The Nineties: When Surface was Depth - Michael Bracewell

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is it possible to detect order underlying the chaos, truth underlying the charlatanry, inexorable justice underlying the false values.’

      And here was Blake Morrison, in 1999, beginning a polemical essay for the Independent on Sunday newspaper – headlined: ‘All Plugs and No Shocks: PR Driven, ‘accessible’, bland, ‘self-congratulatory’. That’s today’s art scene’ – with a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘“We can assert with some confidence,” Eliot wrote in 1948, “that our own period is one of decline [and] that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago … I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even have to anticipate a period [of] no culture.”’ Morrison adds: ‘It’s not that we’ve got no culture, but something almost as bad is infecting the patient: Blandness, capital B. Not just the quiet, inoffensive kind. No, something more shrill and happy-clappy. A relentlessly cheerful, end-of-millennium, let’s-make-everyone-feel-comfortable blanket of good taste.’

      Such doubt and pessimism about the state of culture, therefore, why It’s All Over or has never been worse, would appear to be a traditional sub-strand of culture itself – a homoeopathic dose of fatalism, to keep the arteries of progress clean. It had occurred in Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, back in 1728, and Theophile de Gautier’s Preface to his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, at the start of the nineteenth century, through nearly every cultural configuration by way of Wilde, Pound, Auden, Shaw and Orwell, to the disillusionment with the idealism of the 1960s shown by Sixties people like Christopher Booker (The Neophiliacs) and even Jonathan Green (All Dressed Up). And so when the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it is announced, one can only really think, ‘Well, no change there, then.’

      But as the shutters came down (the moss-green submarine light in the grey penthouse apartment, the pedal-dampened difficult chords, the snapped violin string) and the culture-vulturing city slickers experienced the gathering loss of sympathy between a particular generation and the times they are living in (pondering Muggeridge and Morrison perhaps), there was suddenly the nagging doubt, ‘What if they’re right?’ … That what was now required, maybe, was the exchange (to judge from the shorter history of disillusionment) of a secular for a spiritual path.

      For the 1990s seemed to be a decade of dichotomous thinking, which pointed out more sharply than usual the limits of generational sympathy. Within the culture, there were few gradations of points of view – little anxiety of oscillation between Either and Or. Beyond the increasingly important world of visual art – because visual art, in the 1990s, would become a multi-purpose emblem of modernity and regeneration, rather like London’s Docklands had been in the Eighties – the rest of us would simply become aware of subtle, or not so subtle, massaging shifts in the presentation of things … You just got the feeling that you were usually being sold something, and that, as cultural commodification appeared to be approaching critical mass, most of it simply wasn’t worth the price. ‘So much of everything!’, as Peter York has refined the moment into a four-word statement.

       Britain, TV and Art

      It was Mike Myers, the American star and creator of the spoof nerd cable TV show, Wayne’s World, who really addressed the recent British obsession with searching for expressions of its national identity in the ironic remodelling of its popular culture. For it was Myers, in an unexpected piece of comic shape-shifting, who discarded the definitively American character of Wayne – all gleaming white teeth and cap-sleeve t-shirt – for the amplified Britishness of Austin Powers: psychedelic secret agent and International Man of Mystery.

      The cinema release of Austin Powers coincided with the attempt to revive ‘Swinging London’, as an emblem of Britishness for the late 1990s, heralding the official rise of Cool Britannia. So when the fashionable alliance of New British restaurants, BritCulture and a myriad PR companies was suggesting that a return to the colourful optimism of the mid-1960s was just around the corner, Austin Powers marched round the other corner on our cinema screens, leading a parade of sequence-dancing Beefeaters and hand-springing policemen to a waiting E-type Jaguar painted in the colours of the Union Jack. ‘Hello Mrs Kensington …’ he drooled to the leather-clad agent sitting at the wheel, and the mirror held up to Britain’s latest image of itself as neo-Swinging retro-kitsch was showing a perfect reflection – New Irony and all.

      As Britain is described by cult American television, so the affectionate satire of Austin Powers can be seen to have sharpened into downright derision on some of the latest imports to British small screens. In a recent re-run of an episode of Mike Judge’s cult cartoon of teenage nihilism, Beavis and Butthead, the sniggering duo were sitting on their ripped sofa as usual, watching a video by the British band the Verve. ‘Aren’t these dudes from that country where everything sucks?’ remarked Beavis, eventually. Similarly, in the adult cartoon South Park, with its accounts of the goings-on in a small boring town in Colorado, the foul-mouthed children of South Park Elementary would sooner sit next to the red-eyed son of Satan in class, than the British kid Pip – ‘because you’re British, ass-wipe’. Pip, dressed in the cap and jacket of the boy hero of Great Expectations, accepts all abuse with a generous good humour that somehow makes him even more pathetic.

      What seems to give these American comments on Britishness their comic edge is the manner in which they identify that strand of cultural self-consciousness that has provided Britain with some of the best, as well as the worst, of its national self-expression. Since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer wed Pop to absurdism in their ground-breaking television show, ‘Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out’, in the early 1990s, the cultural fetishizing of Britishness by way of ironic nostalgia and post-modern caricature has been approaching critical mass. The inevitable response to the burn-out of irony would be the rise of the post-Prozac public confessional – the New Sincerity, aided by its sidekick of New Sincerity with street-credibility – the New Authenticity.

      An attempt at self-defence at a time of cultural insecurity, the cry of ‘Any old irony’ had been echoing around the studios of British television for some years, and would seem to have authorized a situation in which – as W. H. Auden once suggested in his poem about the perils of trying to reach Atlantis – it had become impossible to tell the true from the false in terms of articulate statements about Britishness. What had come into relief was a raised tracery of distinguishing national characteristics, from the archaic comedies of British manners acted out by Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse, to the baggy British groups with their trademark nasal whine of post-Oasis BritRock. And these are the enduring traits of Britishness that the cutting edge of American comedy has found so easy to lampoon. In addition to the targeted sarcasm of South Park and Beavis and Butthead, who could forget Frasier’s temporary obsession with a horrible English pub? Or the time that a thinly disguised Mary Poppins came to help out The Simpsons, and wound up on the sofa with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and a fag in her mouth?

      As the advertising industry has the most calculated interest in reflecting versions of Britain back to itself on television, so it has taken the trend for ironic retro-kitsch – itself an infantilist reflex of nostalgia for our pop-cultural youth – and applied it to articulations of national identity. The TV advert for Mercury ‘One 2 One’ cellular phones, is a computer-generated montage of Vic Reeves interacting with the great British comedian Terry-Thomas, in scenes from the 1960 classic, School for Scoundrels. Beyond the product message, what emerges from this advertisement is a working definition of the way in which ‘Englishness’, as a contemporary concept, is terminally stylized in order to be culturally rehabilitated from any reputation for nationalism or anti-multiculturalism.

      This notion is compounded by the latest television advertisement for Rover cars, in which suppositions of Britishness are visually punned into a new, fashionably acceptable vision of Britishness. To an immaculate early-Seventies soundtrack, sourced from vintage Roxy Music and Sparks, the Rover commercial ‘remakes and re-models’ (to borrow from the title of another early Roxy Music number) a British landscape in which the Edinburgh Tattoo becomes the tattooed arm of a young woman at a rave, and a kid munching fast food on a skateboard becomes an arch reference to Meals on Wheels. With a knowing catchphrase, ‘It’s nice to know that things haven’t changed a bit’, Rover’s

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