"The Cult of A24" from Vulture

The iconoclastic studio has bred superfans, dropped swag, and perfected a house style. It’s also teetering on the verge of self-parody.

(I would think that a film studio "perfecting a house style" would be well over the verge of self-parody already.)

Not too long after I complained about being over the whole A24ism thing, this nifty article is published, and since A24 is, at the very least, one of the most exciting independent film studios, which has released a number of truly great and on avaerage remarkable films at a time when corporate monoliths like Disney and Universal seem intent on eating everyone else alive, maybe they deserve their own thread for discussing their output.  And since A24 also begs a slight attraction to hipster pomposity, at its worse in insufferable ways, it probably deserves some special scatological scorn as well.

The company began routinely refusing to speak about its inner workings on the record, propagating a mystique that remains to this day. And the brand began to carry legitimate cultural capital. “Pre-A24, film culture was a guy wearing a flannel shirt with a Clint Eastwood T-shirt underneath it at the New Beverly in L.A.” Rothweiler says. Now it had become sexy. This was the era of Good Time, the cult hit that cemented the studio’s association with the downtown streetwear scene (Pete Davidson was a huge fan), and the Lower East Side opening of art-house-cinema hot spot the Metrograph, where A24 directors like Ari Aster were seen hobnobbing at the upstairs cantina.

The Ion Pack, which has built a podcast empire skewering the cinephile culture A24 represents, pinpoints this as the moment when A24-branded hats and hoodies began popping up in places like Soho House. “It’s mood-board culture,” says Curtis Everett Pawley, the other half of the duo. “A lot of ‘creatives’ love to find obvious art-film references to put on a mood board for fashion videos and album campaigns. It was this weird flattening: A24 became a bridge merging this mood-board, influencer, pop-culture Zeitgeist with art-house movies made by real directors.” You might say it was here that the A24 brand began to represent not movies but vibes — in the words of philosopher Robin James, a way to “connect status-laden people to status-laden cultural objects and practices.”

There is so much in these two paragraphs that represent nearly everything I really really hate about the 2010s, and millennial internet culture in particular.  "Pre-A24, film culture was a guy wearing a flannel shirt with a Clint Eastwood T-shirt underneath it at the New Beverly in L.A."  Don't let not knowing what the fuck you're talking about keep you from expressing your dipshit takes on anything.  (Here, "film culture" clearly must not have pre-dated 2000s LA., but, you know, that was before they were born, so....)  "Moodboards"?  "Creatives" in quotes?  People giving a shit about what Pete Davidson is watching?  "Status-laden people" with "status-laden cultural objects and practices"?  Not that there's anything generationally unique about that, except the presumption among them that there is.  Influencers have frequently been more profitable than artists in past times, but they used to hide the grift better - now they're openly championed for "showing rather than doing".  Btw, the "philospher Robin James" is actually a gender studies academic, nothing wrong with that except that I imagine that these kids have never read any philosophy written before they were born either, and if you want a truly excruciating read, I recommend clicking the link on her name for a dissertation on what a "vibe" is, with helpful insights like "A vibe is not a vibration" and "A vibe is a phenomenological horizon" and lots of other philosophically insipid dipshittery.  In short, she and these Ion podcast bros are like the distilled condensation of the worst, most precious and self-important A24isms, cooled and coagulated overnight into a pungent and slightly hairy sour cream.

(Robin James, Milennial Sartre, A24 Trope)

"A24 fandom filtered down to the digital middle classes through spaces like Letterboxd."  You see, the problem with this line is that it's supposed to reflect exactly the point at which A24 became a stereotype, and the writer doesn't recognize that this line is actually a bonafide A24 stereotypical thing to say.  It doesn't understand that the uber-stereotype of A24 is the type of noxious snobbery that would think "digital middle class" was a perfectly reasonable phrase.  It's the cool kids who are upset that normies are onto their shit, which isn't really the problem with A24, but precisely the problem with the kinds of awful fans who wear A24 hoodies while hobnobbing ("getting seen") on the Lower East Side and making Ari Aster uncomfortable with their stares and omgs.  This writer doesn't understand that he might be part of the A24 joke.

One insight comes from a guy who got laid off from one of these LES hotspots, and, yes, getting fired by the cool kids can make one a little more introspectively bitter:

He says the experience made him wonder if the internet idea of the “A24 superfan” had been fully separated from reality  ...  "Online, there’s this idea of an A24 fan as a guy wearing Salomon sneakers, a subzero-resistant shell coat, and a tiny beanie that looks like a condom. And you do see that guy walking around lower Manhattan, but how much of that is just us playing Don Quixote?”

I'll venture a guess that if and when you're more focused on a person's laundry than their artistic interests (or at least unable to discern the two things) then you might be a poseur yourself.  But that's not to throw any doubt on the phenomenon, I'm certain that this kind of A24 "uniform" exists, and that there's a lot of "superfans" (quotes I'm making with my hands) have congregated around the studio not because they care about the films so much as they care about the proximity to credible relevance, and where the apex of cultural appreciation is the carefully selected tattoo.  Shoes and tattoos are a recurring motif of cultural significance here.  Or, as the article concludes, "there’s no more powerful imperative than 'Look at my shit'."  The analogy with the most irritating facets of indie-rock culture has become complete.

But really, setting aside the admitted consistency of quality in A24's releases, looking only at the greasy eager adherents of the cult - of those who desire the cultish belonging - are they really any different than the similar modern media cults around Disney and Marvel, Twitch and TikTok, Apple and Elon?

Last edited by Jinnistan (8/25/2022 11:14 am)