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Jul 29, 2024 7 min read

Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV

Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV [4]Let's get ready
to crumble

The much-maligned 1985 boxing film provides a few hints about the causes of
21st century artistic stagnation: namely, popular artists now work in a
risk-averse creative paradigm that avoids making instantly-outmoded artworks

Sylvester Stallone’s 1985 film Rocky IV is so infamously schlocky that it’s
become a cliché to even discuss its flaws. The Cold War Russia-versus-America
plot is cartoonish, and Stallone’s direction is thoroughly over-the-top, from
the opening sequence with exploding American and Russian flag boxing gloves to
the superfluous montage sequences of pre-existing footage meant to stretch the
film to feature length. Compared to other cinematic masterpieces, Rocky IV is
not a well-made film, and no one has ever thought it to be. In his
contemporaneous review, Roger Ebert called it “a film so predictable that
viewing it is like watching one of those old sitcoms where the characters never
change and the same situations turn up again and again.”

But unlike most bad films made in 1985, Rocky IV remains fascinating nearly
forty years later. It has great value to us in 2024 as a relic — an artwork
that embodies the unique stylistic choices of a particular point in time. Rocky
IV is a time-traveling passport to 1985: the Manichaean Reaganite politics, the
sassy robot maid, the soundtrack of power ballads and cold digital synths, the
artless action-film editing and over-use of freeze-frame fade-outs, the casual
lack of verisimilitude in using Wyoming as a stand-in for the Russian
countryside. 

There can be good relics, of course. Nothing represents the artistic decisions
of 1967 better than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and until recently,
it was long canonized as the best album of all time. By comparison, almost all
of Rocky IV’s bold aesthetic choices quickly soured. Just five years later,
movies no longer looked or sounded like Rocky IV, and the end of the Cold War
calmed the American spiritual anxiety powering its ridiculous plot. “Eye of the
Tiger” became a joke. So did Carl Weathers. And in the last few decades, we’ve
seen so many [5]parodies of Eighties montage sequences that it is nearly
impossible to watch the originals as earnest filmmaking. The musical montage in
the middle of Rocky IV, where Stallone remembers clips from the previous Rocky
films, is absolutely ludicrous.

Watching Rocky IV in 2024, however, was clarifying to me in the ongoing debate
around "21st century cultural stasis." The basic argument is that culture is
less healthy because there are fewer significant aesthetic changes. This
implies a healthy ecosystem produces a large quantity of relics, as new styles
outmode old ones. Songs that are "so Eighties" imply that the Nineties rejected
all of those artistic choices. In the logic of the stasis narrative, if The
Bourne Identity doesn’t scream 2002 with the same volume as Rocky IV screams
1985, culture must be slowing down.

Of course, the 21st century produced many now-outmoded looks: “early 2000s
gel-spike-hair guy,” “2012-era pork pie hat speakeasy bartender,” “background
extra in Legally Blonde.” At the same time, 2003's “Hey Ya” and "Drop It Like
It's Hot" feel timeless rather than ludicrous. The 21st century seems to
produce fewer novel aesthetics that humiliate the previous attempt at novel
aesthetics.

Debates about the causes of 21st century cultural stasis always begin by
blaming the economy and technology: monopolistic control of the media industry,
the hollowing out of the middle class, rising health care costs, algorithmic
feeds, the proliferation of media-making tools, etc. These are certainly
legitimate factors and set the horizon for our social activity. Yet Rocky IV
makes it clear that stasis also must involve how artists think about
production. In 1985, Stallone made most choices as director that broke with
pre-Eighties filmmaking techniques, and unfortunately for him, very few of
these radical decisions became conventional in the future. He swung, and he
missed. Compare that with original Rocky director John G. Avildsen who chose to
do his film as a grainy, naturalistic underdog story. Both are products of
their times, but the original is canonical, while part four is famous as the
world's most dated film.

But Stallone was doing what a lot of 20th century artists felt was their core
responsibility: pursuing bold aesthetics. He operated from a vague avant-garde
mindset of wanting to make something that felt au courant. A major part of
cultural stasis, then, may stem from most artists refusing to embrace
contemporary aesthetic choices. In fact, I would argue that the Nineties
ushered in a paradigm of rationalized, naturalistic aesthetics anchored in the
meta-knowledge that artworks have a longer shelf life when they feel “real” and
avoid mannerist/over-indulgent faddish aesthetics.

Technology and economy do play an indirect role in this change, but there seem
to be three values guiding the anti-relic school of art:  

1. A Rejection of Radical Stylization

In many cultures, art is expected to involve mannerism. Even today older
Japanese audiences expect and enjoy “overacting." For maybe the last century,
however, Western acting has instead emphasized acting that attempts to recreate
real-life human expression.

This second approach itself is an aesthetic — not the lack of aesthetics. As
Susan Sontag wrote in her 1965 essay “On Style,” “There is no neutral,
absolutely transparent style.” Hemingway’s bare prose, for example, is its own
style. Sontag complained in her day that “Today styles do not develop slowly
and succeed each other gradually, over long periods of time which allow the
audience for art to assimilate fully the principles of repetition on which the
work of art is built; but instead succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to
give their audiences no breathing space to prepare.” And perhaps as a backlash
to this failure of new aesthetics to stick in the postmodern era, there was a
move to naturalism — an attempt to find a common universal artistic language.
This meant fewer obvious breaks with the past — and with the future.
Alternative music in the 1990s stripped down production back to basic live
instrumentation, making it sound like 1970s rock and teenage garage bands. Same
goes for fiction: Most contemporary fiction avoids the overly stylized prose of
a Woolf, a Gaddis, or a Pynchon, thereby making it seem era-less.

In clothing, the overall de-formalization of society led to a similar outcome.
Men in suits gave the suit industry a literal canvas to direct sequential
changes in silhouette, lapel sizes, and jacket lengths. This created clear
chronological differences in looks. In a world where the baseline is T-shirts
and shorts and the brands/graphics are primary over silhouettes, there is less
opportunity for subtle stylizations that mark the eras. A Supreme T-shirt in
1998 doesn't look that different than a Supreme T-shirt in 2024.

2. Rationalization of Techniques

The cultural industry has always had a core business problem of not being able
to anticipate demand for its products. The more these companies can reduce
risk, the more they can profit. One way to mitigate risk is to collect audience
data and try to create goods that better respond to human psychology. This has
produced formulas and templates that increase the odds of success. Streaming TV
episodes, for example, mostly end with small cliffhangers so that audiences
will click to watch the next one episode immediately. 

This kind of rationalization crowds out the possibility of idiosyncratic
choices that can be made by a single auteur (and then sour). Moreover most
big-budget films and albums are no longer made by a single person. Big studio
productions — especially those made with computer graphics — require massive
bureaucratic planning and technocratic decision making. Larger staff numbers
are likely to pull the work towards an “average” approach based on time-held
conventions.

3. A Deeper Respect for Pre-Existing Audience Tastes

Avant-garde art bombarded the audience with aesthetic choices that made them
uncomfortable. More naturalistic art avoids this by conforming to the
audience's conventional understanding of artistic forms. Everyone knows that a
woman singing with an acoustic guitar is "music"; aleatoric composition on a
prepared piano requires the audience to work harder.

Whether meant for market maximization or as a sign of respect for the audience,
21st century artists seem more interested in speaking their fans’ pre-existing
aesthetic languages rather than pushing them into new styles. This results in
the use of more classic artistic techniques. Simon Reynolds’ idea of [6]
“retromania” now makes sense as an audience-pleasing strategy. And the more
that things pull directly from canonized past artworks, the less they’re likely
to end up as embarassing relics. Janelle Monae’s [7]“Tightrope” today sounds
like a take on Sixties soul rather than “so 2010.”

That being said, the overuse of a particular retro sound can become associated
with a specific contemporary era. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” so resembled a
[8]Marvin Gaye song that royalties now go to his estate. But as that song
became de-canonized, it's now starting to sound “very 2013.” Same for “Uptown
Funk” being “very 2014.” Yet I’d still argue that “Blurred Lines” is much
weaker as a relic than Rocky IV, which is solely "1985."

[caomart]

The question is simply: are artists themselves choosing to reduce aesthetic
risk-taking in their art? In an era where past and present songs all exist on
the same Spotify playlist, few musical artists would want to create songs that
may be ridiculed as passé a few years later. And all artists have the
historical knowledge that helps them avoid mistakes of the past like Rocky IV.
But this result — a lack of embarrassing relics — is what makes us feel that
culture is less healthy. New genres like trap and drill feel vibrant because
they outmoded "boom bap," yet it's this vibrancy that puts them at risk of
feeling dated in the future. When artists stick with the classics, it's good
for stabilizing their careers. But if they don't push for outrageously now
sounds, we're left with the feeling of stagnation.

[9]

Published by:

[10] W. David Marx
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References:

[1] https://culture.ghost.io/
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[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrXxGf1lDd0
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Q2F6QYiD4&t=65s&ref=culture.ghost.io
[6] https://pitchfork.com/features/paper-trail/8010-paper-trail-simon-reynolds/?ref=culture.ghost.io
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc&ref=culture.ghost.io
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iStrNY_8n_U&ref=culture.ghost.io
[9] https://culture.ghost.io/culture-is-an-ecosystem-a-manifesto-towards-a-new-cultural-criticism-3/
[10] https://culture.ghost.io/author/wdavidmarx/
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