What Is A Culture's Future If It Kills Its Past?

 At group therapy, I get a lot of cracks about never watching modern movies. My youngest step-son used to say that I only watched black and white movies.

Neither is true.

I grew up seeing movies on TV. It was a black and white TV. Nothing was in color.

I have been griping for decades that our culture is being manipulated. As much as I love Turner Classic Movies, it seems now the only place to see James Cagney, Clark Gable, or Greta Garbo. (Yeah, there is more, but I write this early in the morning.) When I was a kid, I could have something in common with my parents through seeing the movies and the movie stars they had seen. That common culture no longer exists. Dirty Harry is now an old movie, with all the disparagement "old" connotates. I expect the same applies to Chinatown, The Godfather, and Deliverance. It may not apply to Star Wars, thanks to it having become a franchise.

And franchises are not about movies that dig into one's mind and then out to the wider culture, they are about creating product to be consumed. Like McDonald's Big Macs, they fill one's stomach with questionable nutritional value. 

And proof of this was found this morning, thanks to YouTube and Giant Freaking Robot.

What do we become if the arts get fragmented by gatekeepers? I know it always happened. Publishers do not publish every book; not every play written is produced; art galleries do not exhibit every painting or sculpture; and not every movie gets made. However, one could start a new publishing company, one could start their own theater company, artists could exhibit on their own, and one could buy a movie camera.

Artists went to the work of their predecessors and copied what they saw. Or they rebelled in reaction.

Writers read their predecessors and learned.

Film taught its successors.

The past taught the future its possibilities.

Leonardo da Vinci taught Manet as Manet taught Picasso as he taught Rothko.

Cervantes taught Defoe who taught Austen who taught Melville as he taught Tolstoy who taught Hemingway and Proust.

Charlie Chaplin and John Ford taught Orson Welles who taught Kurosawa who taught Leone who taught Hopper who taught Spielberg.

Artists embodied the wider culture and prophesied a new vision for its culture. They were both recorders and critics.

How are we because of a Beatles lyric, or a bit of movie dialog, or a story told by some long gone writer?

But it is the gatekeepers that worry me most in this age of unreason and rising authoritarianism. The old gatekeepers looked at taste and profits. These new ones want control of ideas. This is George Orwell's Ministry of Information.

sch 5/23