"In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore."
I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct.
I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes!
Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today.
Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.
It's not that older works don't have value, it is that a lot of people don't see the value. For example, changes in the way actors perform makes a lot of people claim that old movies are "cheesy" or have "bad acting" -- they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!
Not to make you feel old, but to today's 20-somethings an 80s movie is the same time difference as a 40s movie would be in the 80s. There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80s but it's the same difference in a purely chronological sense.
Not the poster you asked either, but another big reason why the 1980s seems more like today than the 1940s did the 1980s was that the 1960s happened in between the 1940s and 1980s. Our modern world view is greatly shaped by the struggles for racial and gender equality that occurred in the 1960s.
Not the poster you've asked, but I think you might be interested in Mark Fisher's "What is Hauntology?" (10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16). It argues the contemporary culture is incapable of coming up with genuinely new ideas because postmodernism and late capitalism constraint our imagination to the point where we can no longer imagine a wholly different system of politics and values. We're left with the upkeep of an already established system, and this is reflected in how the present crop of films and music mostly sample and rehash what's been done in the past century.
As a personal addendum, I feel this can be (partly) attributed to the loss of the Cold War's ideological struggle that drove the West to innovate, not just in technology but in societal structures and freedoms as well. This is why it can feel as if we've arrived at "the end of history", the current system has won, so what is left to seek or prove?
Re your addendum and "the end of history": I think it would be myopic for people to think that the current system has won, and that there's nothing left to seek or prove. The current system has brought plenty to many but is destroying our planet, and there's plenty of space for fresh thinking. China is taking the lead in innovation [1]; so perhaps there's a new ideological and existential struggle, just with the US as the underdogs. Hopefully people see this as motivating rather than depressing.
>they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!
People grow up. In my 20s, I watched a lot of schlocky action movies and juvenile comedies. In my 40s, I watch a lot of classic and modern cinema. Do I watch a lot of movies from the 1940s? No, but I do watch some and I’m glad they are available.
"Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!"
We all have anecdotes about the bloody kids! I noticed my granddaughter wearing a Metallica (Justice) T shirt - she does like the music - I asked Alexa. I dug out my old records and gave them to her. I also showed her how to rip a CD and put them on her phone. That's proper life skills transfer that is.
I watched Star Wars in the 1970s when it came out and it still seems to be quite popular. Perhaps you might like to avoid the shit films and go a bit more mainstream when you show kids films from the 1980s!
> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.
How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.
Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.
Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.
Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.
Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.
“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.
The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.
I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.
Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.
Yes, Homer will outlive us all, but what 20th century film is likely to have Homer’s longevity?
I think people will still be playing Tetris and reading Homer in a thousand years, but I’m not confident at all that they’ll be watching any of our videos.
I’ve read Marcus Aurelius‘s meditations, a few Greek plays and studied kung-fu movies and Japanese cinema critically. People still endure reading Madame Bovary.
Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.
I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.
>How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?
How many do you read from 10 years ago? Newspapers aren’t really meant to be “timeless”. They are specifically to inform people of what is going on at that moment. I’ve read books from the 1700s. I’ve looked at paintings and sculptures, watched plays written, and read about the lives of important people of the 1700s.
I do agree that most of our culture will be irrelevant to people of the future as entertainment, but will be invaluable as history. If you want to tell a story that is relevant to modern people, tell that story. Movies are remade/rebooted/gender swapped/set in new countries/etc. all the time. You don’t have to replace the original with a “fixed” version so that almost no one can experience anything but the update. We have dozens of retellings of Romeo and Juliet but the original(ish) play is still readily available. Just because new generations will have their own entertainment doesn’t mean we should overwrite ours and present it as if history doesn’t exist and everything revolves around and reflects the current culture and always has.
Speaking of Last Action Hero, those movies won’t ever be box office hits again but the action movies and political thrillers do tell us a lot about America’s anxiety and uncertainty about our place in world affairs in the post-Cold War world. They are interesting to revisit in the same way Casablanca is interesting to revisit and think about the context for a movie made about WWII when we didn’t know what the outcome of WWII would be.
"How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?"
Social history interests me. So does genealogy, although I am the apprentice. My family tree has over 150,000 records in it - thanks to my uncle's painstaking research.
I generally try to read summations by people who have read all those articles but I am happy to dive in myself if I have to.
Just off the top of my head: A great example of trying to get inside the thoughts and ideas of a long departed peoples - "Courtesans and Fishcakes". That book deals with the cultural mores of ordinary people not gods and kings and legends and stuff.
I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct.
I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes!
Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today.
Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.