Disappearing Ledger in Culture and the Re-appearing Cobain

22 to 30 year olds. Who do we have? Odds are you don't know what that even means. We used to all get behind someone (usually it was a man, but somehow he transcended such pedestrian concerns of chauvinism and its fem counterpart). A man defined the spirit of a time. I hear old flaccid intellectuals call it "Zeitgeist." There was just something about "living now" that we could refer to one person and feel justified in going to highschool (and later on shitty jobs, though the obvious hero worship subsided and we just watched re-runs of Friends).

Generation Y. What have you got? Brittany Spears? Justin Timberlake? And the various clones of clones with no original. At the same moment you may note my hostile tone you will contemporaneously not know what I refer to.

Do these people speak for you? In who you are? What your hopes, aspirations, dreams, projected impossible self-image is? Maybe they do! I'll say you're programmed. And in no less a way the previous generation's media conditioned kids to Kurt Cobain and the like. But really, who else was there?

I want to connect two arbitrary examples (If you'll allow me), make some assumptions (which I will enumerate) by comparing them viz a viz the difference between the 90's and today! (And obviously we're talking about the production of dissemination culture, here--I'll get into that later on).

Prelude: Who had the best possible claim to define GenY kids? I say J.T. Leroy. (Harmony Korrine is a good one, too. But he's not relevant to my point). Now J.T. Leroy. He turned out to be a literary invention: a forty year old (GenX age) woman figured out a way to sell. Unimportant: the writing is stellar, and she proved her point. "Only a sexy back story will sell." But it amounts to another GenX intruding--no, parasiting-- on the younger generation, which should(?) produce their own social identity. Well, we have Brittany, Justin and how many ineffectual "indie rock" idiots who mean nothing to music. We all know no one has made the impact on culture that, say, Nirvana did, when they in 9 months in 1992 happened (and everything changed before the music was commodified, which is expected). Kurt said, "All the kids will eat it up if it's packaged properly."

So. JT Leroy was another GenX joke on us. Actually, everything about GenX that was said: "being lazy, doing nothing" and movies like Wayne's World parodied these statements immediately, the best music in how long? Oh and not mention The Internet (Yahoo, Google)--all GenX. They did well, as it turns out.

But GenY (the 25 to 33 year olds) have produced nothing! (Harmony Korrine gets a lot from his dad Werner Herzog), but still, he's good. And I won't take shots at him.

Now here's my point. I want to articulate the difference between personalities and their death (the history of famous deaths. Start with James Dean if you want.)

There is a break in play between the person (college kids might say "referent" and "signifier") where the two are inverted. And this is the first time we've seen it happen in mass media culture. And it shows where we're at.

When Kurt Cobain died the image of him continues as the singular, irreducible "icon" Kurt Cobain. He is available for our consumption, still, in his records, pictures and most importantly our belief that he was a real guy.

When Heath Ledger died he was Joker. Did Heath Ledger die? Or was Joker somehow not available to make any more movies? What got everyone wasn't an "actor personality" Heath Ledger, it was his transcendence of being a mere person and laying the fact of personhood raw as becoming-Joker.

Bottom line: the image we remember is Joker, not Heath Ledger. We remember Cobain as the singular man. The image is the man himself. For Joker, it's a movie, a man may have played him, but we don't know that man. Joker didn't die. Like any Super Villain he somehow became unavailable. Acting the villain became real villainy.

The point I want to make is this: there is something about NOW where a character has equal weight as the real person. There is no difference between the character and the individual doing X (Cobain is the best example here). In fact, the "real person" disappears within the character, in the Joker performance (which amounts to "becoming Joker" in the Deleuzian sense).

What happened in culture where the simulation is seamlessly traded for the real? But maybe this isn't simulation at all. Could GenY (or maybe the only notable instance of someone doing something powerful) enacted signs of Becoming-Other (in this case "Joker"?)

But that's wrong. Joker is us. Driving the big rig truck to meet Batman, Joker says, "I like my job! I like it!" A moment that connects to all of us in our shity jobs, which locates Joker as just another guy performing a function in society, doing a job.

I could go on to argue how Batman: Dark Knight is a meditation of terrorism. But I will only say, the only potent agent of our generation is cast as the terrorist. We consume it as entertainment on one hand. The obvious political overtones are there, but we're left in a more troubling position about what to do at all. The major movie industry provides us with the iconic image of our time (Joker), who is a critique of our generation that refers to our generalized incapability to act.

Joker made a statement. And though I don't agree with his practices, like everyone, I think he's "cool" (which is a way to compartmentalize the critique he makes about us).

But I have no idea who Heath Ledger is. Cobain was a man. Ledger, a line in the credits. There is only Joker. Now what do we do?