Old fashioned

As I get older I feel increasingly out of step with modern life. This, I think, is fairly normal. Generally speaking, as you age your personality ossifies until eventually you find yourself pining for a half-remembered past that never really existed because you aren’t pining so much for the era as for the person you were. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and so too is youth, combine the two and it’s easy to see why many people view the period in which they came of age through a thick haze of sentimentality and revisionism. Due to a combination of being both miserable and awful when I was young I don’t actually have much fondness for the actual era in which I grew up and so I’ve wound up projecting my nostalgia backwards into the period before I made the first mistake in a life riddled with poor choices, that of being born. I have no patience whatsoever with current popular culture which exists as a fascinating exercise in trying to find out exactly what too much of a good thing looks like. Even things I used to enjoy such as superhero movies, Star Wars, and professional wrestling have suffered from this increasingly fractal multiverse of content. We live in a world that contains a gritty re-imagining of the Archie comics, a world in which a Batman prequel focusing on Commissioner Gordon has been followed by an even earlier prequel focusing on the life and times of Batman’s fucking butler. There’s a tiny independent UK film studio that produces micro-budget slasher movies that are all set in the same cinematic universe. None of this is bad exactly. People seem to like it and I’m not someone who thinks that everything I don’t like is toxic and evil just because it isn’t aimed at me. I don’t feel entitled to a popular culture in tune with my emotional and philosophical concerns. As a cisgender man living in the West I am already grotesquely pandered to in almost every way. It’s just curious to me that I should find myself becoming more and more untethered in time, retreating backwards into the pop culture that was made decades before I was born. This afternoon I watched Invaders From Mars from 1953. It’s a slightly incoherent riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers which actually predates that classic by a number of years. It’s also made in colour, Supercinecolor, to be precise and can claim to be the first movie to show a flying saucer in colour. If you made a more or less identical film today I doubt I would be prepared to sit through it but its historical nature means that there’s always some little period detail to enjoy. There’s hokum science that would never pass muster today and a lot of very shiny hair that’s been carefully slicked into place. There’s an innocence to it, which is partly the result of much of the action taking place from a child’s perspective, but its also from an age where science was often portrayed as an unambiguous good, an age where America’s confidence in its own ability to handle crisis hadn’t yet been fatally undermined by Vietnam. It’s also easier to deal with the casual misogyny and the total absence of people of colour by rationalising it as a product of its time. Everyone involved with the production is dead. There’s no mileage in getting angry at the dead. I find that much harder with modern creators who should be expected to do much better but still fall into the old habits of foregrounding straight white men to the detriment of our cultural richness. The past is more attractive because it has, for better or worse, already disappointed me. There’s a pleasure to be found in being completely powerless to effect change. It takes a lot of the pressure off.