Transcript: Our 2024 cultural predictions — short movies, glitter chaos, cabbage

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Our 2024 cultural predictions — short movies, glitter chaos, cabbage’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. We have an annual tradition here, which is that every December we collect your predictions for the following year. And then my colleague, Matt Vella, the editor of the FT Weekend Magazine, comes in and we talk through them and we make predictions of our own. And this year, year of 2023 is no different. We asked for your predictions. They flooded in on Instagram. And I have the great Matt Vella with me now from London. Hi, Matt. Welcome.

Matt Vella
Hey, Lilah. Thanks for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks for being here. As you know, we asked listeners two questions. We asked them, one, what do you think will happen next year in culture? Or two, what do you want to happen next year in culture? And we got a ton of really good ones.

Matt Vella
That’s great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. But first, I wanted to ask you to maybe humor me in taking stock of this year. Like, how are you feeling? It was a tough news year. But what about in culture? What are you thinking? Is there anything that surprised you?

Matt Vella
Oh, that is a good question. Maybe the better question is, like, is there anything that didn’t surprise you? Because we’ve sort of been living in that, like, jump-scare world for a while now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Is there anything that didn’t surprise you? I can tell you mine.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I guess what didn’t surprise me is something that we predicted in last year’s episode, which is that Twitter, as it was, would die.

Matt Vella
Aah OK.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You predicted the revival of Tumblr, which didn’t happen. But what did surprise me is that, like, we didn’t really know what to do with that. Like, I felt like this year and the internet felt pretty fractured. I didn’t love Twitter. I didn’t love, like the public shaming element of it. But I did sort of appreciate that it was a place where people could, like, talk in public and everybody could read the same article or everybody could laugh about the same thing. I didn’t really feel like there was a place for that in 2023. I felt like, you know, like we moved into the DMs completely, chats completely.

Matt Vella
Yeah, it hasn’t died like it’s been shut down. But what it was is definitely gone. And I guess the thing that surprised me most is to see how many public people, public figures, public, like, celebrities could go full goblin mode and how fast that pipeline goes now, like, you know . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
What do you mean?

Matt Vella
How long did it take Kanye to go from like, you know, genius to whatever he is now? Let’s put it that way.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it took some years.

Matt Vella
But like Elon Musk, for example, like his whole pipeline to goblin mode just sort of happened. And I feel like that happened to a lot of public people this year and it was kind of a surprise.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, shall we go to the voice messages?

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so the first one sets a sort of tone for the predictions that we got. It is from Solana in Berlin.

Solana
I think 2024 will be loud. We’re continuing to leave the pandemic behind. And there are wars either happening or in danger of breaking out all over the world. And there are big elections coming up in several countries and the global temperature is rising. And there’s just this palpable sense that any damn thing could happen next. And I just think whether it’s people looking to get out and play or get out and protest, shit’s gonna get loud, maybe primal scream therapy will even make a comeback. Life will just be happening at full volume, for better and/or for worse.

Matt Vella
(Laughter) Did primal scream therapy go anywhere?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I don’t know. I could use it.

Matt Vella
But I really like this. Did you? What did you think of this?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I liked it too. I just thought it was, like, very different from previous years. Like in last year, I don’t know if you remember, but at least two years ago, listeners wanted flip phones. They wanted to move to the Romanian countryside to milk cows and again, to get a milkman. And I think people just, a lot of the responses were people just wanting to, like, get out there. One person Sophia Oswald in Munich said that old-school techno music will make a comeback and people will start dancing in the middle of the day, like take a lunch break and go dance and then go back to work. So whether it’s like bad because there’s so much going on and people are just like anxious and exhausted about it, they don’t want to like, go in and worry about it. They want to like, go out and forget about it.

Matt Vella
Right. I like this because you could read it in a bunch of different ways. Like loud could mean in a ‘90s retro way, you know, neon colours, squiggly lines on top of everything, or to just be literally loud. But I definitely like the idea that the sort of mumblecore era’s permanently gone. But then I just wondered like, should we coin what comes next or attempt to, I mean, kind of predict like shout corn, scream core.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, primal scream core.

Matt Vella
Primal scream core. All right, cool. We’ll see if we can hashtag that up and get it trending.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I don’t know. Like laaah! core.

Matt Vella
Laah core? Yeah. OK. All right.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Let’s go to the next one. The next one is from Calliope Cromarty from York.

Calliope Cromarty
Hi, Lilah. I’m a huge fan of the podcast, and my prediction for 2024 is that cabbage will be front and centre — pickled, roasted, steamed, raw, cooked, you name it. I love cabbage. It has been rising in popularity for quite some time now, and so I think it will rule 2024.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) OK, this one’s one of my favourites.

Matt Vella
Cabbage is so hot right now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cabbage is hot right now. Yeah. Cabbage, like the least sexy of all of the vegetables, really the like, number one depression vegetable, also like the thing that people ate in the Middle Ages because it’s all there was, will be back.

Matt Vella
You know cabbage in a civilisation is still around kind of way, 50/50. Cabbage in a post-society scenario 100 per cent therefore.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, what do you mean?

Matt Vella
Well, I mean in a sort of struggle to survive, like a natural state of man kind of situation, cabbage has a lot of advantages. You know, high source of fibre.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it’s true. Cabbage is like the cockroach.

Matt Vella
Right, yeah, exactly. Have you seen more cabbage on menus and stuff? I don’t feel like . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, I’m actually, I’m on a personal cabbage tear only because I’m making a lot of stuffed cabbage, dolma, recently. But it’s been funny because we got a lot of food-related ones. We got a lot of people saying they want more pie in 2024. Someone said they want more hard cheese served in chunks. A lot of people wrote in about mocktails, like more mocktails. But I kind of feel like 2023 was the year of mocktails. They’re already, at least in New York, on every menu. And then the thing that felt related to me about cabbage is that I have an old neighbour who wrote in, Rebecca Anders. She wrote in wondering like, what’s going on with vegan food? You know, there was an uptake, at least in New York, on like bad-for-you comfort vegan food. It was just like, kind of like messy. It was vegan, but it was like messy and hearty and delicious. I feel like maybe if I was to make a prediction about vegetables, it would be that we swing back to the purity of the vegetable as it is, you know, like slow-roasted carrot for 14 years.

Matt Vella
I don’t know. I have to disagree with you. I kind of feel like we’re gonna swing back towards, you know, preservatives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Meat?

Matt Vella
No. Well, just, canned food, you know. We did a big story in the magazine about microplastics, this really serious issue that, you know, is starting to get more attention. But the scientist in that, her big discovery is that, you know, she thinks microplastics are having an effect on human reproduction and fertility. And the measure of this is the size of the taint, you know, that part of the body. And it’s you know, you read about it and you’re like, oh, my God, we’ve got so much plastic out there. What are we doing to our species? Da da da da da. But then on the other hand, part of me is like, you know, Tupperware? Pretty good. And if the cost is my great great grandchildren have a slightly smaller, you know, area toot, it’s kind of worth it. I think a lot of people are going to swing that like, toot, it’s kind of worth it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, there’s a little bit of a like, fuck it attitude to 2024.

Matt Vella
Yeah, exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Forgive my language.

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OK, why don’t we do the next one? This is from Amanda Schauffele from London.

Amanda Schauffele
My prediction for 2024 is following on the coastal grandma aesthetic of 2022 and the eclectic grandpa aesthetic of 2023, that 2024 will be the year of the disco auntie aesthetic. So metallic turquoise eyeliner, excessive prints, bold bangles, feathers and sequins for days.

Matt Vella
What do you think about this? I didn’t realise coastal grandma aesthetic was a thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The coastal grandma aesthetic is like Diane Keaton in like, any movie with Diane Keaton, kinda walking on the beach . . .

Matt Vella
Oh, white turtlenecks . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wearing white turtlenecks. Exactly. And like, linen pants. So that’s gone. And instead, we’re wearing feathers and disco balls. We had Elif Ince, journalist from Istanbul wrote, and she said she’s done with the no-make-up make-up clean girl aesthetic look. So actually, she just wants to put on dramatic, expressive, artsy, colourful make-up. So there were a lot of things like this, like there’s gonna be this surge in whimsy, in clothing.

Matt Vella
I mean, that would be great. I feel like sweatpants have a stranglehold on us in a way that we’re not really ready to admit as a society. But I don’t know. What do you think?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Whimsy I can get behind. Like I can go hard. I can wear a fluffy cow print hat. I saw a lot of them at the Beyoncé concert this year.

Matt Vella
Really? Is that a Beyoncé thing?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Maybe . . . The Beyoncé Renaissance tour was full of chaos and glitz. Everybody looked amazing. Everybody kind of like glistened when they moved. Everybody like, made sounds when they moved, they were, it was a human disco ball aesthetic.

Matt Vella
I don’t know why I’m so desperate to like, coin a term here, but glitter chaos is definitely, if it’s not already a thing, it’s a thing I would like whether it’s a fashion trend or a make-up trend or, you know, political trend or who knows, I think I’d be down for that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. I like that too. I think we’re moving on from primal scream core into something that feels more right to me.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, Why don’t we move to movies and films? I want to do one from our colleague, the wonderful Emma Jacobs. Her prediction sounds specific, but I think it’s, there’s a lot to talk about.

Emma Jacobs
I would like to have more 90-minute films next year because there’s something so perfect about being able to, without sounding like a philistine, being able to go to the cinema, enjoy a film and then chat about it afterwards rather than drag yourself away and go home to bed. Some of the best films I saw this year were 90 minutes — Past Lives and Rye Lane — and I can’t face going to see a Scorsese film at three and a half hours.

Matt Vella
I don’t want to disagree with the brilliant Emma Jacobs. But what about the exact opposite? So like a Charlie Kaufman film about the last guy going to the movie theatres and he has to watch a movie that will last the rest of his natural life. That, maybe?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that sounds good.

Matt Vella
But no, in all seriousness, yeah, movies are way too long. It’s just ridiculous. I mean, I don’t know. What do you think?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I kind of agree. You know, we’ve been doing these culture chats on Friday now on the show, and in a lot of them, we find ourselves asking this question: could this multi-part TV show have been a movie or like, could this movie have been shorter? It feels like there’s a lot of bloating.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And even in television, like we’re remaking Frasier because we think that’s what people want and because it’s safe and we know there’s an audience who likes it. But actually people just want to watch the old Frasier. It feels like what we want is like shorter, one-off news stories, hour-and-a-half long movies without, like a callback or a remake. But then that’s kind of the opposite of what production companies want to invest in.

Matt Vella
Yeah, I mean, one of these nerd things that I’m fascinated by is how different business models and technology changes affect the way we tell stories over time. You know, like the big question about why did we go from three-act structure to five-act structure during the Victorian era? And, you know, people say, and I don’t know whether this is the case or not, because I’m not that much of a nerd about it. But well, actually the five-act thing is the time it takes for the candles to need to be replaced. You know, some people say it’s the human bladder kind of related thing or, you know, the way that you structure network television so that you had stingers right before the commercial break, which of course, now . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
You don’t need.

Matt Vella
That’s going away. Now we have the streamers who just ghoulishly want you to just never shut them off and never close your eyes. And so we have gotten this explosion of long content, which it’s probably a combination of things, but it is too much. The BBC has done this right all along. Like you have seven episodes and two seasons and then done. And I don’t know. I guess the economics tilt away from that on the streaming platforms, but I’d be for that for sure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other thing that I want, actually, and now that I think about it, is what our colleague Eric Platt wrote in and he said, first he said he wanted the crop top to go mainstream for men as well. (Laughter) But really what he wanted was like a very meaty romcom that had character development and beautiful writing and like not another Amazon Prime movie sponsored by Tiffany’s and is bad. Like, he wanted a story. He wanted romance, he wanted a twist. He wanted good romcoms back. And I agree.

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OK, Matt, so we’ve talked about so much, we predicted and hoped for so much. But I’m curious, like, maybe we can spend the last couple of minutes just reflecting on what kind of year we had. I was thinking about you, something that you said last year, Matt, which sort of rang in my head all of this year, which is, White Lotus was very popular and the intro theme song that was like (imitating tune), you said, you sort of said that that song that like, the sort of horribleness and the weirdness of it and, like, represented how we all feel, which is like all of these things that shouldn’t happen and in normal life, for years, decades has never happened, are happening again. There’s a war in Europe — like, what? There’s, you know, a former president gets indicted — what? Like all of these things are happening. And so everybody’s just wandering around, like, bumping into stuff, trying to figure it out. I’m trying to think about where that’s gone, like, where we are now with that, in terms of the movies that have come out, the books that have come out. Like, I was reflecting on, has any of that sort of represented where we are in a way that feels right?

Matt Vella
I feel like we’re in this multiyear transition from WTF just happened, like dislocation, to full embrace of the chaos. I mean that is a running theme in these listener responses. Is this sort of just acceptance of the chaos? So you know, I don’t know that I could point to anything that is quite as much proof as the (imitating tune) thing. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
It does feel like we’re kind of just comfortable with our heads chopped off. In previous years, like, people have really felt like very strong on their values and strong on like what represents their values and what doesn’t. And then there were films like Barbie, and there were like big shows like the Taylor Swift show that seemed fully embraced by the culture, even though it was like, it was about capitalism. And it was also sort of like old-fashioned feminism, but also it was just effin fun, like it was just easy to watch and it was fun and people had a good time. And so there was this kind of like tension this year between like, are we just gonna like, relax a little? Yeah, about all of this because everything is on fire and we’re used to it now. That felt, I don’t know, unique maybe to 2023.

Matt Vella
Yeah, I think there’s something to that. The way I might put it is, there are a number of explicitly nostalgic pieces of culture. I don’t know if Barbie fits into this or not because it was pretty constructed, you know, a deliberate . . . but where something shifted, where it didn’t feel like, oh my God, you’re just plumbing my childhood from the ‘80s in order to get my eight bucks and it was sort of OK, I’m thinking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Did you see that?

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) I didn’t watch it though.

Matt Vella
Well, I have young kids, but I will fully admit that I was indoctrinating them and they did not really care about the Ninja Turtles before we saw the movie. But, you know, it was made by Seth Rogen. He was involved and it was very, very lovingly done. But it was cynical. You know, Viacom owned property that was a bunch of toys and blah, blah, blah. You know, same story as Barbie, in a sense. But it sort of didn’t matter. And I don’t know if that’s a me thing, an audience thing or the construction of it’s a bit more sophisticated. But I felt like there are a number of things where either people were just letting it go that it’s made to get their money, or maybe there’s something in the way those kinds of stories are told, or if it’s lovingly done enough, whatever, you’re just there to enjoy it, who cares?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, maybe they’ve given up on the idea that there’s, like, any purity to anything. So it’s like, not really worth fighting this. Like, there are inherent contradictions in most pieces of art and film.

Matt Vella
And we come back to the taint and the microplastics. Maybe the preservatives. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, maybe. Or just like, whatever.

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My last point on this sort of does, I think, round this up, which is that as a child of a therapist, I was very aware of how like therapy speak sort of like took over our culture over the past couple of years, and watching us sort of misuse words like trauma and gaslighting and inner child and making them sort of whatever we want them to mean. And it felt like we were sort of over-diagnosing ourselves in this very black-and-white way. And sometimes that’s not a simple diagnosis like ADD or autism or whatever. It’s like, it’s more than that. So maybe 2024 is the year of the nuanced take.

Matt Vella
Therapy speak definitely was a trend. And, you know, I hear you on the sort of misdiagnosis and the sort of using a diagnosis or a suspected diagnosis as an excuse, but I don’t know. I’m kind of OK with it. More therapy in general, is probably OK. But just keep the therapy speak to the room where you’re getting the therapy, maybe. I don’t know. I think if you’re hoping for more measured takes, it’s not the train we’re on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I know. I don’t know how to end this because I also am pro-therapy. (Laughter)

Matt Vella
Well, there was one caller who just said big asteroid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Their prediction for 2024 was big asteroid. (Laughter)

Matt Vella
Yeah, that sort of like brings everything together.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is that where we end? That doesn’t seem right. 2024, the year of growing flowers in your apartment and having a fun time and glitter. (Laughter)

Matt Vella
And diagnosing yourself correctly moments before the big asteroid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And diagnosing yourself correctly and quietly. And just being (laughter) better in public.

Matt this was such a delight. Thank you so much and may all our wishes come true.

Matt Vella
Indeed. Happy New Year to everyone. Thanks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks.

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That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. We will do our best to link to all of the things that Matt and I mentioned and listeners mentioned, including that article on microplastics. The FT links will get you past our paywall. In the show notes, you’ll also find discounts for a subscription to the Financial Times, and we have ways to stay in touch with me and the show, whether that’s by email or on X or on Instagram. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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