Synthwave

There are many times in people’s lives when they are searching for something. When one begins to persistently look to the point of unhealthiness, the search becomes a type of obsession. For years, I wanted a sound, a musical sound. It’s silly looking back on those times, but I was annoyed with inching closer, almost finding what I was looking for, and not getting any further in my exploration. Many months would go by where I would only be moving laterally instead of hitting a peak of discovery. Of course, I should have either searched longer or smarter. Just after giving up the search for the sound, I finally came across the music that continually slipped through my fingers, which typed all kinds of combinations but never found the sonic treasure. The music genre in question was synthwave, a genre built on nostalgia.

Listening to synthwave draws images on a past that only exists in imagination, a nostalgia for a time where I didn’t exist. Still, I connect to the past, feeling as if I’m roaming around in a car late at night, driving aimlessly, or in the afternoon, walking along the beach with people roller skating in varicolored shorts and knee-high socks. It’s a genre reminiscent of the 70s and 80s synthesizer music but the tracks aren’t limited in any way, because there’s various kinds of synthwave. In one style, I return to childhood, covered under a slightly scratchy wool blanket, watching movies like Legend or Enemy Mine on laserdisc late at night when staying up was a huge deal. Another takes me to a mystic dystopian future of neon lights shining upon a perpetual raining city. Nothing is as calming as hearing rain and thunder miles away in these musical pieces. The rain falls on a world different from our own: flying cars, trees and soil in a dome, skyscrapers filled with the technology characters go to war over.

My “discovery” of synthwave should have happened sooner. I typed in the YouTube search box synth music, and I watched movies with synthwave as the soundtrack, but I never struck that retro gold. After listening to the movie soundtrack of The Exorcist, I randomly clicked on a song made by a synthwave artist. Even then, a eureka moment was not in store. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to this song. Only later would I retrace my steps to find the mystical tune and delve deeper into the style of the piece, leading me to love a subgenre I was not aware of, but always thought about. Synthwave dominates my thoughts; it relates to my other passions such as film and literature and takes me into reveries. It’s something I (hopefully) won’t get tired of, a healthy obsession for the retrofuturistic ages.

The Value of Mediocrity

In film conversation, I find the most popular way audiences talk about films or filmmakers is in terms of the “best” or the “worst.” The two extremes naturally gather the most attention, since it is easy to talk about film when we are at emotional peaks. Plus, we yearn for validation, and seeing if others feel the same way. We might not be able to articulate specific reasons for a film being included in our “most favorite” or “best of” lists, but we know on a basic level why it is there. These films made a positive impact that won’t be forgotten.

The same type of conversation and thought process occurs with bad films. In this case, filmgoers are just as likely, if not more so, to communicate their thoughts on the movie with friends or users on film forums. I would argue it doesn’t take as much effort for people to criticize what they don’t like than what they do like, since it can be difficult to identify how all the elements work together. But I digress, the point is that it is a simple, uncontroversial observation to say that audiences spend more time on what they perceive as the apex of cinema, and what they consider trash.

The purpose of writing this blog is to dedicate time to mediocre movies, which is a more complicated topic than at first glance. What makes a movie mediocre? Like the bad and great film, people have their own ideas, but I think the outcome is the same: mediocre movies aren’t talked about.

That isn’t the only way I’m defining a mediocre movie, because there are many reasons for why this question is a difficult one to answer. I’d prefer not to strictly define what a mediocre movie is, and that includes not defining what a great or bad movie is either. I’ll talk about what critics such as Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, and what filmmakers like Douglas Sirk and David Fincher have theorized about cinema, but my objective is to look at the numerous ways mediocre films exist. In addition, my angle won’t involve using terms like underrated, overrated, or dated, because I’m not attempting to persuade anyone why a film is secretly a masterpiece. Rather, I want to look at how regular films work, and how they fit in popular and unpopular fields of study. How does The Faculty subvert genres, and what is its representation of high school and teen culture? How does Kong: Skull Island show tribes compared to its predecessors? What is the role of westerns–the romantic The Magnificent Seven (2016) or the slow burner Bone Tomahawk (2015)– for auteur filmmakers and for audiences? It is not simply the good and the bad things a film does with its story that makes it mediocre, or average, but also the context in which the film is being analyzed in.

The driving force behind analyzing mediocre movies will be how they deviate from the norm, and how they encompass the norm. The same measurement can be used for great or bad movies to see what they succeed or fail at, but mediocre movies are assumed to be the norm, representing all that is conventional and cliché. Their averageness does not inspire conversation. They are what we don’t think about after the credits roll. Presumably, they are the unnoticed, and the simple. However, mediocre movies cover a far wider area on the quality spectrum than the great and the bad, which means they are harder to situate in a category by themselves. There are various reasons why a movie might not be championed as other films have.

There are the movies which are derivative, and movies that don’t strive to be one of the greatest. Mediocrity is probably best understood within genre: mediocre movies are the type of films that conform to a genre’s tropes, and don’t offer anything new. In terms of a filmmaker’s oeuvre, a movie can be deemed mediocre compared to the other well-respected films from the filmmaker. I believe commonly accepted mediocre movies do as many interesting things as a movie that’s constantly placed in “best of” lists. In fact, the boundaries between the bad, the mediocre, the great, the mainstream film, the art film, and others are not explicitly drawn out, or easily located.

Of course, movies are reappraised, and there are plenty of examples of movies that were not deemed worthy of analysis, but later, they received enough praise to be added into the canon of the greats. Analyzing normal movies isn’t uncommon at all, but the topics that dominate film discussion are the historically great movies, the movies that we hate, the movies that are close to us. The movies we are ambivalent and unresponsive to are necessary for the community, since the average film is a vague idea, but also the most familiar.