For example, last semester, I wanted to reference the ending of Chinatown to highlight a couple of points about the legal system, so I asked a class of about 55 students how many of them had seen it. A total of one student raised her hand. She said "do you mean the one in San Francisco?"
Paul Campos, LGM
I'm fascinated by this discussion. As we get older this question comes up more and more in one form or another: "Are young people now living up to the standards we set when we were their age?" Are kids today really squandering the promise of the cultural legacy created for them, or are older people just seeing the past through rose colored lenses? I think the answer is somewhere in between, although it may be simply meaningless because there is no objective way in which to answer it. There are several issues that may converge on some kind of answer.
1) Time. If you look at the so-called classic films that professor laments, they are Chinatown (1974), Dirty Harry (1971), and Death Wish (1974). They all come from a very narrow and very specific period not only in time but in the history of film production. It's not hard to guess that these all premiered during a formative time in Campos' life and acted as cultural touchstones. They all also represented a kind of early 1970's milieu that doesn't recur before or since.
2) History. There was a strange period, somewhere between the invention of television and the invention of cable television, when nations had a unified mass media experience. Baby boomers grew up when there were four networks and no internet. What was on, was on. You watched it, or if you didn't you were teased at school because you didn't know what happened. With 500 channels plus YouTube there's no reason to expect that media is a shared experience.
3) Accident. I'm probably about the same age as Campos, and yet he and I had different media experiences. Why? Because while we're both nerds, we're different kinds of nerds. When I was about 13 my sister and her friend took me to a theater showing Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). I was enthralled. About the time the Black Knight was losing limbs in showers of blood, they decided that it was too nasty and forced us to leave. That might have been it except that a year or two later I discovered Monty Python on PBS and I found the culture that would serve me into adulthood. About the same time as Chinatown and Death Wish, and yet by chance it was a very different outcome.
4) Ignorance. It's not clear that those who complain about modern youth have followed Harry Potter or Twilight. Is it possible that Pokemon or Lady GaGa could be cultural reference points equal to Madonna or the Spielberg oeuvre? It may be that baby boomers have simply closed their ears to anything that they didn't grow up with. Perhaps they should listen to what their kids like and learn from it instead of trying to impose their own values.
5) Experience. As we get older, we know more. It's the benefit of age; it's called wisdom. We shouldn't expect teenagers to have the same level of understanding that we do. To the extent that we use our longer experience as a cudgel we should be ashamed. To the extent that we are wise, we should use that wisdom to help the young, however much they might whine about it.
Dan Dennet has developed a very good model about how culture works. Using archetypal cultural touchstones -- like significant movie references -- allows us to off-load the problem of understanding the world into the world itself. We don't have to represent a kaleidoscope of ideas in our own minds if we can just react to "That's not true! It's Impossible!". The culture we grew up in has done the work for us; the touchstones of culture are our inheritance. We should be proud of it, but understand that it's as temporary and mailable as the rest of the environment that we live in and create.
- jack*
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