The Riddle of the Pop Cult
For a while now, the nostalgia-prone have been contemplating a now-ubiquitous image by retro artist Rachid Lotf.
And it’s fitting that this image was featured in a popular post from the other day:
Image: Rachid Lotf
Because here in the online counterculture, we've been plumbing the riddle of the Pop Cult for years now. And as often happens, the answer was staring us right in the face.
Related: A Tale of Two Cults
Look at that nostalgia pastiche above. Can you spot a common thread running through many of the pictured entertainment products?
Don't get discouraged. It's subtle.
Here are some hints ...
The Zelda canon of the day established that Link was Catholic. At least according to A Link to the Past's official concept art.
Image: Nintendo
So was Robocop.
In Back to the Future, Doc Brown expressed interest in seeing Jesus' birth. Even if he got the year wrong.
Screencap: Universal Pictures
Even Ghostbusters, which is based on Dan Aykroyd's weird materialist spiritualism, paid respect to the Bible.
Screencap: Columbia Pictures
And George Lucas himself has identified the Force with God.
Lucas used the term the Force to "echo" its use by Canadian cinematographer Roman Kroitor in Arthur Lipsett's 21-87 (1963), a National Film Board production, in which Kroitor says, "Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God". Although Lucas had Kroitor's line in mind specifically, Lucas said the underlying sentiment is universal and that "similar phrases have been used extensively by many different people for the last 13,000 years"
Now ask yourself if you would find such prominent references to Christianity in Current Year Marvel and Disney corporate death phase product.
The 80s & 90s were the last IP explosion phase fueled by Christian culture. And Cultural Ground Zero is nothing more or less than the exhaustion of that fuel.
The mistake was seeing CGZ itself as the cultural crisis. Those last works of Christendom had been inviting Gen Y to look deeper for the Truth & Beauty that inspired those media. So the real crisis was Gen Y missing that invitation.
Instead of illumination, Gen Y were benighted with geekdom. Instead of entering into the true Mysteries of which their beloved pastimes were shadows, they fell into the Pop Cult.
Now, like abusive exes, the Pop Cult high priests don't want their aging supplicants anymore.
Geekdom is dead.
It's been dead for years; it just wasn't broke yet.
The media megacorps behind Pop Cult IPs have known the ship was sinking since the middle of the last decade.
They just wanted to squeeze the last few drops of milk from the cattle before bringing in your replacements and leaving you to rot.
Reality is giving you a wake up call.
The 1980s creators who still had an artistic vision to share have long since been replaced by corporatist bugmen who hold you in contempt.
But the postwar artificial bottleneck has been circumvented.
Newpub and indie film and gaming have made end runs around the old gatekeepers.
And many are drawing inspiration from the pre-1980 classics that retained healthy Christian themes.
I for one have been producing that kind of morally grounded but not preachy; action-packed but not gratuitously brutal entertainment for years.
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