TOWARD A GENERAL PRACTICE OF POP-CULTURAL OVERTHINKING AS CANON

PART I

1. THIS IS NOT AN INTRODUCTION

OK, so I don’t mean for this to be anything extravagant. It’s just a small, dark corner of the internet for overanalyzing my bad ideas about good art, my good ideas about bad art, and an occasional existential crisis about mozzarella sticks.

Well, that’s the surface story, anyway (but you know better than that, my beloved Media-Faithful)—just an average, ordinary, respectable place for a debut blog. 

But let’s face it, writing is never small. Writing is a challenge of architecture. A sentence is a beam. A paragraph is scaffolding. A personal essay is a structure buckling under the strain of the urge to hyperlink itself. 

A blog, therefore, is either a skyscraper, or a Cheesecake Factory menu. An endless corridor of choices engineered to exhaust you into transcendence. 

Because nobody walks into a Cheesecake Factory planning to read the whole menu, they walk in planning to order. Yet, there they are, four pages into a novella about shrimp scampi, realizing they’ve lost track of time, meaning, maybe even their own sense of self (Journal of Culinary Eschatology, 2017.)*

So no, this isn’t some tawdry “hello, gang” welcome post... This is the first structural failure of restraint.

2. SCRIPTURE WITH A CALORIE COUNT

In fact, let’s just start there, at the Cheesecake Factory. Our very own carb-loaded cathedral of our metamodernist age. 

When Don DeLillo wrote about language becoming an event—y’know, words no longer pointing to reality but, in fact, being reality—he didn’t know those words were going to be “Bang Bang Chicken and Shrimp” (See also: Cheesecake Factory, Menu, 2017 edition, pg. 36.)* And if that sounds absurd, well, guess what? Culture is absurd, always has been. But absurdity is structure, and structure is sacred, so here we are. Again.

To the same extent, if we take Marvel Studios, they’re not in the business of making movies. They’re making liturgies. The infamous ‘post-credits stinger’ isn’t flourish. When a congregation sits straighter, eyes fixed, waiting for a glimpse of a future that may never arrive, that’s an altar call (Proceedings of the Marvel Synod, Vol. 3.)*

Sure, you can call it ‘entertainment’. But I, along with legions of overstimulated Media-Damned, refer to it as something else.

3. ENTERTAINMENT AS RITUAL

Blogs are also rituals. They pretend to start at a beginning, but really start wherever you happen to discover them. So, there’s really no first post (this is no first post), it’s just the one you happened to link to, like dropping into a random episode of syndicated television you’ve been watching over and over and over your whole life. 

The Office. BoJack. It’s Always Sunny. These aren’t shows, they’re oral traditions; Homeric cycles backed by laugh track. You don’t start at the beginning of The Iliad; you start wherever the singer of tales starts, and you know the story because you’ve always known the story…

And that’s how culture works when information never stops arriving. Every thought is a rerun. Every memory is a page reload.

The only way to keep from drowning in it? Overthink it.

4. OVERTHINKING IS SURVIVAL

Because if we don’t treat the trivial seriously—if we don’t carve depositions in stone about why the Cheesecake Factory is Proust with a side of ranch, or why the MCU is just Catholicism with better merchandising—then we’re left with nothing but the feed. And the feed never tells you what anything means, it only tells you what to want next;

And if all of this is beginning to sound a little, well, academic-y… Good, academia has always just been fandom with better sources.

So let’s commit to the work, shall we?

Let’s pretend this blog has been peer-reviewed, and an editorial board somewhere approved its inclusion in the Journal of Applied Recursive Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 1, and the title of this first paper?

Toward a General Practice of Pop-Cultural Overthinking as Method.

Our thesis is simple: To spiral is to think.

PART II

5. THEOREM I

Every artifact of culture produces more meaning than it can reasonably contain—that’s the first law of overthinking.

A Marvel eyebrow raise can become a three-month symposium on YouTube; a TikTok peep becomes a new vernacular for heartbreak; a Doritos flavor launch earns more media coverage than a midterm election (Flavor Dust Studies Quarterly, 2019.)* 

Meaning leaks. Always.

This is what we call The Semiotic Surplus Model. It represents a tendency of the trivial to inflate until it crowds out everything else. That meme is not a sideshow, my poor, poor Unbuffered, it is the main event disguised as detritus.

Consider The Cheesecake Factory Menu once more, 2021 Edition: 250 items, not one discrete. Each dish bleeds into the next like Borges rewrote the entreé section. Every laminated page is an act of semiotic inflation. A slice of Ultimate Red Velvet Cheesecake is not dessert, it’s a palimpsest of American anxiety—our fear of sugar, our lust for excess, a conviction that slight nausea is proof of transcendence.

Culture survives through surplus; criticism survives through faith in surplus. To ignore it is malpractice. To overthink, fidelity.

6. THEOREM II

Nobody watches an episode of Friends for a plot. We watch to rehear the lines we already know—televised ritual, communal hypnosis, background prayer.

I present to you The Sitcom Homeric Continuum, or syndication as oral tradition. This is repetition that keeps the world from ending during commercial breaks.

Seinfeld’s bass riff is the new lyre. “We were on a break” is our “rosy-fingered dawn.” Michael Scott screaming into the void is the bureaucratic echo of Achilles howling at the sea. Reruns are not programming, they’re catechism. The Greeks called it tradition. NBC called it Thursday Night (Broadcast Liturgies Review, Vol. 12.)* (e.g. Homer and the “wine-dark sea”—a tagline before the concept of branding existed.)

And Cheesecake Factory knows all this; knows that you’ll return. It knows you will never “finish” the menu, because finishing is a false goal. You can no more complete the Cheesecake Factory menu than you can complete culture. You simply order another dish (See also: Cheesecake Factory, Menu, 2022 Edition, “Low-Calorie Specialties” section.)* 

7. THEOREM III

DeLillo wrote White Noise and accidentally described TikTok. He thought the event was televised terror. But what he didn’t realize is that the event would be a six-second audio clip of someone yelling “sheesh” over a trap beat. 

It’s a perfect example of The Language-as-Event Principle.

The meme format ‘No one: / Me:’ doesn’t describe behavior, it is behavior. To post is to enact, to enact is to believe. 

The modern event is not the State of the Union, it’s that Marvel post-credits stinger. Thirty seconds of nothing that spawns months of online speculation and at least two doctoral dissertations (Proceedings of the Marvel Synod, Vol. 5.)* 

It’s a Post-Credit Event Horizon, where individuals wait through thirteen minutes of credits for thirty seconds of theoretical promotion already considered prophecy. That isn’t cinema, that’s eschatology in CGI (e.g. Avengers: Infinity War, 2018, Post-Credit Sequence 2, a beeper left buzzing in the ruins of New York—a more potent invocation than most contemporary religious services). 

It’s like the Cheesecake Factory adding Korean Fried Cauliflower to page 47 and rewriting the American mythos of flavor.

8. THEOREM IV

Abundance that collapses into sameness—this is the third law of overthinking.

Again, we take the Cheesecake Factory menu. Thirty-six pages. Four hundred variations. Chicken, beef, shrimp, pasta. Each permutation chases the illusion of freedom.

Choosing Chicken Marsala or Chicken Madeira is like choosing between Calvinism and Lutheranism: it’s a schism of sauce, not salvation (See also: Cheesecake Factory, Menu, 2009 Edition, “Glamburgers” subsection, pg. 14.)*

For your consideration, may I present The Doctrine of False Choice, where the ritual is not eating, but choosing (Doctrine of False Choice, Journal of Menu Studies, 2011.)*

This menu is the apotheosis of late-stage capitalism, every appetizer a hymn to surplus, every dessert a eulogy for taste. You don’t order from it; you surrender to it. You might as well just lay waste to reason and let the waiter choose your fate, because reason was never the point.

A blog is built much the same way. It’s not a plated meal, it’s an entire menu; not a bite but an accumulation. It’s an endless catalog of items that may never be consumed but, for some reason, must be preserved. 

This doctrine is comfort by illusion: The faith that infinite options equal infinite meaning.

But they don’t. They just mean more menus.

PART III

By now, the argument has collapsed under its own abundance—which, of course, also proves the point.

9. THE SKEPTIC’S OBJECTION & THE REPLY

I hear a skeptic clear their throat.

Surely, they say, this is all ridiculous. Upscale casual restaurant menus are not scripture. Sitcom reruns are not Greek tragedy. Marvel is not religion. And blogs are not ritual, they’re just procrastination with better kerning.

To which we respond: Ridiculousness is the method

Seriousness was never the measure of meaning, it’s just branding. What makes Homer Homer is not solemnity, but recurrence. What makes DeLillo DeLillo is not paranoia but how paranoia repeats itself until it becomes his pattern.

The Cheesecake Factory is scripture because it repeats. Marvel is scripture because it repeats. Sitcoms are scripture because they repeat. It’s repetition that makes culture holy (Proceedings of the Sacred Rewatch, Vol. 2.)*

Overthinking, then, is not indulgence, it’s just honoring the pattern.

Read the Cheesecake Factory menu like Proust and you acknowledge that Proust was always describing the Cheesecake Factory menu. Treat a TikTok peep as DeLillo and admit DeLillo writes memes (e.g. White Noise, p. 21, “the family sitting down to watch TV feels national”.)* Treat the MCU like an organized religion and admit we found a god in cinematic continuity.

10. BABBLE OF TOWER AS PRAXIS

So, this blog? This is a discipline. Each entry is another attempt to systematize the unserious; another contribution to the Journal of Applied Recursive Studies.

It doesn’t begin; it paginates.
It won’t end; it’ll syndicate.
Continuity is an illusion; the blog is the continuity.

Welcome to the Babble of Tower. Not as an introduction, but as a post-credits sequence for a cinematic universe that hasn’t even made imprint yet.

It’s DeLillo masquerading as a menu, Marvel cosplaying Homer, the Cheesecake Factory performing itself as the Library of Alexandria, TikTok core aesthetics disguised as ontology (American Vibe Studies Journal, 2023.)*

It is everything, nothing, laminated, paginated, algorithmically shuffled until belief becomes inevitable.

11. THIS IS THE CANON NOW

Not Shakespeare. Not Milton. Not Homer.

The canon is the Cheesecake Factory menu, laminated in perpetuity.
The canon is the Marvel stinger that never pays off.
The canon is the sitcom rerun—comfort disguised as comedy.

“We live in a society” has done more cultural work than entire political manifestos. A Vine scream outlived Vine. TikTok audio of a squeaky toy has restructured more human behavior than most presidential addresses. 

And still the Cheesecake Factory calls us back. Its menu is not just a menu, but text so vast and contradictory it becomes writ, both DeLillo and Derrida, maximalist and deconstructive at once. Every page insists infinite choice, yet every option is the same.

Cream, carbs, chicken, beef. 

And still you choose, because the ritual demands you choose. This is the essence of overthinking. To not see the thing, but rather the system the thing belongs to.

The meme isn’t funny because of its caption; it’s funny because it participates in a lineage of captions. The sitcom isn’t comforting because of its jokes; it’s comforting because it exists in rerun. The Marvel stinger isn’t meaningful because of the tease; it’s meaningful because of the wait.

To overthink is to take the ritual seriously (Transactions in Recursive Faith, Vol. 4.)*

It is here we must introduce the Principle of Cultural Excess. This principle states: Every disposable artifact carries the potential for scripture, provided it is repeated long enough and overthought deeply enough (e.g. the “Shrek is love, Shrek is life” meme—moved from parody to canon through sheer force of recurrence). 

The skeptic will say this demeans canon. But canon has always been a retrospective hallucination. Homer was just a sitcom writer who survived.

12. CONCLUSION

This is not an introduction.

This is a set of axioms for the study of pop-cultural overthinking as canon; as survival; as faith.

We don’t analyze Marvel because it’s a franchise. We analyze Marvel because it’s a recycling program for meaning. We don’t analyze sitcom reruns because they’re funny. We analyze them because they’re myth (e.g. Friends, “The One Where No One’s Ready,” 1996, is identical in form to a Greek stasis scene; endlessly re-performed, endlessly remembered). Even the Cheesecake Factory menu is haunted by its own echoes. Chicken reappears in twelve forms, each pretending to be unique; each secretly identical.

Faith is just participation in recurrence.

So, welcome—now you’re enrolled. Attendance will not be taken because attendance is impossible.

You’re already here.
You’ve always been here.

That’s how recursion works.
That’s how culture works.
That’s how the Babble of Tower works.

Just sit back. Relax. Order something. There are only two choices on the menu: Chicken Madeira or salvation. 

Either way, you’re already full.

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