The First Church of Pop Culture Celebration

Two weeks ago, my FaceTube and InstaTwit feeds became clogged with everyone’s speculations about the Game of Thrones season premier. Audiences muttered, whispered, and gossiped with the same vigor previously used when discussing the Royal Baby. As it aired, friends deluged my timeline with live tweets; after it ended, others demanded a virginal, spoiler-free environment for literally days afterward, until they could watch their DVRs or on-demand thingamabobs.

People floated theories much like they do surrounding the Super Bowl, or a presidential election. Things were electric. And then… nothing. At least until nearly two weeks later, when everything I just said could be repeated perfectly, except with Avengers: Endgame.

Mass-media premiers assume the cross-cultural weight once reserved for papal visits and political events. This isn’t coincidental. As a society, we don’t share the same religion, language, or allegiance to Major League Baseball that we once had (at least in mainstream nostalgia). Our politics has become shattered. We don’t even have a unifying interpretation of national history anymore.

This leaves us only one communal experience: we consume the same media. Without the ability to click on the same premium cable TV channel, or queue up for the same cinema, we lack any unifying vision as a people. Consuming mass media has supplanted church, sports, and politics as the one thing keeping us from living like complete strangers who coincidentally occupy the same space.

In itself, I have no problem with this. Societies have always required something unitary to avoid spinning apart under the centrifugal force of selfish desires. My problem arises because these shared experiences are created by for-profit enterprises. HBO, owned by WarnerMedia, and Marvel Comics, owned by Disney, aren’t philanthropic charities building a better community. They exist to squeeze another buck from customers.

Therefore we’re unified, bound together, made a single people, by the effort to keep us passively consuming. Once-shared experiences like Christmas Eve mass, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and World War II bond drives, brought populations together around the thesis of shared sacrifice. Movies and TV gather citizens in subordination to the most extreme manifestations of capitalist excess.

And what extreme manifestations they are. The advance in communications technology, which has made it possible for shoestring entrepreneurs to start film studios and basic cable channels, has paradoxically concentrated power in the hands of corporate conglomerates. Anybody can create content; only massive industrial monoliths can create PR sufficient to get heard over the background noise.

(And I do mean massive: WarnerMedia is owned by AT&T, while Disney’s impending Fox acquisition will create a company so large, it will own around half of America’s media landscape.)

In this condition, we ordinary citizens gather under the aegis provided by empires so vast, they make Mansa Musa or Charles V look anemic and unambitious. Recent pushback against rules changes, like the FCC abandoning Net Neutrality, suggest Americans are perhaps more aware of unregulated capitalism’s hidden risks than prior generations. Yet without GoT or the MCU, wholly owned capitalist subsidiaries, we have no shared cultural experience.

Don’t mistake me. I realize many prior social unifiers have been for-profit enterprises. MLB and the NFL are mega-corporations (though they retain outdated Depression-era protections against monopoly busting). Religion arguably once bound populations together, but any reader of religious history knows self-appointed servants of God have often gotten distracted in service of Mammon.

Nevertheless, these prior enterprises had a commitment to the greater good. Football and baseball players have frequently done goodwill tours in advance of the World Series and Super Bowl. Even at its most corrupt, the church needed to occasionally endow charities and public works, if only to retain tithe-paying parishioners’ willingness to give.

Modern media titans have no such motivation. Though TV channels and movie studios nominally compete, consolidated ownership in fewer and fewer hands makes them functionally as competitive as drug cartels fighting turf wars--that is, more willing to compromise than compete. This is especially true since the 1990s, when deregulation has resulted in more “vertical integration” in the industry. That is, more monopoly ownership.

This becomes especially pointed as we witness these most recent manifestations. Like M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, and Harry Potter before them, we’re watching mass culture movements concentrating about a franchise ending.

I don’t begrudge anybody enjoying Marvel movies or Game of Thrones. With religion, civil politics, and participatory sports in retreat, we need something holding us together. But it’s important to remember that these enterprises aren’t benevolent charities bent on community. They exist to part us from our money.