Feeling listless? If only...

As the year draws to an end, so polls of the "best" albums, films, books etc. of the last twelve months appear in newspapers and magazines; as the decade draws to an end (allegedly), so polls of the "best" albums, films, books etc. of the last ten years appear in newspapers and magazines. These are disparagingly but inaccurately called "lists", presumably by those who think that election results are just meaningless itemizations of random people's names. Such critics' polls are especially common in those cultural forms where academia hold little sway, like rock and pop, or where consumer opinion is noisily heard, like film: you don't get many polls about the "best" Greek tragedies or Victorian poems. Consequently, the results are to a certain extent canon-making, in the absence of professionals thought to possess the socio-cultural capital (the authorityl) to create them. The recurring "best albums of all time" polls found in the NME, Rolling Stone, Q etc have wound up by establishing a sense that certain texts - Revolver, Astral Weeks, etc. - are of an exceptional quality regardless of how many copies they sell or what the punters may think.

Texts of the year polls, on the other hand, come too early to be worthwhile. The NME chose "Heroes" as its album of the year in 1977, a verdict surely nobody would today wish to endorse (even Bowie). On the other hand, they sum up a mood among critics, which has a certain interest in itself. The fact that in 1989 the NME plumped for De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, although four years later they chose the first Stone Roses album as the greatest of all time let alone of the year of its release, reminds me of the critical popularity at the end of the 80s of postmodernist theories of pastiche and intertextuality, and therefore the modishness of sampling. It brings back an era, regardless of whether it's "true" or not.

So what have I learned from the current glut of lists, sorry, polls?

(1) That the transformation of American and consequently world popular cinema into a form of children's entertainment continues apace, and that although some of its manifestations are cynically sterile (Transformers 2: etc etc), many of them are brilliantly original (Up, Fantastic Mr Fox. I expect that the Christmas Radio Times which will be out in a fortnight will be packed to the rafters again with "children's films". What these have replaced is not, as some drearily and disingenuously moan, towering works of film art like 2001 and Taxi Driver; instead, they have superseded earlier forms of popular entertainment. Thirty years ago the Christmas Radio Times was a litany of MGM musicals, 1930s slapstick comedies, and war movies. Some of these were brilliantly original too, but tastes change.

(2) That the rock/pop album is dead. The results of the various albums of the decade polls that I've seen have been truly pitiful. Kid A, a very good record that pales in comparison with its predecessor in Radiohead's oeuvre, as the best album of the past 3600 days? Or The Streets, the only artist in the history of rock to provide its own devastasting parody at the same time and in the same place as its music? Some ancient rocker, I forget who, once complained that critics were so lazy that, were they to review a record called "I'm Completely Crap", they would just write "You said it, mate" even if it sounded like "Good Vibrations". Bearing this in mind I don't quite know how to respond to the fact that NME chose Is This It? as the best long-player of the noughties. Is that it? (Sorry.) That slab of diet Coke Marquee Mooning? The best we can come up with? You might as well have listed the "best" music hall artists of the decade. The point is, of course, that a poll of the best downloads would yield far more impressive results, since that is now the format in which rock and pop achievement comes.

(3) That TV drama and comedy has been, across the decade, of an extraordinarily high standard. They have, I think, culturally outpaced their film equivalents. The advent of "box-setting", whereby TV shows are written and structured largely with a view to being watched at home in a self-scheduled and intensive run analagous to the reading of a novel, has vastly improved these genres, especially American drama. This is important to note, because just switching on your set every night and flicking through the channels you can get the impression (a) that TV is crap, and (b) that TV is nothing but wall to wall docusoaps, reality TV, and futile "challenges". The point is, of course (to repeat myself) that box-setting takes shows outside the economy of television: they're deprived or freed of the advertising that bankrolled them. Fantastic for the viewer, tough on the networks.

(4) Somebody writing on Wikipedia called my "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond" an "entirely pessimistic" take on 2000s culture. Since writing it in 2006, I've come to the conclusion that my negativity about the quality of contemporary culture owed too much to a backward-looking conventionality (the same that causes critics to cling to notions of "best albums"). The real achievement of the decade hasn't been the appearance of great works in established formats so much as the emergence of new formats of expression. I shouldn't therefore have been looking so much for terrific new novels, plays, films etc., as exploring the new kind of textuality that has emerged. If I were invited on to a show discussing the drift of culture in the 2000s that's what I would emphasize: the extraordinary flowering of new avenues and economies of expression, rather than sensational new instances within long-established forms.

Mea culpa? Yes, all right; but 2006 was, in digimodernist terms, a very very long time ago.

Lost and gained

I've been watching the first episodes of Lost, first screened in 2004.

Many people pointed out a while ago that Lost resembles the 1960s TV drama The Prisoner, and I think a comparison of the two is interesting. Both concern the sudden and violent arrival, against their will, of English-speaking individuals in a beautiful and sinister, exotic-looking location. One is kidnapped, the others fall from the sky in a plane crash. Where they are, they don't really know - it's a major enigma and plot driver - but it seems to combine the idyllic, the touristically delightful, and the dangerous, the menacing. Stranded and striving to survive, these people have secrets which they may or may not want to reveal; they are opaque to each other and to the viewer. The attraction of both series is the unresolved nature of their premises - who these people really are, where they are, and why, are all nebulous, such that viewers become simultaneously hooked and frustrated, eager for explanations and ready to advance their own. And so a "cult" series is created, in the sense that its fans become ravenously keen to know more about it.

And yet there are differences between the shows which suggest to me the passage of cultural time. One key variation reflects the shift from "popular culture" to a dominant "children's entertainment" paradigm which is consonant both with the fulfilment of postmodernism and its superannuation. The Prisoner was a mature man, a worker, sober, serious and inscrutable; most of the Lost cast are very young, single, non-employed, and childless adults who dress and act for the most part in order that young teenagers can identify with them. I've never been on a flight with fewer couples, kids, or over-thirties on board! They all look 23 going on 18. Moreover, they're "young" in a teenage way - as cool dudes and slackers, geeks and rebellious babes. They wear scratches from the crash like make up, like members of some hip subculture. They're lightly unattached, sexually attractive, and given to fashionably unexamined attitudes about gender and race.

Much has been lost by Lost. The geopolitical, ideological, technological and indeed political aspects of The Prisoner have been evacuated by this dash for a young teenage audience. No knowledge of or interest in the actual existing world is assumed by Lost's makers. Equally missing is any philosophical enquiry, however allusive and finally unsatisfying was the one sprinked through The Prisoner. Consequently the stories oscillate between the soapily quotidian (the backstories, the character interplay) and the mystically sinister, between the natural and the ineffable, squeezing out the middle ground, the social, on the way. It's a Prisoner for a consumerist, a post-political age, and just as it's not really "popular" (it has no desire to please the older half of the population), it's not really "cultural" either - not really significant or resonant beyond itself.

Narratologically, too, the episodes are rather shapeless compared to those of The Prisoner. The show seems predicated on its own apparent endlessness: just piling enigmas and mysteries and riddles on to each other, just ceaselessly adding puzzles and their solutions, the show is set up to go on, in principle, forever. It moves forward episode by episode, but in no very palpable direction. Most interesting new TV dramas made over the last decade grow from episode to episode and contain no internal mechanism by which they could end themselves, so that they continue until halted by a TV executive (rather than until they conclude their own business). Lost is an obvious example of this. Personally, I find it rather ridiculous, though enjoyable: it seems so nakedly arranged to be "intriguing" and "addictive", to draw its viewers along a wild goose chase-cum-treasure hunt, rather like Life on Mars and The Da Vinci Code, with no intention of ever repaying the fascination they elicit. Such stories, with their evocation of a problematic and opaque reality system, owe much to the strand of postmodernist fiction that destabilized their characters' sense of the real, from The Crying of Lot 49 to The Matrix and from Money to The Man in the High Castle. But Lost isn't interested in ideas related to the "fabrication of the real". It's like an afterecho of such fictions, rendered shallow and subjugated entirely to its prevailing endless narrative structure.