Just Getting Old , Or Has The Culture Changed? The Maggie Smith Example

Since my return to Indiana, I find myself more and more unmoored from people younger than myself. I would go so far as to say I share almost no culture with anyone under 40. Specifically, movies and television.

 I noticed this first in the halfway house. Matt found it amusing that I was watching TCM. It was he who pointed out to me that Dirty Harry was an old movie - more than 50 years old. I had not thought of it that way - it was part and parcel of the world I grew up in. 

KH and I talked about this. We both hit on the point that in 1979, a fifty-year-old movie would have come out in 1929. We would have thought of it as belonging to another world altogether. (Think of Al Jolson - who? - in the original Jazz Singer.)

On the other hand, we would have known who Al. Jolson was from re-runs on TV.

Working at DIY only emphasized the disparity between what had been part of my culture and the ignorance of younger co-workers. There, I also began noticing the people I spoke with were gamers. I never played games on the computer, which leaves me utterly ignorant of their culture.

During the group therapy session where I was trying to explain my detestation of rats, I found no one recognized Willard or Ernest Borgnine (until I brought up the movie RED).

The latest example comes in the obituaries for Dame Maggie Smith - it is the Harry Potter movies that get referenced and not The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. That is where I first saw her - on TV.

Where would it be possible for large numbers of people to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? Nowhere. The only place for many people to have seen Maggie Smith was the Harry Potter movies (which are getting long in the tooth themselves).

And people wonder why movie theaters are declining. We are divorced from the culture of the movie.

Maggie Smith, Oscar-winning star of stage and screen, dies aged 89 (The Guardian)

Smith’s gift for acid-tongued comedy was arguably the source of her greatest achievements: the waspish teacher Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, period yarns such as A Room With a View and Gosford Park, and a series of collaborations on stage and screen with Alan Bennett including The Lady in the Van.

And who has seen any of the movies mentioned in that paragraph who is younger than I am? 

Effortless skill, mixed salads and a certain impatience with life: Michael Palin remembers Maggie Smith

And who recognizes the name Michael Palin - other than the English and people my age? Who watches Monty Python today?

Maggie Smith's 20 best films – ranked!

I agree with what is said about Jean Brodie. However, I would also point to a movie that was not her best (the film, not her performance): Murder By Death.

(She is intelligent and sexy.)

And who would recognize any of the other actors in that scene?

Yes, fame is fleeting. Dwelling in the past in the past is stultifying. However, what do we get by not knowing our past? Donald J. Trump seems to me the ugliest example of historical ignorance.

Not knowing our past gives us no means of judging our present. I look at the movie franchises and see us trapped in a nostalgia loop. We do not build on our past but want it repeated over and over. 

Look at Star Wars. I went to the opening of the original movie and went back several times to see the original movies at the theater. I watched the prequels, thinking we waited all this for this? Of the sequels, I thought a grumpy Luke Skywalker was a great idea. The fanboys hated it, and the studio made the anodyne final sequel. No ideas, no chances taken, no improvements in what was really a sketchy idea.

Deadpool and Wolverine was a silly film that made lots of money. It is good at what it is. Will we want to watch it 50 years from now? Does it even leave any traces in the mind like Deliverance or The Exorcist or Dirty Harry did when I first saw them. What movie today do we stagger out of with our minds blown like we did after Apocalypse Now (which was flawed but ambitious in its execution - as I write that the image of Marlon Brando's head  coming out of the water comes to mind in a way that nothing came to mind when I mentioned Deadpool and Wolverine.)

Am I a cranky old codger? I hope not, but I do resemble the image! I would like to do more than that. 

I would hope to make everyone see prisons are self-inflicted. That living in the lotus land of nostalgia makes you small, not safe. Kick out the jams and see what you are missing. Stick your nose into places you have not been. Life is too short to live in prisons of comfort presented to by smiling marketeers. Or to surrender yourselves to the slavery of algorithms.

Demand not just more but a better culture.

You, too, can dance:

sch 9/28