O.J. and the Eclipse of the Monoculture

When people cheered during the eclipse, was it appreciation for the celestial show, or a deeper delight in a return to the forgotten world of shared experience?

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THIS PAST WEDNESDAY, I walked into my 8:30am class at McGill and asked the students if any of them had watched the solar eclipse that had tracked across from SW to NE across North America on Monday, and of so, what they thought of it. Almost all of them had tuned in to the celestial broadcast, many had taken part in the viewing party the university had hosted on the front campus, most thought it was pretty cool. One skeptic thought it was neat enough, but there was one thing he didn’t quite understand: Why, he wanted to know, when the eclipse reached totality, did everybody cheer?

I stammered for a bit, hemming and hawing. It seemed dead obvious to me why everyone cheered the disappearance of the sun, but I had trouble putting it into words. Stalling for time, I lamely offered “well, people used to cheer on planes when they landed.” The student sort of scoffed and said “sure, but at least that’s a technical accomplishment. The eclipse was just… something that happened.”

I gave up trying to give a cogent answer and just got on with the lecture. But the question kept bugging me during class, and I was still thinking about it back at my desk when a Slack notification popped up, informing me that O.J. Simpson had died. 

A lot has been written over the past few days about the life and death of O.J. Simpson, most of it focusing not on his outstanding career as a football player, nor on his oddball second act as an actor/pitchman, but rather on the fact that he murdered his ex-wife and her friend. Or more correctly, the coverage has focused on everything that happened after the murders. 

Simpson’s trial is typically described as “the trial of the century”, which it probably was. Stretching for almost a year, from November 9 1994 to the following October, it was a preposterously over the top and irreducibly American mix of pop culture, sports, celebrity, crime, television, and racial politics – the whole moronic inferno. It was also perhaps the last great psycho-social-cultural spectacle of the pre-internet age. 

The political and cultural fallout from the trial was enormous, starting with Simpson’s shocking (to white audiences) acquittal by a jury made up of eight African-Americans, two Hispanics, one half-white half-Native American, and a single white female. While it is impossible to understand the acquittal outside the context of what was widely understood as deep racism within the LAPD, as well as the aftermath of the Rodney King riots of 1992, it  is fair to say that the failure to secure a conviction ruined the legal careers of the prosecutors — Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden both resigned after losing the case. The presiding judge, Lance Ito, was himself the target of a great deal of mockery and criticism over his obvious enjoyment of the trial’s profile and his indulgence of the media’s coverage of the trial.  

As for Simpson, he had managed to assemble a “dream team” of lawyers that included  F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, and Johnnie Cochran. All went on to some sort of fame or infamy (if they didn’t already have it): Cochran’s courtroom manner was satirized relentlessly on Seinfeld; Kardashian’s offspring gave us (Keeping Up with) The Kardashians and the whole influencer culture that followed; Dershowitz was already known as the lawyer to the stars, but has been dogged in recent years by his seedy connections to Jeffrey Epstein. And so on and on.  If Spy Magazine were still around, they would be publishing a continually-updated 8-page pull-out map showing the network of connections between the O.J. Simpson trial and the extended popular culture of the last thirty years. 

All of this has been written and talked about at great length; there is a reason why 2016 saw the release of both a mini-series and an extended documentary about the trial, such was its cultural impact. Given all this, it’s difficult to keep in mind that behind the pop culture circus of it all was the brutal killing of two innocent people, by a serial abuser who got away with it. This was a point that Norm Macdonald went to great lengths to keep reminding people about, to his own detriment and the great discomfort of his targets. 

There is one aspect of the whole Simpson affair that always amused me though, and that’s the role it played in derailing David Hasselhoff’s music career. Hasselhoff is, of course, best known to children of the eighties as the co-star (alongside the car) of the cheesy action show Knight Rider. He then became one of the biggest TV stars of the 1990s thanks to Baywatch, which ran for over a decade and which had a viewership estimated at close to a billion people. 

But Hasselhoff was also a singer, and alongside his fame as an actor was somewhat of a big deal as a pop star in Europe, especially Germany. He craved singing success in America though, which is why in the middle of June 1994 he booked himself into a pay-per-view show in Atlantic City to promote his recent album You Are Everything. It was supposed to be his big music break stateside. 

But as luck would have it, 100 million Americans ignored Hasselhoff’s concert, and instead spent a few hours that day watching television as a white Ford Bronco, with Simpson in the back seat and driven by his buddy and teammate Al Cowlings, led the LAPD and a phalanx of police and media helicopters on a long slow-speed chase down a California Interstate. Hasselhoff took it pretty well, joking later that the only people who watched him perform that night were three people, including his mom and dad. As well he should; the chase also derailed the kickoff of the USA-hosted soccer World Cup, the NBA playoffs, and the ticker tape parade for the new Stanley Cup champions, the NY Rangers.  

Amusement factor aside, there’s another interesting aspect to the Hasselhoff piece of this, which is the very idea of the star (and producer) of a show with a global reach of a billion people having to book a pay per view concert at a casino resort to juice his singing career. It is hard to conceive of a world where someone’s talents and audiences could be so siloed and isolated. Today, the multi-platform profile of the singing/acting/entrepreneur/influencer star is the standard package.

From the murders to the car chase to the trial and its aftermath, the O.J. Simpson affair was one of the last great episodes of what we’ve started to call the “monoculture.” This refers to a somewhat mythologized time during the last decades of the 20th century, when the culture was still created, programmed, and distributed by the top-down gatekeepers of mass society. This was the push-culture of broadcast media, including radio, film, cable and network television, that by its very nature gave people a limited set of cultural choices that frequently had to be consumed “linearly”, i.e. at the same time. This is the culture of Letterman, Leno, and Howard Stern, of Friends and Seinfeld, of the Oscars and the Grammys and the Olympics and the Super Bowl. 

Like all aspects of the lost age of analog, the simple recourse to nostalgia has to be tempered by a recognition that there was a lot to dislike about the era, not least of which was that it didn’t really admit of a great deal of diversity in either content or intended audience.  As a good Vox piece from a few years ago put it, the late 20th century monoculture was basically middlebrow entertainment made by and for white Americans: 

Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default.

What do we have now? Everyone agrees that the old monoculture is gone, killed by the internet, though it disappeared more recently than we might think. Even in the early years of social media, when Facebook and Twitter were young and innocent and no one had been cancelled yet, the social internet frequently served as a fun “second screen” where there would be a collective conversation going on where everyone was talking in real time about some other shared or focal part of the culture — the Oscars, or an Obama speech, or Hurricane Sandy.

That online culture is gone now, and with it, the whole idea of a monoculture. What has replaced it? Some argue that the culture we have now is completely asynchronous, fragmented, individualized, and niche, as we retreat to our rooms and our phones to binge our way through an offbeat miniseries or listen to some obscure band or, increasingly, swipe our way through an endless succession of viral TikToks or reels or stories or shorts. 

There is that for sure; I am increasingly surprised by just how much culture I consume alone, in the dark, with headphones on staring at a small glowing rectangle. But parallel to this is a monoculture of a different sort, one driven by the relentless selection pressures of the algorithms on mass streaming. This is the world of Netflix and Spotify and Amazon, but also the world of the Avengers and the MCU and Taylor Swift and Beyonce’s new “country” album. For all the choice on offer, there’s a shallow sameness to everything, a digital-algorithmic sense that whatever it is, it’s contrived and cynical, created entirely for its ability to snare your attention or clicks. We are only in the earliest days of seeing just how much AI will exacerbate and accelerate this process. 

It’s probably trite, but my sense is that people don’t miss the monoculture so much as they miss things like togetherness, and the sense of depth and meaning that comes from experiencing the universe on its own terms, not as something engineered for their attention. Something like a solar eclipse, which, as my student put it, is just something that happened. 

Why wouldn’t you cheer?

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I apologise for the long delay between newsletter dispatches. I got into a busy time at work and it took me longer than I had anticipated getting back to this. I expect to be back on a regular schedule now, posting every week or so. Meanwhile, welcome to all the new readers! Thanks for joining us; please share this with anyone you think might enjoy it. See you in the comments. ap

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