedented scale. It allowed people to act out their dreams, frustrations and nightmares in direct ways impossible earlier. It formed part of the general shift in the American economy towards the service sector and media capitalism.
Not surprisingly, in the 1980s, video shops were part of the fastest growing employment sector in the retail trade. Videos were circulated exactly like takeaway or home delivery food. But this also meant the invasion of the sacred homestead by aesthetic textures transgressive of middle-class Puritanism.
David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks caught these cultural contradictions of the 1980s in all their colourful dissonances. From its first transmission in 1990, the series caught the maelstrom of insurgent desire that video had elicited in hick-town America. Shot like a community production on local cable network, Twin Peaks managed to mash up all generic populisms — slasher and demon horror, romantic musical, corrupt police drama, vampire drug film, soft-porn betrayal drama, middle-class consumerist comedy, science fiction, you name it and it’s all there in Lynch’s magnificent TV opera.
Of consumerist escapism
At the heart of Twin Peaks lies the desire for media stardom by young American girls, brutally exterminated by an incestuous father. Around this core narrative arise serial killers, ghosts, demons, and alternate dimension realities sought to be controlled by the secret services. All of this is framed by a happy commodity culture created by televisual advertising that veils dirty communal and familial secrets. Lynch reveals the general entropy of life hitting the U.S. after de-industrialisation underneath the shine of consumerist escapism. There could be no recovery from the material dereliction that the fall of bourgeois capitalism in the 1970s entailed.
For Lynch, the new consumerist populism could cover up only some of the trauma of industrial modernity. There was a huge outside to it that would forever haunt middle-class history as a vengeful spirit. It is a cosmos that has gone dark permanently. New consumerism was being carried out by a defeated people who would first turn to greed and then to guilt about its sensory excesses.
When we encounter our times in the final breakdown of global capitalism, we find visions of a permanently entropic universe in ideas of the Anthropocene that speaks of terminal terrestrial death due to ecological degradation. Much of media today is about the occult, serial killers, corrupt surveillance states, mafia and drug cultures, and above all the twisted behaviour of a guilt-ridden middle class in the midst of unprecedented prosperity. The haunting has now taken over everything.
The author is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at JNU. When not ordering food on various apps, he is writing about cinema and art.