It seems to be getting a little less cool to be cool.
The rigidly laid-back evaluative framing central to the notion of cool is slowly but surely coming unglued here and there more and more, leaving a load of cool out in the cold, dying to chill, to somehow avoid being just more cultural roadkill.
Cool has been around for a long time, occasionally shoved somewhat into the background by upstart variations and offshoots – like awesome, neat, hip, bad, sweet, and bitchin’ – but is in danger of being put out of business not by any of these, whatever their coolness quotient, but rather by its own operational core.
What this means is that the stylized invulnerability, the fashionably attired dissociation, the show of savvy ease, the engaging disengagement, the contrived display of emotional immunity – that in various combinations underlie and animate cool – are now more widely recognizd as signs of dysfunction than of having it together.
How cool is that? No more cool than wanting to be cool, but with one difference: Cool itself is losing more and more of its privileged status (“If the neighbors are doing it, it can’t be cool”), and is coming undone. Unstrung. The sense that cool ever really was where it’s at is fast unraveling. Cool is losing its cool, losing its shades, suffering a long overdue exposure.
Cool is run by shame, and not just run, but driven.
Of course, cool doesn’t look like it has anything to do with shame, other than perhaps to make others feel shame when they are in the presence of someone apparently cooler than them. But cool is shame that’s run about as far as you can get from shame. If we didn’t already feel shame – which is the nastily gripping, self-shrinking sense of being seriously flawed in the eyes of a convincingly critical audience, outer or inner – we wouldn’t have so much investment in being or acting cool. There are other tracks that shame can take, as when it is converted into aggression (both self-directed and other-directed) or flat-out withdrawal, but cool looks a lot better than these.
Cool doesn’t – mustn’t – look ruffled, not because it is courageous or knows how to get centered when there’s a crisis, but because it’s pathologically attached to looking good in a in-the-know kind of way, and ruffled just doesn’t look so good. Cool does not, does not, does not want to lose face – and what is shame, but a painfully mortifying loss of face?
Cool kicked in strongly during the 1950s (getting overassociated with jazz), picked up steam in the 1960s (far out!) and 1970s, and really got rolling in the 1980s and 1990s, especially when it shacked up with postmodern thought and its self-fertilizing cleverness (and relegation of truth to a term only the ignorant used). Cool had come a long way since its early hipster/outlawish pretensions, gradually infusing the mainstream, with Simpsonesque “insider” cultural asides at the nicer end of the spectrum, and Pulp Fiction’s glamorous, ultra-hip violence at the other, and the smartly cutting, almost gleefully cynical patter of “serious” comedians like David Letterman somewhere in between, with the whiter, more fashionable shades of rap pervading it all. In an era of unprecedented collective psychic numbing, cool helped keep the numbness alive and dressed to kill.
Cool seems to be autocannibalizing itself. The less cool it is to be cool – so that it becomes cool not to be cool – the more that cool will fade. When cool really sees itself, it doesn’t see cool, but shame in I’ve-got-it-together drag. Behind its shades, cool is losing its cool. The lid is coming off, as it must. We’ve done our time with cool; the stakes are too high now to make sueh a virtue out of disengagement, regardless of its edgy fashionableness.
Perhaps cool’s biggest shortcoming is its lack of vulnerability, along with its tacit pride in such lack. Cool doesn’t wear its feelings on its face, or anywhere else. It instead simultaneously buries them and projects them onto the uncool. Getting emotional usually is a sign of failure for cool; blowing our cool is a fundamental no-no. When cool is in the presence of real love, it gets very uncomfortable, for such love could, like shame, cause it to lose face or control, which of course is very uncool.
Cool is a kind of overdressed restraint and emotional removal, a style-driven standing apart all but devoid of heart. As such, it is but the shortest of steps away from cynicism. But strip cool of its outward appearance – after all, it’s all about exteriors – and what is left? All the debris of its unexamined interiority, constellated around shame, shakiness, insecurity – that is, a trembling abundance of vulnerability.
To enter such states with openness and awakened attention requires that we let go of being cool, and start reembracing our bare humanity, our woundedness and shamed selfhood and raw beauty of being, so that these get not just a token nod or some pharmaceutical help or the latest shades, but rather a depth of healing and integration that puts us back on our feet and in our hearts, unseducible by the siren call of cool.
