The millennial/gen z divide is like 75% fake, but one difference that I think is real is which aspects of culture seem fresh and which ones seem dated and ancient. Like, even if you were born in the 90s, you grew up in a culture that was soaked in the culture of the last few decades. 80s movies were on TV, 70s songs were on the radio, etc. It wasn't all the hottest, latest stuff but it was all part of the broader milieu. Speaking personally, my dad liked to have me watch old movies (all the way back to silent Charlie Chaplin films) and listen to 50s oldies or the Beatles. For me at least, the stuff that struck me as "contemporary" as in not hopelessly old fashioned was basically the stuff from the mid 1960s onward. It was old, but it didn't seem like it came from a different world. Which makes perfect sense, given the massive cultural shift that happened then. The Beatles really did embody a pretty new musical sensibility that continued on through the decline of rock around 2000.
But really, that stuff was getting long in the tooth when I was a kid, and now the 60s are 60 years old. That is in fact ancient! It seems fresh enough to me but that is only because I am no longer young and because even when I was young I was slightly out of touch. I am just objectively wrong here. There hasn't been a 1960s level cultural revolution since then, but the accumulated changes plus the internet are enough to make that era antiquated.
And while I am not Gen Z, and presumably this varies person to person, it seems like the dividing line has moved up by a whole lot. There's 80s fetishism in the same way that I had the 60s pushed on me, but that's mostly a few shallow signifiers, and anyway I think by now the dividing line might be all the way to the early 2000s? Post-9/11? Movies are heavily reduced in importance, rock is dead, all that. You see it in how even fun populist directors like Spielberg or Tarantino now get rounded off to art house and obscure, only for the real cinephiles. I find them easy to watch of course, and it's intuitively nuts to me that their reception is so different now, but then again I have a hard time watching silent films and those were once just as popular. There's a mentality shift that is undeniable but hard to get a feel for if you're on the wrong side of it. The culture of the past really does eventually become alien. Not that you *can't* understand or enjoy it, but it becomes effortful instead of intuitive.
Which brings me to the point I actually want to make with this post, which is that in order to understand a culture, you have to also understand what is foreign to that culture. It's a very weird thought to me, but I think I would have a better understanding of the present if I had a worse understanding of the past, if I could look at an 80s blockbuster and see it the way I do see some 1930s talkie. "Wow I get it but this is old and weird." Or to listen to a rock song and hear it like how I hear big band music. That's so strange to me! It's strange that for something to come naturally to me means that I lack the experience of having to work for it. But I don't know how to unlearn that familiarity. I don't know how to remove those grooves from my brain. I rather doubt there's a way.
I think it's called "experiencing it with a kid"! you watch the movie that you watched as a kid and suddenly the distance between it and the present day becomes glaringly obvious, especially if -- as in the examples you gave -- it was dated even when you watched it.
the canonical example of this is watching Star Wars, a movie from the 1970s based on movies from the 1950s, with a kid who has grown up immersed in a dozen new franchises that do it bigger and flashier and louder, with video games that have more impressive special effects than anything ILM could achieve back then, it's boring as shit! it's like trying to convince an '80s kid of the virtues of the original Flash Gordon TV series from the '50s!
and the wheel doesn't stop turning of course, time comes for Marvel too: the first Iron Man movie is approaching twenty years old now, eventually it's going to be an obscure trivia question, "wow how many of these fucking things did they make back then"
I tried to sit down and watch To Wong Foo with a Zalpha kid and had to pause every 5 mins or so to explain a joke. Even explaining WHO Julie Newmar WAS was a struggle because they didn't even know about the Adam West Batman!
I think that part of this is that media culture has gotten a lot more singular and personalized. My daughter has her headphones and her phone, and she listens to her music. She doesn't listen to the music in the car or on the speakers in the dentist's waiting room or whatever. Most people don't do like... family movie night. You watch your thing and I'll watch mine.
And to an extent, that's fine, bc everyone can do what they like. But there's a lot less consumption of ... like... everybody's stuff. You're just watching Your Stuff.
Oh hey, another post that gives me an opportunity to gush about Rocky Horror Picture Show.
So much of Rocky Horror is a product of it's time. RKO pictures is no more, few remember who Faye Wray is (basically the entire lips song is just dated actor references), but in the cult following and shadowcast performances, a lot of people wind up learning a bit about media history just to get the jokes.
IDK if I have a big point, mostly just think its cool that RHPS has managed to show a way that we can keep a piece of media relevant as a group, even through a changing media landscape.
