Who's Feeling Like Some Brain Candy Today? (So What, Who Cares, vol. 4, issue 3)
Hello!
Some days, there are the dim shapes of future newsletter topics -- how BYOD is a double-edged sword for employers and employees, what it means that credit card debt is at an all-time high, whether books about sexy European lifestyles have helped make socialism saleable in the U.S. -- but there is not the brainal capacity to make words go thinky-sentence-write.
So you get pop culture recommendations and ruminations and you'll LIKE IT. Or you won't -- let me know via Twitter at @lschmeiser. I still read my mentions.
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YOUR POP CULTURE RECOMMENDATION FOR THE DAY: I read this Vox piece onwhat a difference twenty years makes in the way we look at Meredith Blake in the remake of The Parent Trap and it reminded me of one of my favorite McSweeney's pieces, "I Regret to Inform You That My Wedding to Captain Von Trapp Has Been Canceled."
It really is an amazing time to have decades of movie history to look back on so we can see how and when some characters reflected the moment in which they were created. Writer Rebecca Shuman's "The 90s Are Old" series for LongReads unpacks that decade in classic Xer fashion and her evisceration of Reality Bites is *chef's kiss*. I was in college when that movie came out and my fellow college-newspaper habitues and I all cackled at it with unbridled hostility even then, fulfilling the Time magazine characterization of us as "the New Petulants." I believe we conflated Ethan Hawke with Zima.
I'm not sure if we mentioned this on Phil and Lisa Ruin the Movies or if I merely imagined we did, but I rewatched High Fidelity earlier this year, and a movie that had charmed me slightly when it came out in 2000 now feels curdled. John Cusack's performance of Rob reads as exceptionally entitled, especially given how little Rob has to offer anyone in return.
When I was unpacking my unexpected revulsion with Phil, I said, "I feel like if Paul Rudd had been in the movie as Rob, the performance would have aged better." Mind you, Paul Rudd is responsible for one of the greatest displays of on-screen petulance ever, but I stand by the assertion that he would have worked better in High Fidelity. Rudd's ability to play up the absurdity of a personality trait or situation without a protective coating of irony would have given Rob a more plausible character arc in the movie.
(This brings up another one of my cultural bugbears: Gen X is often associated with irony and sincerity, but there's very little mention of the gleeful absurdity that laid the foundation for so much of today's comedy. Go back and watch Mr. Show or The State and suddenly everything from Adult Swim to Parks and Rec to Drunk History makes sense.)
And in what proved to be a mistake, I watched T2 Trainspotting right after revisiting High Fidelity. I still -- well, enjoy is not precisely the word I'd use for the original Trainspotting -- but I'll still watch it if it's on and there are no children underfoot to traumatize with any one of a number of scenes. Trainspotting is the opening salvo of the Cool Brittania moment in pop and political culture; T2 reckons with what slipped away and honestly, at this point in American pop and political culture, I am not really keen on being reminded simultaneously of my fallibility and my mortality.
To bring up a well-aged and entirely appropriate John Cusack performance and moment, my first thought on watching T2 was to recall the scene in Grosse Point Blank where he asks his secretary if she went to her high school reunion and she replies, "Yes I did. Everyone had swelled."
Anyway, to get back to an idea I'm going to pretend is my original point, it is fun to revisit the movies made during the 1990s and identify what was an artifact of a very specific moment in time versus what was foundational to the culture that succeeded it. One of the reasons I love pop culture is because its works provide an accessible structure for understanding the wider world, both in the present and in retrospective.
h/t to my colleague Mitch Wagner, ace journalist and excellent curator of the interesting, for bringing the Meredith Blake rehabilitation link to my attention. He is not responsible for where I chose to lurch after reading it.
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