Has anyone else noticed a mischievous irony crawling into our lives through pop culture? Have you noticed the startling number of dark rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, and odd shirts reminiscent of the 80s splashing across the silver screen? Have you noticed the increasing indie-ocity of popular music or the nerdy but strangely cute stars of television? It’s the invasion of the hipsters. Symbols of the hipster “subculture” have become ubiquitous in our modern fashion, music and especially television. Eat your hearts out vampires and zombies (literally)! The year of the hipster has officially dawned.
The last couple years have seen the advent of characters like Zooey Deschanel’s quirky, weird, but endearing Jess on “New Girl,” Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine and Kyle Newacheck broke, bumbling potheads in “Workaholics” and Lena Dunham’s quartet of bohemian twenty-somethings in “Girls.” With these awkwardly charming series, television is paying homage to, making fun of, or trying to make likable the trend of the hipster in American popular culture.
Popular audience opinion is not the only push these show have going for them. According to imdb.com, “New Girl” has been nominated for 14 awards and has won two, a TV Guide Favorite Actress for Deschanel and a Teen Choice Award for Choice TV Breakout Performance – Female for Hannah Simone. Even thus far in 2013, “Girls” has been taking the nation by estrogen storm, scoring two Golden Globes and an AFI Award. It also won numerous awards in 2012 and is has a multitude of nominations for the upcoming year. Comedy Central’s “Workaholics” is slowly gaining more recognition by the Young Artist Awards.
So it seems that the public and the critics agree — hipsters are now cool, and zombies and vampires drool (pun not intended). With the great critical acclaim of HBO’s “Girls” and the overwhelmingly saccharine but eccentric earnestness of Deschanel, television is successfully bringing a culture to light that would historically much prefer to stay far, far away from the mainstream. However, this creates the strange conundrum of telling audiences it’s cool to be out of the mainstream, thus turning the ideas of mainstream versus independent upside-down, begging the question: Is there any such thing as a hipster culture anymore?
But never fear, confused American public! As usual, Hollywood will not stop here! According to an article on deadline.com in September, NBC just picked up a comedy project from Jimmy Fallon in which a “decidedly un-hip anthropology student finds himself living with — and studying — the wild, untamed hipsters of Brooklyn, New York” Until its premier, we won’t know if the Untitled Hipster Project, as its fondly referred to, will actively make fun of hipsters or try to make them likable, relatable human beings, or perhaps, heaven forbid, a little of both.
As one can imagine, the unfolding of this particular trend will be a potentially hilarious caricature of the rising presence of ironic facial hair and pseudo-intellectual bulls**t and fashion or perhaps even an interesting cultural study on how “hip” our pop culture is willing to be before it rebels against itself…ironically, of course. In either case, I’m sure Hollywood can’t wait to create its first hipster vampires and zombies for its own twisted and completely UN-ironic enjoyment.