Belatedly, I just finished Season 1 of True Detective, a dark crime drama against a backdrop of cultism and hypocrisy/cruelty. I can’t help but notice the abundance of surrealism in this first series; and that makes me think.
Surrealism is generally thought of as an artistic style, — one I can never relate to, I might add. But if art is a creative expression of human emotion, then its popularity is a statement of social mood in aggregate. Surrealism was born in the 1920s in Paris on the heel of World War I, out of disgust with the War and with life in general. Traditional European culture and art had lost meaning to surrealist artists, who purposely produced “anti-art” or “non-art”as a way of protest.
It is important to remember at the very same time, the “Lost Generation”, — a group of accomplished American writers, artists, poets and intellectuals (Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, TS Elliot, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, et al) rejected their own country’s “establishment” to seek meaning of life in Paris. They were essentially escaping Nihilism by way of excessive partying and drinking. In the end, Hemingway committed suicide, both Fitzgerald and Picasso (yes he was pal’ing around with this group of creative Americans) died of heart failure, Gertrude Stein died of cancer and TS Elliot died of emphysema. Arguably, destructive alcoholism and excessive smoking contributed in some ways to all of those cases.
In hindsight, the Roaring Twenties was a decade of contradiction. Materialistic excess coexisted with spiritual deficiency. The decade ended with the infamous 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression in America. Surrealism was but an expression of the social mood leading up to similar events around the world. I see the same dark mood today, not just in one but many movies and TV series, as well as video games. And we all know “art imitates life”. That is to say, the dark mood in art is not conjured out of thin air but a reflection of the reality of life, — witness rising mass shootings and heinous crimes in daily news. The days of “Bambi” and “Leave it to Beaver” are a distant memory.
I mention The Fourth Turning a lot in my other articles. The typical length of a complete four turning cycle is 80 years. Our current one is longer than that. If the current stock market bubble bursts in 2029, it will make for an exact 100 year cycle. But then there is no guarantee of round numbers. And dire financial and economic over-stretch (mentioned in my other articles) can’t wait that long.
All this is not bad news. The night is the darkest before dawn, and spring invariably follows winter. There will be a new era of “Bambi” and “Leave it to Beaver”, when the pendulum swings from one extreme toward the other. This too, shall pass. You just need to be prepared to survive the passing.
