The 1985 film My Science Project depicts a scene where one high school student interviews another for the school yearbook.
The joke works, because one student is "out of it" having never seen Return of the Jedi. Harlan's gearhead credentials are established, in part, by this fact.
There was a time when the sprawling nation of the United States was held together by a common experience of film. We didn't go to the same churches. We didn't cheer for the same teams. Some of us shoveled snow in the winter, while others of us fought mosquitoes in the summer, and the least fortunate of us did both. But what we had in common was a dream life. In 1985, we all got the joke, because it was expected that almost everyone would have seen Return of the Jedi.
Movies offered us a culture shorthand. They offered a stock of examples for comparisons and characterizations. We may not have known "Bill," but we all knew "Biff" from Back to the Future. And if someone told us Bill was like Biff, we spontaneously had an image in mind. We "knew" what was being said about Bill.
Films offered us something to talk about, a chance to get a feel for each other. Opinions about The Godfather or Titanic would not only give us an ice-breaker for conversation, but also to get a feel for another person's personality in their evaluations and interpretations of shared texts.
More than this, films were a source of common topics and cultural wisdom. Thus, they were an inventional resource. If someone had never heard of Plato's Cave, there was a very good chance that they had seen The Matrix. Quotable quotes from movies, for decades, served to generate our adages, aphorisms, and proverbs. I can't tell you how many time I have uttered something I thought was profound only to realize (sooner or later) that I had merely quoted a favorite movies.
As Audrey Hepburn put it,
Movies thus sustained and generated cultural values and folk wisdom.
All of this brought us closer together. It was a centripetal force.
Today, when I speak to people, specifically young people, I find that they're functionally illiterate with regard to filmic knowledge. They've never even heard of some of the most important films of the last decades. And they don't really care.
The meme economy goes fast and the latest meme format will perish almost as fast as the application on which it goes viral. Life goes by pretty fast (Ferris Bueller, eh?), but they're not only speeding past these common experiences, they're all drinking from different wells.
In effect, we're siloed into echo chambers. We've voluntarily entered into walled ghettos, thinking that they're "gated communities." We hate each other now. I've never seen people hate each other as they do now. Empathy depends on a psychic connection to the humanity of the other person. The loss of the filmic experience is one resource, arguably an important one, for catalyzing empathy and allowing for discussion.
We lack that and we're spinning apart like a solar system without a sun. We from the death of God, to the death of Man, to the death of shared cultural experience. In the end, it is the algorithms that sort us into our interests, reflecting and directing, mirroring and driving, that are masters of increasingly fractured cultural unconscious. The apotheosis of this trend would a hypothetical day when we're all safely ensconced in our own "seclusions" (anyone see Session 9? Great word I got from this film) merely talking to ourselves, not unlike this songbird, the last of its kind.
OK, what do you want to know?
Your major?
Major. I don’t know. Auto shop?
Favorite video game?
World Series.
All right, how many times did you see “Jedi”?
I never saw "Jedi".
You never saw "Jedi"? Have you been under a car for ten years?
Your major?
Major. I don’t know. Auto shop?
Favorite video game?
World Series.
All right, how many times did you see “Jedi”?
I never saw "Jedi".
You never saw "Jedi"? Have you been under a car for ten years?
There was a time when the sprawling nation of the United States was held together by a common experience of film. We didn't go to the same churches. We didn't cheer for the same teams. Some of us shoveled snow in the winter, while others of us fought mosquitoes in the summer, and the least fortunate of us did both. But what we had in common was a dream life. In 1985, we all got the joke, because it was expected that almost everyone would have seen Return of the Jedi.
Movies offered us a culture shorthand. They offered a stock of examples for comparisons and characterizations. We may not have known "Bill," but we all knew "Biff" from Back to the Future. And if someone told us Bill was like Biff, we spontaneously had an image in mind. We "knew" what was being said about Bill.
Films offered us something to talk about, a chance to get a feel for each other. Opinions about The Godfather or Titanic would not only give us an ice-breaker for conversation, but also to get a feel for another person's personality in their evaluations and interpretations of shared texts.
More than this, films were a source of common topics and cultural wisdom. Thus, they were an inventional resource. If someone had never heard of Plato's Cave, there was a very good chance that they had seen The Matrix. Quotable quotes from movies, for decades, served to generate our adages, aphorisms, and proverbs. I can't tell you how many time I have uttered something I thought was profound only to realize (sooner or later) that I had merely quoted a favorite movies.
As Audrey Hepburn put it,
"Everything I learned I learned from the movies."
All of this brought us closer together. It was a centripetal force.
Today, when I speak to people, specifically young people, I find that they're functionally illiterate with regard to filmic knowledge. They've never even heard of some of the most important films of the last decades. And they don't really care.
The meme economy goes fast and the latest meme format will perish almost as fast as the application on which it goes viral. Life goes by pretty fast (Ferris Bueller, eh?), but they're not only speeding past these common experiences, they're all drinking from different wells.
In effect, we're siloed into echo chambers. We've voluntarily entered into walled ghettos, thinking that they're "gated communities." We hate each other now. I've never seen people hate each other as they do now. Empathy depends on a psychic connection to the humanity of the other person. The loss of the filmic experience is one resource, arguably an important one, for catalyzing empathy and allowing for discussion.
We lack that and we're spinning apart like a solar system without a sun. We from the death of God, to the death of Man, to the death of shared cultural experience. In the end, it is the algorithms that sort us into our interests, reflecting and directing, mirroring and driving, that are masters of increasingly fractured cultural unconscious. The apotheosis of this trend would a hypothetical day when we're all safely ensconced in our own "seclusions" (anyone see Session 9? Great word I got from this film) merely talking to ourselves, not unlike this songbird, the last of its kind.