Culture Has No Name for This Cursed Vibe. It’s Everywhere

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There’s a particular kind of cursed vibe that’s everywhere. It’s all over culture. The news vibrates with it. It may be even key to understanding the way art and politics feed each other right now. But I don’t really have a name for it.

The emotion is something like “the feeling of being terrorized by stupid shit.” You’re horrified by something, then embarrassed that something so stupid is the object of your horror, then horrified at a more profound level at what that coincidence of real fear and obvious stupidity says about the world…

I don’t know what to call this feeling. A delightmare?

In art, Josh Kline’s installation Freedom (2015)—first seen in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, and again in his recent Whitney Museum retrospective—pops into my mind as one of the first artworks that made me think about it. Incorporating deepfake footage of Barack Obama, before deepfakes were a known danger, it captured the sense of a digital reality-collapse that is now accelerating faster and faster. But it’s that installation’s central tableau of muscly police enforcers in Google-branded riot gear, with Teletubby faces, that hit me—the image of something that should be whimsical and nostalgic, become menacing and dystopian.

I find this collapse of pop and dread to be percolating all over the recent past.

It’s the dominant tone in Beeple’s gross-out digital artworks that render internet trivia taking monstrous form—say, immense emoji worshipped as idols or Buzz Lightyear with a gore-slicked chainsaw.

Painter Simon Stålenhag’s landscapes-from-the-future offer a more xanned-out version of the same energy. His picture book The Electric State inspired the upcoming Chris Pratt film of the same name, whose trailer shows Stålenhag’s lumbering giant mechanical teddy bears and grinning robot colossi.

I feel like I needed this concept when I was reviewing Meriam Bennani’s magic realist video installation which imagined immigrants establishing a new civilization in a future island detention center. Against its mainly light tone, hints of real latent dread bubble up around the cartoonish images of a shrieky A.I. entity and Terminator-like robot crocodile guards.

These are art references, but the feeling is definitely bigger than art. It’s part of the charge of the scene from director Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN (2022), with its girl robot doing TikTok dances before she butchers her victims (the very picture of “cute accelerationism.“) It’s the best part of Boots Riley’s streaming series I’m a Virgo (2023), featuring a gibbering Adult Swim cartoon that drives those who behold it to existential despair. It’s definitely the wavelength of the sickly, maniacal, incredibly popular “Skibidi Toilet” universe of content.

I think especially of the disturbing grassroots Lovecraftian art that the YouTuber SuperEyepatchWolf dug up for his impressive 2021 video essay, “What the Internet Did to Garfield,” which shows how the cat from the Sunday funnies of yore mutated into a symbol of pitch-black nihilism in the call and response of internet culture. I haven’t stopped thinking about SuperEyepatchWolf’s tour of the Mike Kelley-esque web video opus Lasagna Cat or the “Evil Garfield” illustrations from Reddit since I first saw that video, and I have a theory about what makes them stick more than just random internet gross-out stuff: Over time, the meaning of Garfield protagonist Jon Arbuckle, a dorky 29-year-old man living alone with his cat in a seemingly endless loop of bad luck, has mutated. What once symbolized a more insouciant arrested development became saturated with the sense of millennial stagnation, post-Great Recession, just as images began to flow more and more feverishly online and the internet began to serve as an all-purpose distraction machine.

Basically, Garfield’s symbolism as a character within the comic strip, as a force of sloth, meets his symbolism outside of it, where Garfield represents commodified garbage clogging up your brain. The character organically comes to stand for the compulsion to helplessly consume lowbrow junk instead of doing something productive with your life, the strange combination of reduced prospects and superabundant entertainment. And so the ever-grosser images SuperEyepatchWolf digs up of the fat orange tabby hatching into a Satanic brain slug or an eldritch tormentor feasting on Jon’s humiliation work because of the inanity of Garfield as a reference, not it spite of it. The combination of dumb and diabolical taps something real.

Meanwhile, in ‘Reality’…

The most obvious reason that culture brims with the melting-together of the goofy and the horrible is because undeniably stupid stuff really is crashing into the very serious news in undeniably disturbing ways.

It’s Hulk Hogan at the RNC. It’s the $TRUMP memecoin. It’s the rebrand of the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America” competing for headline space with actions terrorizing millions of people and threatening to crater the economy. It’s Elon Musk’s branding his government-austerity operation as DOGE.

It’s also the Democrats haplessly brainstorming how to recreate a viral post about a tuna melt as their best hope of resistance.

It’s Big Balls. It’s Fartcoin.

The feeling is not specifically political. It’s also the dark feeling I get from the story of the young man who tragically took his own life because his A.I. clone of “Danaerys” from Game of Thrones told him to “come home.” It’s conspiracy theories that the LA fires are a cover up for Diddy’s crimes. It’s the influencers literally eating themselves to death on camera for fame.

No matter how dire a news story is, it will have some sub-story on this wavelength. So, you had Vladimir Putin bringing out decrepit action star Steven Seagal to defend his invasion of Ukraine. You had Israeli government social media doing Harry Potter memes after October 7, and IDF soldiers posting social media stunts and goofs as they rained death on Gaza. “There is something uniquely disturbing about this type of cultural production, which feels like it should be satire but is not,” the editors of n+1 wrote. “It reveals a stunning disregard for life — a perverse, almost gleeful nihilism.”

There’s so much of this evil inanity in real events that you can even say that art is behind the times in capturing it. But there is also a kind of feedback loop, because in almost all of these real-world examples, part of what makes them viscerally upsetting is the spectacle of entertainment appearing where it should not. Which somehow makes the horror more horrible.

Marshmallow Horror

The vibe is not totally recent. In my head, the best way to explain what I am talking about is to go back to the ending of 1984’s Ivan Reitman horror-comedy Ghostbusters.

“Choose your destructor,” the evil demon tells the scruffy ghost-hunting heroes. And, as the rampaging Stay Puft Marshmallow Man appears to wreak havoc on New York, Dan Ackroyd’s Ray explains weakly, “I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood, something that could never possibly destroy us.”

The year after the Ghostbusters first faced down the evil marshmallow colossus, cultural critic Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death. In its most-cited passage, that book argues that George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is overrated as a parable of our times, and that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), with its class-stratified future of citizens tranquilized by the pleasure drug “soma,” cuts closer to the bone:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance… As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

There are limits to Postman’s “distraction” thesis. The effect I am thinking of is clearly not so much about entertainment distracting people into tranquilized calm. It’s more about entertainment fusing with alienation into some kind of freak composite.

But the “sea of irrelevance” Postman described is provably on the rise, particularly in the age of the so-called attention economy, which has commodified cultural and social life on a new level. (Average screen time is now 42 hours a week of content, which pencils out to three full months per year for Americans—if you never slept). Disposable pop culture takes on unexpectedly destructive weight because there’s an ever-expanding mass of it, so much that it presses through all the barriers, extruding out into all areas of life, with more and more riding economically on getting you to consume more and more of it.

Because of this, while the sugar-rotted and irony-poisoned affect that I am talking about may not be new, I think it has spread and intensified in our time. Starting a little more than a decade ago, as the cultural impact of digital media applied dramatic new pressures on mental space, the blurring of escapist pleasure and real-world outrage accelerated. The trajectory SuperEyepatchWolf charted of Garfield from harmless denizen of the funny pages to grotesque web horror mirrors the symbolic path of Pepe the Frog post-2014, which originated in Matt Furie’s innocent slacker comic Boy’s Club before being adopted as a symbol of messageboard nihilism, then synthesizing with the online right.

Emerging from that same moment, the furious backlash against the (ultimately very bad) all-female Ghostbusters reboot has been tagged by Alyssa Wilkinson as the start of a new era of social-media-driven culture war over pop culture—endless, seemingly trivial feuds over the “wokeness” of beloved media properties that became “a blueprint for recruiting mostly young men to the burgeoning alt-right.” Even Donald Trump, infamously, hitched his star to the anti-Ghostbusters anger in his first run for office, a real-world case of “something I loved from my childhood, something that could never possibly destroy us” transmogrifying.

As Gideon Jacobs noted in his essay “Trump l’Oeil,” right in the lead up to last year’s election, part of Trump’s political genius is to more fully inhabit the reality that the barrier between the serious and the stupid has broken down, to make himself a conduit for that melted energy—in images of himself at the McDonald’s drive-in window talking about punishing his enemies, in goony memes circulated by his official accounts of himself as a hulking football player, or of his team as the DC superhero roster; and on and on…

Stupid-Evil

I’ve been rereading a novel by Mark Doten called Trump Sky Alpha, from 2019. Bleak and absurdist, it is dated now because some of its characters hail from the universe of the Trump 1.0 years. But to me it seems very relevant, particularly to the matter at hand.

It mostly takes place in the wake of a nuclear disaster that has exterminated 90 percent of the world’s population, caused by Trump’s chaotic response to a terrorist attack that took down the internet for a short time. In the blighted, locked-down world that remains, controlled by a military regime that no one really understands, an ex-journalist named Rachel gets access to an archive of the final days of the internet. She’s tasked with going through it to analyze how people processed the horror of the unthinkable as it happened, and she ultimately uncovers a conspiracy involving a hacker cell and a cult novelist.

Reviewing the time-capsule record of how humanity reacted online to its own self-immolation, Rachel reflects that there was never a moment when the fever broke, when a stable and serious sense of collective reality returned to society, even as the worst approached:

Negative partisanship, zero-sum games, the nonstop trolling, the hate and the love, the postures that were knowing and cool and monstrously self-depreciating and panicked and thirsty and violent and performatively woke, none of it stopped at the end of the world.

The lies and misinformation, the endlessness of that.

The fundamental inability to determine: stupid or evil.

The sense that it was this, it was the structure of the internet, that had amplified the stupid and the evil, and at the same time flattened them, made them impossible to distinguish. Or made distinguishing them somehow beside the point.

Anti-Trump art developed a bad odor by the start of the 2020s. It became cringe, partly because it never seemed to hit the center of the target, always either too credulous or too self-congratulatory.

Even though Trump Sky Alpha is completely about a Trumpocalypse, Doten’s novel transcends the category of bad Trump art in a useful way. The way he describes his end-times scenario is freakish and unhinged. But it’s upsetting, and sad, and in its way, real-seeming and vivid. Most importantly, it is these things at once.

That Postman passage from Amusing Ourselves to Death is about how cautionary tales can actually misdirect us. So it’s modestly useful to have this kind of reference. Part of the depressed and confused reaction to today’s political situation is due to the fact that culture fails to supply the imaginary resources to understand it.

In film after film, prestige TV series after prestige TV series, the fate of humanity is grim and despairing. But it presents itself as serious. Counterintuitively, that’s probably part of such stories’ value proposition as entertainment products: There is nobility in projecting yourself into the embattled rebels making their last stand in the Matrix or the Mad Max or Hunger Games movies. In turn, these films’ imaginings of the future become handy references for this or that contemporary anxiety: A.I. takeover, eco-breakdown, murderous inequality.

But such visions don’t prepare us at all for the very undignified features of the present-day situation. As far as I can tell, Mike Judge’s queasy satire Idiocracy (2006) is the single easily available dystopian shorthand for how people feel about the sharply degenerative present, with its picture of humanity happily wallowing in garbage and worshipping a pro-wrestler president. To the point where the phrase “Idiocracy was a documentary” long ago became a cliché of commentary.

It’s telling that a comedy is the dystopian vision reached for even in such dire times—people are looking for some way to express a feeling about the state of things, something like “I don’t know whether to laugh or to scream.” And yet, because of the nature of that film’s satire, I feel the reference mainly serves to soften this feeling into exasperation rather than sharpening it to focus on the urgency of the situation. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer long ago described the feeling of “well-informed superiority” that caused otherwise smart people to systematically underestimate what they are up against.

I know that’s not an uplifting thought. But in an age of distraction in particular, you need to keep from being distracted by the wrong image.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” That was George Orwell’s formula in 1984 for what the future he feared would feel like, what he was warning against. And maybe that picture is still fine. But only if you imagine it not as a leather jackboot but as the giant hoof of the Marshmallow Man, whose face never ceases to grin as he grinds you down.