Goosebumps: Lame stuff for a culture jam-packed with lame lameness
I just consistently have the feeling that our best storytelling days our behind us. Don’t you? I felt that way especially after seeing some of the the recently released streaming series Goosebumps. This show is based on the 1990s kid’s horror anthology series and it is, I think, so emblematic of all that is bad about pop culture these days. Full disclosure, I only watched any of it because I had a baby who wouldn’t go to sleep and I needed something sort of numbingly stupid on TV to dull my senses and let me rock from side to side more rhythmically. You get real practical after the fourth kid.
Goosebumps, which is streaming on Disney+, is the third screen adaptation of R.L. Stine’s original series of books. There was a contemporary television show in the mid-90s, then a couple of films a few years ago, and now this most recent iteration. You have to ask: Qui bono? For whom is this being done? The kids who read Goosebumps 30 years ago are now all in their mid- to late-30s and older. Why are we strip-mining a dated series of children’s books that 95% of present-day children have never heard of, much less read? What exactly is the target demographic for this longitudinal effort? How is any of this making money, three adaptations in?
Perhaps I overestimate the standards of my fellow Millennials, many of whom have no children of their own and have thus never had to truly grow beyond the trappings of the pop culture in which they themselves were reared. I mean, look, I used to read Goosebumps like crazy. I had a huge stack of them and I just devoured them relentlessly. Sometimes I’d just take them out to look at them—the covers were beautiful, just really wonderful atmospheric stuff designed by a New Jersey illustrator named Tim Jacobus. They weren’t high literature or even high young adult literature, it was all extremely formulaic and predictable, but it was solid reading for a kid just cutting his teeth on a lifetime of reading. The books were kind of promethean in their elemental simplicity, like macronutrients derived in a food lab somewhere. I loved these books! But, you know, that was decades ago. I’ve grown up. And I’m just not sure why I should want to consume an adaptation of children’s media that I last enjoyed when Bill Clinton was president.
I guess Scholastic was just hedging its bets on this one, but unfortunately they bet wrong. This is a really bad show, and it’s bad in the way pretty much every other mid- to high-level production is bad these days, particularly anything that comes out on a streaming platform. It’s just lame. It’s a crummy, low-effort stab at art, packaged under a contemptible guise of nostalgia and irony-tinged Gen-Z disaffection. It fails at every level. And as ever I just can’t help but feel that this is the pop-culture rut in which we’re stuck, perhaps permanently. I think this is it for the foreseeable future, folks. I think our artists and filmmakers only know how to do this stuff right now.
It looks like crap. Like so many film and streaming productions today, this one looks like total visual junk. The CGI is absolute garbage, just lame uncompelling “visual effects.” The show is shot in ultra-high-definition digital, so it’s all just too crisp and delineated, like everything was drawn with a beam compass or something. And yet the entire color palette of the series is this really depressing desaturated washout, as if someone stuck a straw into the raw data file of the digital film and sucked up about 55% of its vibrancy. This is so common these days. One insightful Twitter user calls this “intangible sludge,” the steady and relentless darkening and greying out of the once-vibrant palette of cinema in favor of dull, boring, depressing smudges. It’s just so stupid, and so unpleasant to watch.
You cannot connect or identify with any characters. Watch a couple episodes of this show and tell me to which characters you feel any connection. I’ll give you a hint: You can’t really identify with anyone. Like its visual palette, the range of the dramatis personae in this production is just completely flat. All of the young teenagers in the show, the principle characters, are comprehensively one-dimensional; the only way they know how to interact with each other or with their environment is through this really grating mix of scrunch-faced Gen-Z irony, deadpan disaffection, hyper-self-awareness, and meta self-referentialism. This is really a problem with so much of modern cinema these days. We’re fully in the throes now of an entire generation raised on social media, and it shows: The reigning popular ethos now is one in which you’re always being watched, always being broadcast on global mass media, and our pop culture has come to reflect this by having young characters just be insufferable, smarmy, rapid-talking wisecrackers, always attempting to pull off the appearance of broad, lightning-fast and meteoric intellect by utilizing what is in fact a small and hyper-cultivated set of personality traits. At one point, being chastised for arriving to a party at the time it was scheduled to begin, one character responds: “Punctuality isn't weird. You guys are the weird ones. I'm the normal one. Being on time is cool.” It’s a lame joke rendered ever-more-lame by its expressionless TikTok-style pretensions. At another point, as the cast prepares to venture to Seattle, a character excitedly screams out “Road trip!” and then sheepishly follows with: “Sorry, I'm trying out the whole, like, unbridled enthusiasm thing.” This show is absolutely chock-full of these insufferable hyper-conscious affectations, like everything is part of a 12-second social media short, with the result that you never, ever feel able to sympathize or associate with any characters beyond these shallow depths. Consequently, you don’t care about what happens to any of them, nor do you care what happens in the show itself.
The plot development is slapdash and inexplicable. Characters figure out huge, important concepts with lightning rapidity, and plot developments happen with stupid and astonishing speed. One character realizes his Polaroid camera is haunted after just two confusing incidents involving photographs. Another quickly figures out she can travel through time using a scrapbook, and everyone else just sort of accepts it, it’s an unremarkable plot development that nobody seems really astonished by. At one point a bunch of characters are attacked by a malevolent, sentient fog, but then one character suddenly and fortuitously figures out he can ward off the fog by beating it back with a spell book—not chanting the spells, mind you, but literally swiping at the fog with the book. The secondary villain of the series is the ghost of a teenage boy, and he killed his parents, and they’ve formed absolutely no part of the story beyond that—but all of a sudden we learn their spirits have been sort of waiting in the aforementioned scrapbook for 30 years, but then later after the boy redeems himself his ghost-parents appear on a mountaintop to quickly welcome him into the afterlife, somehow, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Virtually every important aspect of this series moves ahead by these clumsy and awkward lurches of plot, as if the writers not only didn’t know what to do but only had about 12 minutes to finish writing before the hammer came down. This, too, is a bracingly common part of modern cinema and pop culture. Creators simply seem to have lost the ability en masse to gracefully and organically move a story along. Every major development has to play out over the course of like a minute or less, after which you move on to the next lightning-fast development. You never have time to appreciate the story; indeed there’s never really any story to appreciate.
It’s indistinguishable from everything else. I cannot tell the difference between this show and 50 other programs made on streaming services over the last 10 years or so. It looks and feels the same as everything else. Every shot is like two seconds long; every character speaks in the same flat, disaffected monotone; there’s a gay character whose gayness at first seems kinda central to the plot, somehow, but then you realize they just wanted a gay character in there; the color is washed out and the digital film quality is sterile and unpleasant; it’s yet another feature built from a long-established, onetime-popular series or piece intellectual property. This is all shockingly par for the course. Everything is produced within the same narrow creative confines and it all predictably comes out looking and feeling the same way.
This is our pop culture moment now. And as I said, I grow increasingly convinced that we’re not going to get out of this, or at least that our creative culture will not improve anytime in the near future, that this is a self-reinforcing loop that is simply begetting more and more unsatisfying productions from more and more creators reared in this saccharine and useless milieu. Incredibly, by these standards, the original Goosebumps books seem Shakespearean by comparison. You could do worse than to skip this series altogether and read a few of those instead. It’ll take less time and you won’t have to sit through several hours of slop, as I did. Well, I didn’t have to, but I did it for you, of course.