*NOTE: THIS POST WAS PREVIOUSLY UPLOADED TO MEDIUM.COM BACK IN JUNE 2018. I’M RE-UPLOADING IT HERE SO I CAN DELETE THAT ACCOUNT.*
By the time this is published, there has only been one film that came out this year that convinced me to see it in theaters (Isle Of Dogs). Television shows have largely been pushing me away. My favorite anime so far this year is the absurdist Pop Team Epic, and only one other series (Devilman: Crybaby) has compelled me to watch it through to the end. Gaming looks like a wasteland of boredom for me.
I’ll admit, I’m something of a serial media consumer. Most of my free time is spent watching or playing something. It’s to the point that I’m confident anyone who knows me can say it’s why I always seem so distant: I’m that guy that saw The Avengers a second time in theaters instead of going to prom. My anti-social habits nearly coincide with my need to always be watching some movie.
Yet 2018 has proven a year that holds no interest towards me, by and large. Seemingly all of the big successes so far have seemed to come from a pocket dimension that I don’t recognize as entertainment. The conversations I’d see online almost look like an alien language to me. I have seemingly completely escaped from the realm of relevance.
And, despite not always being “part of the conversation” and typically not caring whether I was or not, I feel like a complete outsider. Despite never caring about being “part of the zeitgeist” (and being known to friends as the guy that tried to be a contrarian to whatever was popular at the time), I’m missing the opportunity to even attempt to act that way. I seem to live just out of step from the rest of the world: I can see everything going on around me, but I can’t really interact with any of it meaningfully.
Thus, five paragraphs in, I get to my thesis: why my lack of new media consumption feels so important to me. Because, as many of you are no doubt thinking, none of this is really important. It’s not like we really need to see movies to survive. It’s not like you can’t survive without playing these games. They aren’t important, focus your energy on something important.
My response to that is “they’re important to me because they aren’t important.”
Honestly, just to level with you a little, I’ve never been one to be involved with what people consider important. I’m not a political person (if anything, I try to avoid any conversation or activity that’s political). I’m not a person one would call “involved with his community” (if anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbors just assume I’m a recluse). I can probably be described as “that weird guy in the corner of a party looking at his phone that wears a face that looks annoyed at the noise around him”. Stuff considered important has never really seemed all that, well, important to me. It was just another barrier keeping me from understanding other people.
Media is important to me because, well, it is my window to other people. I like stories and like being able to talk about them. I have a (currently un-updated) site to write about that. Seeing movies showed me how I can really engage with people in the world. It provided an escape from the insanity coming from dealing with my family. In the past, when I didn’t resent my family and consider them a source of annoyance, it was how we were all able to connect with each other.
And now, I’m writing this in frustration that I don’t feel compelled to be a part of it.
Part of the problem, and know that this is an opinion coming from a personal observation, is that 2018 seems to be the year of everything needing to be important. The phrase “everything is political”, a line I’ve always seen as a way to nitpick and criticize anything that doesn’t agree with their worldview, seems to have been more widely accepted now, as I can’t really try looking at anything without hearing how the piece’s politics is either important and necessary (besides fatigue with the franchise, a film released in February completely repelled me by this reaction by people) or how it’s politics are toxic and evil and people who like it are bad (one of many reasons I kind of gave up on Darling In The Franxx, although I at least want to see how it is once it’s done). Everyone I see online is trying to turn any and everything into an important statement on some facet of the world.
And I am just trying to find something fun to watch. Something that isn’t trying to say anything important and is trying to just entertaining. It feels weird that someone who has, in the past, been fond of trying to subvert tropes and clichés would now just want something that would just embrace them. My year so far has been spent trying to avoid the types of “important subversive works” I was more openly accepting of last year. After the clusterfuck 2017 was (at least for me personally), I wanted 2018 to be a simple year. And I appear to have been the only person who desired that.
Importance has grown tiring and I want no more of it. I can (futilely) hope that the second half of the year is more vapid, more entertaining, more unimportant. Because as the world keeps trying to make art important towards the world, those looking to escape the world are just pushed away, back into a world we’re trying to turn our backs on.
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