A Reboot Stamping on a Human Face—Forever
Eventually, there will be just one story, told over and over, a thousand different ways.
Every movie, every play, every comic book, every ballad: another retelling of the omnistory. Children will look for shapes in the clouds and see only its images. Even the constellations will rearrange to illustrate it.
Or at least, that’s where I think we’re headed, sometimes, when I think about how everything is a reboot now. In 1990, less than 25% of top movies were based on existing IP. In 2020, that number was over 75%. Can 100% be far off? Willa Cather said there were only three essential human stories, but if anything, it looks like she may have overestimated.
Forget comic books and video games—now they’re adapting toys and even emoji. They crammed Marvel movies down our throats until even the most diehard fans couldn’t keep track of what’s going on, and they somehow remade Garfield even though no one watched the original. (If you remake a movie that no one saw in the first place, does it still count as a remake?) I learned recently that Mattel is planning its own “Toy Cinematic Universe.” Get ready for—and I swear these are all actual projects in development—Magic 8 Ball, Hot Wheels, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and, somehow, even Uno1.
It’s not just movies. Everywhere you look, the new is out and the old is in. Gen Z is obsessed with Friends. 73% of streams on Spotify and Apple Music are from artists’ back catalogs. Everything on Broadway that’s not by Lin-Manuel Miranda is either a revival of a Sondheim show or an adaptation of a movie that truly did not need to be a musical—Groundhog Day, Beetlejuice, Back to the Future.
Tech—traditionally the most youth-worshipping industry of them all—has calcified. The dominant companies have been mostly unchanged for decades, and the founders are getting older. When was the last time a dropout started an important company? Sam Altman is 39. Elon is 532.
Even my exes are getting back with their old boyfriends at a higher rate than ever. I can’t prove this one, of course, but trust me, it’s true. Maybe the crazier the world feels, the more we seek the safety of the familiar. Or maybe, the older we get, the more we start to think that what we had before was actually the best we could do.
Which brings me, unfortunately, to the election. The reboot people wanted even less than Garfield: it’s the first candidate rematch since 1956, and the first since the invention of modern polling where a majority of voters would replace both candidates if they could.
Even our third-party candidate is a reboot, in his own Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox way. If history rhymes, then this election is one of those overused, groan-inducing rhymes, like when someone pairs “party” and “Bacardi” for the 500th time. How we got here is inexplicable, unless you assume that Americans hate themselves and secretly crave punishment, in which case it makes perfect sense.
This summer has seen Donald Trump hit a string of lucky breaks so unlikely that I’m starting to wonder whether we’re all just NPCs in his simulation. Either that, or God is real, and he’s a Trump fan. We’re speedrunning that famous Marx quote, with history repeating itself as both tragedy and as farce at the exact same time. If he somehow manages to lose this one, he’ll be the Republican nominee in 2028, 2032, and every four years thereafter until he dies. If he dies. At this rate, he’ll probably be the first person to live forever.
And yet.
If Biden indeed drops out—an outcome prediction markets think is more likely than not as I write this, though the odds keep fluctuating—then we won’t be facing a reboot after all, but rather something weirder and more interesting. This election will finally stop being a slow-motion car crash and start being… well, probably a high-speed car crash, but that’s still way better. No matter how it ends, we’ll at least get to see something exciting happen, and at this point, I’m ready to call that a win.
And maybe, just maybe, this will be a turning point. Not against Trump, but against our bipartisan gerontocracy. Something tells me that being young and fresh-faced just became a much larger political advantage than it was a week ago. And if there was ever a moment when age limits for officeholders might start gaining momentum, this is it.
After all, even Marvel is changing their tune. They’re cutting back, they say—“Two good movies a year.” If they can break the cycle, there’s hope for the rest of us yet.
If you enjoyed this piece, please clap. 👇 💙
The Afterparty saw it coming.
Biologically, if not psychologically.