Fleekonomics
I urge you not to do the math, but I was in ninth grade when 9/11 happened. Three things followed, worldwide: it clearly became infinitely difficult to be an Arabic person, let alone Muslim; American exceptionalism, a marker of merely foreign policy that has in recent times found its bayonet turned inward, began its disorganised death march; and sadness became a product you could sell to people, particularly in popular entertainment.
My generation is one that continues to import nearly all its pop culture from the United States, before making a late dash towards alternative distractions like European cinema, anything even remotely ‘classic’, and (often) anime. However — television, especially, spent my late teens telling people we were in a state of collective mourning, and we were. Dramas like Smallville, One Tree Hill and to the least extent The OC featured high schoolers destined to be with one another by quirk of personality, but whose romantic gratification was delayed (across multiple seasons) by inexplicable inner turmoil. We emerged from all that anguish as relatively clueless twenty-something year-olds, into a world that, ideologically, packaged itself as prepared to start again from scratch.
That world elected Barrack Obama, and congratulated itself for its breadth of mind. It proffered a Conservative Party, in the United Kingdom, full of fresh-faced young chaps who’d cut their teeth studying New Labour. That world gave my generation social networks, platforms upon which to begin rebuilds of self, after all that mourning.
Television gave rise to the anti-hero. The conclusion of The Sopranos helped usher in a golden age of content that starred bad men (and a few bad women), with whom we could sympathise for doing bad things; vapid ad executives, vigilante serial killers, rogue cops, bipolar intelligence operatives. The world that greeted my generation, once it was ready to adult, said, It’s totally okay to just do you — sure there will be consequences, here and there, but not all of them will be yours to bear. The wild genius of it was that it phased us all into such perfect consumers. You could be pitched things, at will, and expected to purchase them if you were at first lonely enough (post 9/11), dating a person (whenever), roping several other people into a web of social or romantic meaninglessness (post-post 9/11), and then, ultimately, investing in your own little cult of personality.
Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, in Hulu’s ‘Normal People’.
This is what’s at the heart of millennial entertainment like Normal People (Sally Rooney, and also Hulu), Exciting Times (Naoise Dolan), and HBO’s Industry: the idea that 21st Century adults are plagued by a kind of philosophical emptiness, which appears to be an endless journey that culminates in nothing much; but actually sets young people up to be either perfect consumers or efficient drivers of capitalism.
In Normal People, a pair of smart Irish kids (Marianne and Connell) flutter in and out of a years-long, occasionally destructive, will-they-won’t-they relationship where big intellectual ideas (in the end) merely function as sexual weapons. Rooney’s book has rightfully garnered praise for being super-accessible, ever so lightly canvassing its core love affair the way it does recent history, and translating into a damn good TV show of uncommon subtlety. But I was not immune to the reading experience many have had — of variously wanting to fling the book right across the room — for how it uses apathy as a place-holder for real life. At several junctures, Marianne and Connell’s love is doomed by the fact that the 21st Century adult is free to bail at any one point — and there are countless possible transactions, right in the palm of our hands, enabling us to do so. Go ahead and book that flight to nowhere. Buy that outfit if it makes you feel good. Swipe right, do it, if you’d rather hook up with someone else on Thursday.
The apologetics for this nearly universal world view are dangerously rooted in the idea that we are still nursing ourselves back to optimum mental health as a species, and even in a movement as vital as modern feminism. The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, in a wonderful collection of essays called Trick Mirror, discussed her discomfort with the idea that the draw of sexual fertility in a champion like Beyoncé can simultaneously act as a basis for withholding it from men. (Without, of course, explicitly knocking Beyoncé.) If you’re able to justify your behaviour with some scholastic argument, with an idea, you’re essentially free to do whatever you want — but you’re also likely to transition seamlessly from one form of consumerism to another.
Exciting Times, in which Ava, a self-possessed millennial, debates whether to persist in an unhealthy relationship with a banker (an Englishman) or the danger of true love with a lawyer (a Chinese woman), is refreshing because it caricatures the phenomenon constantly. Ava is endlessly self-deprecating, and thus acknowledges the hypocrisy of trying to be a socialist whilst bonking a generally unbothered bank employee. She chooses all the white privilege of being with Julian, the materialistic reward of it, over what self-discovery loving Edith threatens.
This is the perfect way to conclude the narration of a person that is categorically and tragically unable to recognize their own charm. But, like Normal People, Exciting Times is forced to make its exit from inside a vacuum. What does it all mean? Where does it leave ‘us’, and does any of it actually matter?
Myha’la Herrold in HBO’s ‘Industry’.
Which brings me to Industry, a series I’m not ashamed to call the best I saw in 2020, and that displays the callousness of the 21st Century adult in full view of the global economy that sanctions it. A collection of sassy college graduates must vie for full-time positions at Pierpoint, an awfully prestigious but also make-believe investment bank in London. Our protagonist Harper (Myha’la Herrold) is placed under the wing of Eric Tao (the utterly superb Ken Leung), Pierpoint’s sometimes vicious Managing Director of Cross-Products Sales. In the matter of a few scenes, this collection of future executives can go from partying together to each very much minding their own bacon. Waltzing in and out of love trysts, and even what intra-company alliances they’re able to forge, is in its moment lauded as good capitalism — the killer instinct necessary to secure formal employment in this knave new world, and to self-actualise.
In the first season’s fantastic finale, Pierpoint’s woman president attempts to talk Harper through an impasse that requires her to choose between reclaiming her dignity and reviving her sense of opportunity. She tells the story of the original Lehman brother, from when that felled, real-life bank used to deal in ‘dry goods’, and describes him as “an invisible man selling invisible things.” This was quite the statement, a few months ago, on how collaterised debt obligations (CDOs) caused the credit crunch. Writing it down, today, it’s also quite the summation on how capitalism collects, processes and markets our feelings right back at us.
Nothing could justify my generation’s retreat inwards more than the market crash of 2008, the state-sponsored rise of white supremacy, and even a pandemic. We just owe it to ourselves, now, to be honest about what happens next — to take some responsibility for it.
