Dragons, Superheroes, and the Death & Rebirth of the Monoculture
One is a sprawling epic fantasy show in which the two protagonists don’t meet until midway through the series’ penultimate season. The other is the culmination of a 23-film story featuring dozens of primary characters. Together they will suck all the oxygen out of the pop cultural conversation for the entire Spring.
Many have written about Game of Thrones’ finale representing the nail in the coffin of the monoculture, how it’s the last massive TV show that we all watch together and dissect simultaneously. And the same can be said for Avengers: Endgame: even if Marvel’s remarkable success continues, we’ll never see such prolonged cinematic storytelling of this magnitude again: you can’t add many more characters to a film and the stakes can’t get any bigger (the death of half the universe has to be worse than the end of the whole universe, right?).
But this ignores the fact that these moments are actually bigger than anything we have seen before when viewed from an international perspective.
Game of Thrones is the biggest shared fictional event in the history of the world and Avengers: Endgame the most anticipated movie in history. These are moments that rival real world coronations or royal weddings and will make previous monoculture high points look like community theater. (Compare Thrones’ expected billion global viewers with Seinfeld’s paltry 76 million finale viewers)
In fact, the exploding global significance of Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a harbinger for what replaces the “monoculture”: dozens off cross-border sub-monocultures in which previously niche moments balloon to massive proportions when unleashed from the confines of modern nation-state geographies.
Globalized streaming content that ignores the legacy regional media ownership issues and visual meme culture eliminating language barriers and social media & messaging apps fueling an instantaneous exchange of culture around the world all make it easy for us to coalesce into masses that ignore our ethno-cultural differences in favor of pop-cultural passions.
Our purely US-centric monoculture is dead. So many Americans will never collectively anticipate and talk about something like we currently are for Game of Thrones and Endgame. But the cultural highways these properties are paving will lead to far bigger global moments and audiences.
And these highways will soon go in both directions.
You can expect that within two years, Marvel will make a Chinese-language film set in the MCU, with Chinese talent in front of and behind the camera (and Chinese investment on the balance sheet). And it will still be a big hit in the US as Marvel fans’ desire to dive into the MCU overrides any annoyance at subtitles.
The fact is there was never a monoculture. There was US pop culture. But the huge films and shows we’ve exported have outgrown us. We now not only share our cultural artifacts, but also share the conversation around those artifacts. Those conversations might be the final seawall that protects us from the current wave of nationalism and isolationism. So, it seems that a horde of ice zombies and a genocidal purple alien might save the world.
