Stop the car! Where the heck are we going?!

Today in American Modernist Literature (with the passionate Edward Cutler), we discussed the twentieth-century counterculture movements that became mass produced and middle class:

1900s—sentimentalism
1910s—classical aestheticism
1920s—sexual rebellion
1930s—hedonism
1940s—supercoolness (Humphrey Bogart, zoot suits)
1950s—rock and roll
1960s—rebellion
1970s—hedonism
1980s—supercoolness
1990s—alienation (grunge, Friends, Dead Poets Society)

Then Professor Cutler tried to name the mass-produced postcounterculture movement of this decade. He couldn't. One student in the class suggested quirkiness, Atlantic Monthly's postulated movement of our era: a postulation supported by Napoleon Dynamite, Hot Rod, underground indie music, messy hair, retro everything, quasi-political blogging. I can see it.

But how mass-produced is this movement? Is it still taking off? Will quirkiness be the middle-class aspiration of the 2010s?

My question stems from watching the movie and television industries, as they are very good indicators of middle-class sentiment. They are all over the place, yet they are always very safe: romantic comedy, bloody action, monstrous horror, bathetic tear-jerker. What are they doing? Why are they doing it? Are they afraid to ask? The retro-everything I think comes from a fear that new things may not succeed, so we should go with what has worked in the past. Looking backward is historically un-American. Edward Bellamy even wrote Looking Backward: 2000–1887 in 1887 about 2000, so it was really about the (socialist Utopian) future.

Under all the 2000s safety lies fear. Even through the Cold War, America was certain of its power, its morality, and its economy. We no longer are sure about anything. We have no unifying middle-class movement because we are afraid. The Internet is full of drifters. We blog about nothing, and we wish our posts meant something.