The Modern Flâneur
How to Live Well in the Age of Measurement
I’ve just watched the sequel of The Devil Wears Prada — quite a surprise that this is the title that brought me back to the theatre for the first time in the past 3 months.
Looking beyond the hype that social media has stormed it with, and the flamboyant fashion appeal, it turned out that ‘the film spoke with me’ more than many I’ve witnessed — perhaps more than the first one in 2006.
A little context on the film: it is basically based on a novel written by the assistant of the fashion magnate ‘Anna Wintour’ — on the ‘experience’ of what it actually feels like to work for her.
So the first film of the franchise was like a ‘worldview’ of a junior white-collar standing in the same room as the title — overwhelming, thrilling, depressing. But the second one is different. It’s less about the hardship of work, and more about the hardship of the ‘creative industry’ in the technocracy era.
From the changed media landscape — where the voice of authority and the role of shaper of society are no longer in the hands of a few establishments, but in the ‘hands’ of people through social media — to the very current disruption of an A.I. that has flipped over the creative sector like humans have never seen before.
Seriously, many of the panel ads that I’ve seen these days in Bangkok turn out to be made with ‘AI generative motion’. So if even the commerce world has already adopted this — even at the first stage of revolution — no wonder the role of the ‘creative individual’ has been called into question by the people with monetary capital: ‘are they still worth it for my capital to invest in, or not?’
And there is the problem with this phenomenon:
It just makes life ‘soulless’.
The current evidence you can witness now is ‘writing’.
While I hate to say this — because I love the power of ‘—’ (the em-dash), which allows the reader to follow the tempo I intend to create, or the hook of “It’s not… It’s…” (very sharp, used by the character Don Draper in Mad Men in his signature pitches a lot) — the modern internet writing has come to follow these patterns too much, and has made ‘all editorial’ somewhat look — and worse, feel — all the same.
There is no perspective. No ideation of the creator.
While I am far from against technology, to ‘delegate’ all of the creative output to it is the fastest way to strip the essence of ‘life’ from humanity.
This might be a little spoiler for the sequel of The Devil Wears Prada — but the conclusion of the film, where the main tension is the disruption of new money, new paradigm of power, new perspective on the creative industry, is not so different from the Renaissance period, where the Medici family did artists a favour by providing resources; or where Universal Pictures is giving everything ‘Christopher Nolan’ desires to make his newest title The Odyssey, even though it has already cost them $250 million. (For an auteur-based cinema in the 2020s, that is the boldest move a production company can make.)
The absolute truth we can all agree on is that art will never detach from monetary power.
So the question is: ‘What will happen when the people who withhold that power do not see it as worthy for them anymore?’
And I can tease you that — it will not be in the good scenery.
