THE WAY WE WERE

Streisand and Redford: Timeless

The other night I watched "The Way We Were" with my fiancee, Shelley.

You know it: the 1973 flick with Redford and Streisand; classic love story; girl falls for boy, boy doesn't requite, boy finally requites, they get married, have a child, boy leaves, audience is touched but confused. Remember it now? Please don't make me sing the title song.

Anyway, my half-witted wit actually does brush up against the point I want to make. You see, it was a rather complex, layered movie. It had depth -- intellectual and emotional. And when it was over, my fiancee and I discussed it at length. And that was as gratifying as the movie. And we're talking a love story here! Hence my point: They don't make em like they used ta -- and that's not an accident.

If you look at my third-ever blog post of March 22, 2010, entitled "The Idiot Culture," you'll know where I'm going with this. You see, my fiancee and I decided that the movies of the new millenium -- and we see a lot of them -- just don't have the quality, the substance, the timelessness of movies made in the 70s or earlier.

True, there are still SOME quality films made (I'm restricting this discussion to Hollyweird, by the way). And I know that's somewhat subjective: but it isn't entirely subjective. Movie icons like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are still movie icons. Try finding a George Clooney t-shirt 50 years from now.

Things used to be made to last. To mean something. And in being made that way, they were more carefully woven, unlike the rough hewn nonsense that is often paraded out as fine tapestry these days.

We live in a conveyor belt, throwaway culture. Films, books, music: There's more money to be made if you keep it simple. Like an assembly line. So you have formula, genre books and movies. You have music made by computers. You have singers who lip sync on stage. You have magazines that rely on skin to get you in (rhyme intended). We're given paint-by-numbers junk while Michelangelo gets castrated by the money grubbers.

We are being systematically dumbed down so we won't think too much. So we don't ponder and question and try to unravel things. That would be a nuisance to the people with the money and the power who don't want to give any of it up. They rely on us being mentally totaled enough that we won't be able to pick the lock to the truth: That we're being screwed and subordinated.

Don't laugh, we're almost at this point

So we read our romance novels and self-help books (we need books to tell us how to help ourselves?), and we find the great writing tucked away in a section of the bookstore called "literature"! That only started happening about 15 years ago. That's what I'm talking about.

And we go to the movies and we see 15 minutes of advertisements that we see at home on TV, before we watch a film that follows a plot suspiciously like a hundred films we've seen before because we know what's gonna happen and we really just wanna see it happen with people's guts blown out with new age, digital, 3-D technology.

First the emperors of Wall Street taught us to accept fast food; and I think they've now well and truly taught us to accept fast culture. But it's just as unhealthy as that saggy Big Mac you're slinging at your gob.

Me? I prefer to have things the way we were.

Take care,
Adrian

IF THIS BLOG POST WAS OF INTEREST TO YOU you might also like to read THE IDIOT CULTURE.