Kirstie Alley and the passing of the old guard

I was mostly familiar with Kirstie Alley as the modestly cynical yet warmhearted social worker from the 1995 Olsen Twins movie It Takes Two. Upon reflection it is surprising how often I watched that movie when I was a boy—somehow we came into a copy of it on VHS and I recall practically wearing it out with repeat viewings. At the time it seemed like there was no more romantic pairing in cinematic history than Kirstie Alley and Steve Guttenberg. That, you may be surprised to learn, is not true, but you have to at least give Alley herself credit for selling a romantic attraction to a man as genially bland and unremarkable as Guttenberg himself. Dead at 71, RIP.

Kirstie Alley’s passing underscores something that has been evident for some time: We are losing, at a fairly rapid rate, the people who largely built our modern pop culture. This would not be such a notable development but for the fact that we are simply not making another culture to replace the one these people are leaving behind. Most of the notable celebrity vehicles and creative projects being made today tend to be rehashes at best, sequels at worse, and reboots at worst; if it’s none of those things it’s a garbage Marvel movie or another possessed-nun horror film starring Vera Farmiga, or just endless streaming noise, a nonstop progression of dime-store bottom-shelf streaming series and movies that mean nothing and that nobody really cares about, what Ben Affleck this month called an “assembly line” of artistic production.

This is kind of inescapable. Cloris Leachman died at the beginning of 2021, she had her hands in too many good productions to count and her working-girl actress aesthetic is more or less vanished from Hollywood these days. Norm MacDonald went a year ago; his own odd style of genius will never be replicated, in part because he was comprehensively sui generis but also because no working comedian these days really wants to be like Norm MacDonald, certainly not on any of the trash dime-a-dozen Netflix stand-up specials. We lost Ray Liotta in May; in August we learned that Robert De Niro on board to star in Wise Guys, a movie being made by the same guys who made Goodfellas (which itself was based off a book written by one of the guys making Wise Guys). Everything old is old again. Olivia Newton-John was gone in August; Grease is still a permanent mainstay in U.S. pop culture, nothing has really been made since then to supplant it, not even High School Musical, and in any event they’re releasing some stupid Pink Ladies TV series next year because that’s just what you do now. Christine McVie died just last week, and her songs have been essentially inescapable everywhere for the past five decades. Can you think of anything playing on the radio today that will be deeply embedded in the culture half a century from now? Betty White died a year ago this month; who will be Betty White in 2090? A TikTok star? One of the countless indistinguishable Zoomers making forgettable Hulu sitcoms? Kirstie Allie died yesterday and it’s really kind of impossible to imagine a network today making anything as charming, understated, talent-studded and clever as Cheers. I mean just try and imagine it!

We can go on but it would only be belaboring the point. Our culture is already in a prolonged creative drought and all signs point to it only growing worse as time goes on. It wasn’t always that way. There was a roughly fifty-year period or so when the creators and artists of our pop culture essentially built the artistic world we inhabit today; those people are now leaving us at a fairly rapid clip. That in itself is not a cosmic tragedy, of course; everyone dies, life has a 100% mortality rate. What is a tragedy is that we appear to be largely resting on the laurels of that creation rather than thinking of new ways to be creative. We’re hobbling ourselves with a world that will be duller, grayer, less interesting and less pleasant. The old order is passing away, and they’re leaving behind an artistic landscape that has itself become old and repetitive. Watch for it to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.