Some Thoughts on the Demise of Class

What did it ever mean to be classy? I wasn’t alive until 1973, a few years into the most aesthetically ugly, unclassy decade in human history, so that question takes on a certain sharpness for me. I hate every single thing about the 1970s, truly all of it. My feelings about that have never changed, and they never will. There was no sense of refinement then, and a totally false sense of style. Plastic had begun to overtake actual substance, a dangerous move on so many levels, environmentally, culturally, materially, facially, and otherwise. That’s not to suggest that much has changed at all since then, and of course since the advent of cell phones and other devices (just another extension of plasticity), they’ve gotten exponentially worse in various other ways. The manifold densities of internal wreckage this has caused in societies globally, which people continue to try to cover up with a deranged smile (I mean, really pause to think about that for a few seconds), amounts to nothing less than an actrocity, as destructive in the long-term sense as any war, and even worse because of how unconcentrated and absolutely widespread it is. Despite the tone of this opening paragraph, this isn’t in any way a kind of negativity. It’s a critique, one that I type while hoping that the jerk sitting next to me in the first-class car on Amtrak ends up getting sucked right out of the emergency exit window next to us at some point during our journey.

Sounds kind of unclassy, right? But not when my particular worldview has been continually prompted by the pervasiveness of uncaring attitudes that have permeated every aspect of everyday life. Every person in this train car is staring at the screen of their own pointlessly expensive little device only ten minutes into our four-hour ride. Almost none of them will speak to one another, unless they’re sitting next to someone they already know. Trust me, I don’t want to be spoken to by any of them either, yet when that sort of behavior extends culture-wide, you know that you no longer have a culture. You have a prison, the type that Jeremy Bentham (and then Michel Foucault) envisioned and predicted. And thanks to individuals like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that’s the world we live in now. None of us will be escaping it anytime soon, and none of it will be getting any better either. It will only get worse. The stark truth behind all of this is a plain and rock-bottom reality about the endgame of capitalism: turn people into money and the pawns for money, and they will begin and continue to resent one another. They will no longer even see each other as people. I think that in our current era, there are very, very few exceptions to this rule. I witness it all around me throughout every single day.

I feel it most keenly, of course, in the realm of art. What can you create in the face of a cultural facelessness that’s entirely unprecedented in the scope of human creativity? The dread and depression that this fact provokes in me are of the variety that there’s no possibility of erasing personally, nor of eradicating socially. One can look back to branches of philosophy like existentialism and nihilism, certainly, but it’s hard at this point to take those guys seriously because they were living in a time when the problems hadn’t even yet been compounded nearly to the extent that they are now. I don’t know. Perhaps people always hated each other as much as they do today.

But back to how all of this affects the movies that I see, the music that I listen to, the books that I read, and the theatre that I watch. (It’s so easy to stray away from that focus.) Again, 2025 was the worst year for cinema in my 52-year lifetime, by far. The bottom line of profitability became one that we, collectively, cannot cross back over again. The redemptive qualities of cinema, and the creative forces that craft it (and I’m talking about true cinema, not trash), will exist now only in tiny, isolated groups of islands that you will have to work very, very hard to find (not that anybody else really wants to, or even cares at all anymore). And so it will all come down to individual artistic visionaries (even more than collaboration) who somehow endeavor, against every odd, to make their vision seen, as they wish it to be seen.

Yesterday I attended a pop-up film festival at the 92^nd Street Y in New York, programmed and hosted by the Turner Classic Movies channel. One of the celebrity guests was Michael Douglas, who attended to help to introduce a screening of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Douglas seemed like a gentleman, though I tuned him out fairly quickly. What can he say about his Oscar-winning performance as Gordon Gecko? That he “did the work” to understand the character and his extremely distinctive, exclusive, toweringly deaf and destructive cultural milieu. I have no interest in the film past its first 45 minutes. Once the audience’s curiosity about (and the erotic tension between) Michael Douglas’ bad yet shrewd man and Charlie Sheen’s shrewd yet naïve boy wanes and ceases to sustain the narrative, it’s just another boring tale of bad people doing cruel and inane things, and that it’s about Wall Street makes it even worse. And of course it was directed by Oliver Stone, who’s often lavishly bestowed the imprimatur of bad taste and total human stupidity upon whatever he “creates.” A man of exactly Stone’s age was sitting next to me at the screening, talking loudly to some annoying people standing beside him before the event had started. He was rattling on about how great it is to come to see movies on the big screen because “we go to the cinema to watch people with faces that are more beautiful than our own.” True and not true. He’d make a knowing harrrumph sound when a character like the ones played by Daryl Hannah or James Spader or Terence Stamp in the film shot some object of affection or competition a desirous look. What did he see, versus what I saw? Better just to leave it at that, I think.

What can Michael Douglas do in the film beyond demonstrating how consummately he understood his character Gordon Gecko and people like him? It’s a form of astronomical precision, but a precision that rather rapidly runs out of rocket fuel. The reason? Because the screenplay and all that surrounds it are built to comment (and yet never really comment) on an essentially empty theme: greed. Douglas tosses off some lines about the centrality of greed and the pointlessness of democracy. Drawing connections to our current political predicament would be unnecessary for anybody who has even a fraction of a working brain. But it was always this way. We all want things that aren’t ours, and too much of them, for our own appetite or comfort, and we all know that human impulse from early childhood. It’s exactly what brought about the demise of class, which is about understanding and fostering, continuously, the comfort and ease of others. (Of course, that’s also what manners, yet another lost human behavioral art form, were also about.)

Having a sense of class was also about having a continual interest in the mysterious habits and pleasures of others, when others were still worth having any interest in. That was one aspect that made watching Wall Street at the 92^nd Street Y particularly resonant for me. Just downstairs from us on a frigid Saturday afternoon at the end of January, when it was far too cold to be doing anything outside for very long, talented and generous adults were volunteering their time to guide children through arts and crafts projects in neatly ordered, minimalist basement rooms. After the movie, those kids were buzzing around the stairwells and the lobby, the complete antithesis of the energy that we’d just dozed through in that film. If the opposite of greed is giving, why does every form of charity remain “tastefully” hidden, when greed always remains so unabashedly unhidden? The moments of generosity, kindness, and hopefully gratitude persist, but they persist in snatches of time and in silence, because there’s too much to sell, too much money to throw away and to take and to be made, which is, in contemporary life, the baseline of human survival. It’s not a world that’s worth surviving in, and I’ll believe that, staunchly, until the day that I die. My only remaining, ongoing aspiration is to be The Gardener from Jenny Erpenbeck's brilliant and important novel Visitation, though I very much doubt that I'll ever have the patience and forbearance to achieve that level of humane and otherworldly equanimity.

Later yesterday evening, I took the subway back to midtown to watch a concert at Radio City Music Hall, singer/songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov performing his music with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. It was my first time ever seeing a show at that venue. The gorgeous and sprawling Art Deco lobby was crammed with stanchions for concertgoers to queue up and purchase WAY overpriced cocktails and (mostly) pointless merchandise made available to acquire and further support the artist. There wasn’t a single chair or bench for anybody to sit down or rest upon in that gigantic lobby before the show, during the intermission, or afterwards. First, you’re herded through the metal detectors at the front doors, so that nobody who hates the system even more than I happen to hate it myself will have much chance to shoot everybody or blow everybody up, and then you’re herded through the benchless rows of stanchions in the overtly pushy football field-sized lobby, then you're herded into your assigned seat (with some guy’s enormously entitled winter coat already propped up on it, of course), then you're herded back out onto the frigid street after the show since your money has now been securely taken. You won’t be getting any of it back, but at least you have a bunch of unnecessary photos on your cell phone, the very device that has now replaced your own memory where you used to store your photos. Every single thing about the past two hours of your life experience had just one singular money-making intention. Were you moved by the music? Did its beauty make you cry as you sat there alone in your seat? Hooray for you.

Hence, all of the bodies in everybody else’s way, the loud coughing during the show when one could just quietly clear one’s throat instead, and the undimmed cell phone screens held aloft to record songs in their entirety, which are available to purchase in the exact same arrangements on CD and vinyl out at the merch booth in the lobby for one-tenth of the ticket price. The breathtaking performance space and the lobby itself, in terms of its architecture, have clearly changed relatively little over time. The human beings inside that theatre and lobby, in terms of class, could not be more diametically different from those who peopled it nearly a century ago now. What must they have been like, in a more polite and considerate time (not to overly romanticize it) when people were desperately struggling, socioeconomically (Radio City Music Hall opened in December of 1932, during the Great Depression), without nearly the vast comforts and amenities that almost all of us today enjoy on a daily basis? Wanting to live then instead of now is the main reason why I always identify specifically as a living suicide. I haven't wanted to be alive at all for well over thirty years now, and the many reasons why, every day that I move through the world, never fail to make themselves abundanty clear from the moment I step outside of my front door.

Finally, let’s not forget the two attendees somewhere out in the middle of the audience (one female, one male...and wouldn’t you just love to know what they must have looked like??) who shouted, “WE LOVE YOU, GREG!” and “WE LOVE YOU GUYS!” right at the two most pensive moments of silence between songs as the orchestra’s conductor rallied his players to shift gears and refocus. Not only is that sort of interruptive interjection, when others in the audience just might be listening or feeling something deeper in that silence, utterly classless and totally clueless; it’s also, I’m entirely convinced, a way of intentionally ruining the experience of the concert and the sacredness of music for everyone else by rudely screaming out and monopolizing that moment for your own impolite and useless cell-phone and social media-addicted generation’s blind and unfeeling purposes. Because of who you are, and when you came of age, and what you obviously represent, nobody cares what you love, least of all the artists on stage who don’t respond to you whatsoever because they don’t care either. Art and class require deep respect and courtesy driven by silence, attention, and focus, both from the creators and from their audience, a respect that’s now trapped within an infinite eternal loop because it’s dead.

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Jason

Boston, United States

Pop culture aficionado.

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