Now we are smug

FOR A while there it seemed as if the world was being taken over by the lava lamp, kitsch Sixties TV programmes, Douglas Coupland novels and Jack Nicholson's smirk. Irony was once the driving force behind much of what passed for pop culture in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Essentially lowbrow stuff given a highbrow treatment, anything was deemed cool back then, no matter how politically incorrect, as long as it came complete with inverted commas.

Irony was U2 going kitsch, calling an album Pop and filling their stage show with giant lemons. Irony was Bruce Willis camping it up in Die Hard.

Irony was Jean Paul Gaultier as a television presenter, Karen Carpenter as a sex symbol.

Irony worked because it was self-conscious. A knowing wink was all it took to reinforce the idea that We Knew That What We Were Doing Was Stupid.

Because we knew what we were doing, we weren't culpable. It wasn't us, guv!

But it's no longer enough just to be ironic, no longer cool to greet every passing trend with a knowing chuckle and dispassionate ennui.

During the Eighties we devoured late-night reruns of Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman in the original Avengers, though no amount of bowler-hatted popcorn could now entice us to see Ralph and Uma hamming it up in the film version.

Watching Michael Keaton mince about as the Caped Crusader was great fun almost 10 years ago - Tim Burton's original films were the noir flipside of the camp TV series. But did anyone enjoy George Clooney in the last Batman?

As any waiter will tell you, there's a world of difference between a know-all and a smart-arse.

Nowadays the faces peering out at us from magazine covers, television shows, advertisements and movies are not ironic, they're smug.

Faces of people who no longer care what we think, who no longer seek our approval.

Instead of Don Johnson, Mickey Rourke or Dennis Quaid's smirking, nowadays we're more likely to get a leer or a sneer from a Hollywood leading man.

Smugness has even affected people in TV. Whereas Jonathan Ross and David Letterman were ironic, Chris Evans and Jay Leno are bumptious and conceited.

When Jonathan Ross wore his designer suits back in the Eighties it was almost a homage to pastiche, but not any more.

Where once we thrilled to the giddy creations of Vivienne Westwood, these days we don't worry about contextualising what we wear. We enjoyed wearing a pair of Nikes with a ballgown, or an Armani suit with some Oxfam brogues. But now luxury is all, expense is everything. Smug is having DKNY or Versace Jeans Couture wrapped around the spare wheel on your Jeep.

Flash is back in style, fur is back in American Vogue. We can't get enough Gucci. Can't get enough Prada.

We often forget how influential Ross was in terms of mainstream British culture.

When The Last Resort, the late-night chat-show he fronted on Channel 4, hit British screens in 1986, it combined youthful, aspirational exuberance with irony, something which had hitherto been successful only in satirical reviews and the odd comedy series. The Last Resort was furiously ironic, as well as smart, sexy and a living embodiment of the "modern mainstream" a decade before Channel 5 hijacked the idea as its own.

It was so successful that Channel 4 soon commissioned other, similarly arch programmes, such as Night Network, The Word and the phenomenally successful Eurotrash, in a deliberate move away from the worthy nature of its original launch programming. But what started as irony TV soon lost its quotation marks, and an ironic bimbo sitting on an ironic sofa in an ironic TV studio was soon just a bimbo sitting on a sofa.

Similarly, when IPC launched Loaded, filling the magazine with deliberately ugly, tongue-in-cheek photographs of scantily-clad soap stars, it was contextualised to such an extent that it made perfect sense. It was funny, cute, clever, ironic. Now, putting a know- nothing blonde on the cover of a men's magazine is an established market-driven cliche. Some of these magazines have proved so successful that genuine soft-core porn titles such as Penthouse and Men Only have started marketing themselves with the same smug, devil- may-care attitude.

Sex plays a huge part in this vain gloriousness. During the Eighties, the ruling tsar of the New York art world was Jeff Koons, the American conceptualist whose work comic-book sculptures and self- portraits taken with his then-partner, the Italian sex queen Ilona Staller - was regarded by many as the highest form of ironical metaphor. Koons, we thought, was funny, cute, clever. In the Nineties he has been displaced

by Jake and Dinos Chapman, two British artists whose work largely consists of children's shop dummies covered in a variety of adult sexual organs. Their art is as smug and as self-satisfied as that of the end-of-pier comedian, all punchline and no joke.

But why have we become so smug?

Why have we became so inured to criticism, so bold in our manner?

And why do we tolerate it? It's not as if someone just came up behind us and took the inverted commas away, like the ladder in a Brian Rix farce. Is it? Are we so influenced by the media that we can't differentiate between good and bad? So bludgeoned by irony that we're no longer able to form a point of view?

Since advertising is one of the most immediate barometers of social change, one only has to look at the latest Renault Clio commercial to see the ramifications of this volte-face.

Where we were once seduced by the escapades of Nicole and her Papa, we're now bombarded with crass, in-your-face ads full of schoolboy sexual innuendo.

Size matters. To whom?

Godzilla? Mel Smith?

In Bartle Bogle Hegarty's 1995 ad for the Audi A4, an upwardly mobile gorblimey broker test-drives the car, moving from squash court to trading floor to cocktail party expounding upon the finer things in life, before finally rejecting the world's ultimate driving machine. "I've always been very competitive, s'how I got where I am," he brags. "At the end of the day you've got to look after number one to survive. It's every man for himself, right?" Three years ago this was an inspired sideswipe at BMW yuppies if the same ad were broadcast today, would as many people get the joke?

Even the members of our government have the self-satisfied look of those who have been allowed to stay up way past their bedtime, as though they can't quite believe they are still in power after almost 18 months.

Some would say that because we've evolved this particularly negative way of defining ourselves - sailing along the surface of life without ever dropping anchor - we're now definable by our very elusiveness. It's even said that being an ironist is now nearly as easy as being a nihilist.

But this is to over-intellectualise the matter. Fundamentally, the smugness we see all around us is the manifestation of an ever- widening moral and cultural vacuum combined with a rapaciousness not seen since the mid-Eighties. More prosaically: Seeing How Much We Can Get Away With.

Ironic, isn't it?

IRONY V SMUGNESS

Ironic The smirk Jack Nicholson The raised eyebrow Bruce Willis Fake fur Sally James Comme des Garons Jonathan Ross Mazda MX-5 The New Lad Boy George The Groucho Club Tim Burton Old Gucci Haircut 100 Style Culture Alan Clark Pinstripes and braces The Simpsons

Smug The leer Nick Hancock The sneer Jim Carrey Real fur Denise Van Outen Prada Chris Evans BMW Z3 The New Old Lad Julian Clary Soho House James Cameron New Gucci Boyzone Cool Britannia Peter Mandelson Pinstripes and braces South Park

Copyright 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.