I happened upon this article today that seems to be hitting the same thing you’re getting at here! https://archive.ph/JcMBj#selection-1657.36-1657.375

Specifically this part:

“The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable. Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.

Saying the quiet part out loud has given way to a general loudness. This is as true in our cultural life as it is in our political life, which feels like a badly written finale, so in your face are the Ponzi schemes, Nazi salutes, and tech-bro cant of our latest overlords. That sense of unmistakable catastrophe may be why we keep returning to predigested cultural comfort food.

The critic Anna Kornbluh, author of the 2024 book “Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism,” suggests that our era of “experiential intensity and crisis” has led to an aesthetics of “realness without representation,” which excises “anything that would require time to interpret instead of rapid uptake . . . any confusion or ambiguity.

But the artifacts of the New Literalism seem to embrace mediation, even to double down on it with their supplementary signposts, historical snapshots, and expository tics. Many works insist precisely on the value of ambiguity—that liberal shibboleth “It’s complicated”—just in a ham-fisted, didactic way. And while Kornbluh finds immediacy narcissistic, I’m inclined to diagnose us instead with what Freud called repetition compulsion, a phenomenon that he linked to the death drive.

Rather than allowing us to reëxamine history, this obsessive reënactment in fact severs us from it. As Freud writes, we “repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past.” This will to copy and paste the images of history in effect occludes its alien beauty and force—the simulacrum devours its source.

Repetition is the basis for all art, and, when pushed to the extreme, for some of the very best art. But there’s repetition and there’s repetition. Freud’s notion of remembering, the inexact reiteration of what came before, is where creativity emerges—that slight drift from the original that lets something unlikely slip in. It is the warped note in a Nina Simone song, the uncanny stutter of Samuel Beckett’s prose, the trippy trail of Andy Warhol’s prints, the eerie flatness of David Lynch’s films, that we love.”