Please read this piece of writing because it is, I promise, dark and edgy.Except that is a lie. It isn't dark or edgy at all. Or maybe it is. I dunno. The thing is: dark and edgy are two of the most over-used and empty adjectives in current use.
The problem lies in the fact that the taste-makers and the literati are caught up in an endless cycle of trying to outcool each other. Which is ironic, because like many other things, cool - the definition of something you cannot contrive - has become yet another contrived quality that we are shrilly and most often fraudulently told to ascribe to films, TV shows, books and music by these self-nominated cultural prophets.
Telling someone that a film/book/record/TV show is cool is the equivalent of someone at a party insisting they are crazy and hilarious. Invariably they are actually an insecure unfunny buffoon. Or someone insisting they are a people person, which is a sure fire indicator of the fact that they are tiresome and shallow with the social skills of George Costanza. In short : it's spin.
Somehow darkness and edginess has become an indicator of both cool and quality. If something isn't dark or edgy it is almost an embarassment to like it.
Years ago, when I was about 23, I wrote a novel. It wasn't a very good novel, but was my attempt to write a love story influenced by Eastern European authors whose names began with a K, like Klima and Kundera. I remember describing it to someone of my acquaintance. It was set in an unnamed European city and featured a group of characters, each of which was involved in a love story of a kind. Some were unconventional, some platonic, some passionate and some merely inevitable. Just on the basis of my description, my acquaintance declared my project boring. This was pretty impolite. I described some of the individual tales that made up the story. An old man mourning his wife of fifty years who finds new purpose in a young woman who assumes the role of the daughter he never had; a philanderer who longs to settle down and finds himself trapped into a relationship that is loveless but safe; a strange and lonely middle aged guy who falls in love with a call girl and finds redemption in his attitude towards women; an artist who seduces his patron's daughter and their defiance of his disapproval. My acquaintance made some plot suggestions. Perhaps the middle age guy could accidentally kill the whore whilst engaging in S&M, the old man could impregnate the daughter figure and then force her to have abortion, the philanderer could escape his safe, loveless relationship by framing his girilfriend for fraud and watching her go to gaol and the artists and his muse could plot to murder her father and inherit his fortune. In short, someone who had never and probably would never write a novel wanted me to re-write my novel so that it's themes reflected his obsessions - which on reflection were pretty unpleasant greed fantasies and mysogenist tosh (just as an afterthought, this was guy whom, I found out later, made his girlfriend sleep in a separate room during her periond!?).
This guy was a type. One of those people who are embarrassed and obsessed about appearing uncool. He liked his cultural artefacts edgy and dissed anything that wasn't dark and cruel. He wouldn't even consider a PG certificate film because it was clearly not adult enough and he thought American Psycho was the best book ever, whilst actually being clueless about that novel's rather unsubtle symbolism. He didn't like pop music, decrying his favourite bands the moment other people had heard of them. If he was caught liking anything mainstream, it was explained away by the fact that he was being ironic and all-knowing. He liked his rock stars dead by suicide and drugs, his books underground, his comedy offensive and his films obscure and censor-worrying.
The cult of edginess and darkness has taken over. I guess over time everything becomes more extreme. Now people are basing entire works of art on their edginess and darkness, and people have started to believe that if something lacks edginess and darkness then it simply isn't worth it.
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