Have ditzes disappeared?

Sweet, naive, trusting, and above all likable, the ditz represented the extreme tail of the bell curve for self-consciousness, namely at the opposite end from hyper-self-aware. She was not socially awkward like a nerd, sperg, or other weirdo -- her wiring was fine, it's just that she was running on auto-pilot most of the time. Her mind was never blinded by the spotlight of self-monitoring, although that meant that it would often look like the lights are on but nobody's home.

Quite a few female characters from '70s, '80s, and early '90s TV shows were, like, totally ditzy, however exaggerated it may have become as the series ran out of jokes. And they weren't just teenage girls like Mallory from Family Ties, Kimmy from Full House, and Kelly from Married With Children. They were in their 20s like Chrissy from Three's Company, Hilary from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Lucy from Twin Peaks. And they were still spacey even during middle age and retirement, like Edith from All in the Family and Rose from Golden Girls. The whole society back then was just a lot less self-conscious.

The fundamentally wholesome nature of the ditz can be contrasted with the sassy, jaded, cynical, and repulsive nature of the oh-so-self-aware diva who has become a cultural mainstay over the past 20 years. When the writers and actresses do attempt to portray a ditz, their heightened self-consciousness turns the character into a blackface version of the ditz, snarky and stupid.

In fact, the writers and actresses have opted more for a different character type altogether, what the TV Tropes people call "The Brainless Beauty". In their minds, self-awareness = reflection = reason = intelligence. And so, ditziness = go-with-the-flow = intuition = stupidity. Where the older type was scatterbrained, her replacement is downright moronic. She cannot therefore be likable, except in the sense of refraining from looking down on her because she can't help being an idiot, and laughing at her wouldn't be nice.

Looking through the examples of "The Ditz" in the TV Tropes list, it seems like most of the ones from the past 20 years are closer to the type who is dimwitted and unlikable, or at best inoffensive, like Phoebe from Friends or Karen from Mean Girls. The only genuine exception is Cher from Clueless; she was a real breath of fresh air in the '90s, the last wholesome-ditzy kind of girl.

Ironic ages are so poor at irony because the background level of self-awareness makes the delivery too on-the-nose. It requires sincerity to appear unrehearsed, and the ditz's delivery was beyond understated. No one did it better when it came to oblivious double entendres.

Is there something I can take out for you?

Does the decline of the ditz reflect a real-world change, or was the character type just some Hollywood fad? It sure seems real to me. I remember ditzy girls in elementary school (later '80s, early '90s), not to mention among the teenage babysitters that I and my friends had. And even though I didn't know them, random girls at the mall often gave off a ditzy vibe, that strange spacey look on their face where they're cruising through daily life without a navigator who's fully alert.

There were a few ditzes left by high school (later '90s), but at my school anyway they caught so much shit, it must have ultimately woken them up from the dream-state. Clueless and kind-hearted was out, savvy and sassy was in. By the 2000s, I don't recall any true ditzes among the students I tutored, or among my fellow 20-somethings, let alone among older women. I'm sure there are still a handful drifting around out there somewhere, but even if you wanted to find out where, they wouldn't have the presence of mind to send up a flare to let you know.

Although the ditz may be dead for now, I wouldn't be surprised if she showed up again the next time the crime rate starts rising for awhile. I don't recall seeing ditzy female characters from the culture of the mid-century, although there are several in Fitzgerald's short stories from the Jazz Age. As a matter of fact, the actresses who played the two older ditzes from the last heyday (Edith and Rose) were both born in the first half of the 1920s, making them part of the Greatest Generation, who are the counterparts of today's Generation X and Gen Y, based on where they were born in relation to the peak of the crime rate. Ditziness seems to have largely skipped the Silent Generation, who appear to have been more self-conscious as teenagers. Ditto the Millennials, who are their contemporary counterparts.

In the meantime, let's remember how pleasant these girls were to interact with. The ultimate in easy-going, you could play any tune, and they'd happily dance right along. Indeed, their largely reactive nature in social situations required that the man take the lead, the exact opposite of the self-aware diva, whose courtship behavior consists of either bitchily pushing men away or sleazily seizing them by the arm. And although their scatterbrained behavior made them a little unreliable, their trusting and amiable nature still made them good friends and co-workers, especially compared to those who are unreliable due to their Machiavellian mindset.

In the good old days, even the least desirable of the common female character types was still harmless and wholesome.

Childhood pictures, pre-helicopter parents

What's so shocking about how sheltered kids are these days is not only the extent of their cocooning but just how rapidly the world changed. Most of our collectively recalled history comes from Baby Boomers, and therefore most of our images of how kids behaved before Ritalin and child safety seats takes place during the 1960s. The Sandlot, The Wonder Years, and Forrest Gump -- that's the standard image of pre-domesticated childhood in the popular imagination.

Naively connecting the two dots of the 1960s to the 1990s and after suggests that it all went slowly downhill in the 1970s. And yet in this case as in so many others, the '60s were just the beginning for a phenomenon that would peak in the '80s or early '90s. Generation X and the mini-cohort just after then, Gen Y, have just as many memories, and just as vivid, as the Boomers do, so why is there such a huge gap in the popular imagination of what daily life was like 20 to 30 years ago?

I think the Boomers were simply fortunate to enter their nostalgic years during a romantic era -- the 1980s -- when no one would look at you funny for looking back on the good old days. And the not so good old days too, witness the steady stream of pop culture about the Vietnam War throughout the '80s and early '90s. Now the Boomers were going to reflect on what it all meant from an adult perspective, not through a child's or adolescent's eyes.

Even the younger generation hopped on board, despite having no personal memories of those times -- Stand by Me is way more popular with Gen X than with the Boomers whose early years it depicts. I imagine the same was true for Happy Days, Back to the Future, and the whole rockabilly revival.

Nowadays, though, we have sunken too deeply into sarcasm, irony, antipathy, and rationalism for an honest, upbeat look back at the '80s to catch on broadly. It would have to be performed in blackface, like the musical Rock of Ages. But so what if it wouldn't be popular? You really wouldn't want to be in-demand during such snarky and sappy times.

So in my own little way, I hope this romp through pictures of the lives of children during the Reagan and Bush years will help fill a gap in the popular imagination. It'll focus mostly on how independent and rambunctious we were encouraged to act, and how eager we were to oblige. I'll probably have more posts to follow that cover other aspects of life back then.

I've related so many personal stories over the past several years that I thought it'd be better to focus on my younger twin brothers. That way it won't be biased by wanting to remember my own childhood as greater than it was. It will also show how sharp the divide is between Gen Y and Millennials, the first to be raised by helicopter parents. Although I was born in 1980, my brothers were born in '82, and even they lived normal, exciting lives. These scenes are mostly from the late '80s and early '90s and show how late the trend lasted. They show both suburban and rural settings to emphasize how much "ain't that America?" there was even in the 'burbs.

First, here's one from early 1983, when I'm not even 2 1/2 years old, but still super-stoked to get to help Pap carry some firewood in from the garage at my grandparents' house. I think I'd already started to help chop it outside first, at least the smaller pieces.

This trip to the Smithsonian is I'd guess from the summer of '87. My brother and I are on the horn/plate area, but just look at how much the kids are climbing all over the thing. Also notice how few parents are in sight, and how those that are nearby are either paying them no mind (assured that the kids aren't stupid and clumsy enough to kill themselves), or are looking on from a distance.

This next one is a bit hard to make out, but it looks like the spring from anytime between '87 and '89. The distance alone makes it unusual from today's perspective of parents snapping pictures from up close. My mother kept herself hidden in the kitchen like in some wildlife documentary, so as to not disturb their natural behavior.

They've got a plastic kids' table set up with what looks like milk and probably cookies for sale to passersby. Letting milk sit out in the afternoon sun? Rookie mistake, dudes. But they learned for the next time and started selling kool-aid. I only assume they thought there was an untapped niche for those growing anxious of the crowded market in lemonade. You don't ever see kids selling stuff on their own anymore, but it was nothing newsworthy in the entrepreneurial Eighties. They're discussing something, who knows what, but it's all taking place unmediated by grown-ups. If you don't learn how to represent yourself in a social interaction, you'll never feel comfortable around other people.

And now we turn to the real shockers. One of my brothers was born in camouflage, and here he is setting off on his first real hunting trip with two uncles, sometime in the late '80s. Yep, that's a real .22 rifle in the hands of a second or third-grader. I don't think he hit anything himself, but he did bring back a grouse head to scare the girls at school with. Nowadays Pap would probably be fined or locked up for teaching the three of us to shoot at such a young age.

This one's from late 1988. My grandmother's caption reads, Let's go to the woods "Pap" -- we would always bug him to take us out there so we could run around, chop tree branches off, push big dead trees over, sever a thick vine to go swinging on out across the ravine, and whatever else would put hair on our chest. It wasn't the anarchy of spoiled brats given total license with dangerous toys -- we actually had to learn how to use those things properly or suffer the consequences. I'm carrying an ax, the center brother a pick-ax, and the left brother a hatchet. All that red... and not givin' a fuck.

The next two scenes are from their 8th birthday party in 1990. One of their friends aims a mini-sawed-off shotgun at the other who points back a life-size rifle. And not a grown-up in sight to steer them away! Also notice the lack of a big orange knob at the muzzle, or any other garish colors and weird shapes that would signal right away that it's just a replica for babies. Kids' guns looked like real guns at one time.

The final scene from Scarface? Nope, just another party where we're pretending to blow each other away, point blank. Just think: that's one of my parents taking a picture of their own precious little dear with a gun pressed against the back of his skull! We indulged in so much more black humor back then -- everything's so damn serious and weepy these days. Everybody is a snarkmeister, yet nobody wants to "go there" or "be that guy". It's like the dork squad took over the whole country.

Easter 1991, when they're still 8. So many things going right here it'd make a modern parent's head explode: he must be 15 feet up in the air, he's distracted and only holding on with one hand, his brother isn't doing much to spot him on the ground, and as usual there are no grown-ups in sight.

I had a summertime job when I was 10, and my brother took a stab at earning a living at that age too. He's on the left, I'm there on the right to lend a hand. This is almost the summer of '93, and he's set up a table selling baseball cards at one of those small-scale conventions that they used to have before people took it way too seriously and would only patronize Lord of the Rings-scale conventions -- i.e., for dorks. This was in a church basement, I think. You can't see it, but on the floor behind the table he brought his functioning cash register -- back then lots of kids had been bitten by the Alex P. Keaton bug.

Finally, here's one from somewhere between '92 and '94. The society was starting to move away from the "you can do it!" spirit and back toward the cult of managerialism last seen during the mid-century. But the decline had only begun; you could still find unsupervised activities that were technically illegal yet necessary for proper development. Pap let us drive his tractor once we'd gotten to be around 10 or 11 or so, and as you can see, it didn't matter if a pedestrian was chasing you or not. Shoot, they need to learn how to make a clean getaway while they're still young, don't they?

Ax-swinging little boy, can you be as far away as you appear? We flung ourselves into some weird parallel dimension and must squint to make out your face anymore.

Disrespectful kids these days

As much as we may have gone against our parents' wishes or even explicit instructions back in the good old days, we never dared to disrespect them to their face -- let alone call them a swear word. Well, teenagers did seem more defiant back then, but definitely not toddlers or children who weren't big enough to hit back.

Since it never happened, I'm not really sure what our punishment would've been -- ax to the head, maybe? Impalement out in the front yard as a lesson to the other neighborhood brats? I don't know, and I'm glad I never found out.

Yet today it's quite common to hear 3-to-7 year-olds shouting commands and insults right in their parents' face, in public. Whether outside the nearby daycare center, inside Starbucks, or around the supermarket, I can't count the number of times I've heard some little squirt scream "Stupid!" "You give me that RIGHT NOW!" "STOP! You stop being a bad mommy!" One more taboo that has disappeared in my own lifetime...

Still, that's nothing compared to what you'll hear when they're around their family in a private space, where they know strangers won't shoot them a nasty glare, where they know their blood relatives will tolerate way more shit than the general public would.

So far I've heard "asshole!" and "little bitch!" from my nearly 5 year-old nephew when he gets angry during playtime. Well, your parents may not automatically spank you for cursing right to their face, but when you're playing with Uncle Agnostic, homey don't play dat. WHOMP!

I've had to give him three hard spankings so far, but if that only happens once or twice a year, he'll just write it off as the occasional cost of having to visit family. I doubt even a steady stream of spankings from his parents alone would correct him. It's the punishment they get from the outside world that sets them straight. If the other kids on the playground shirk their duty of beating up on the bratty kids, if the grown-ups refrain from walking over to pinch a little shit's ear in public, then children learn that it's OK to fuck around with other people.

I've tried to drive that point home by, perhaps hopelessly, trying to reason with my nephew -- that no one likes to be called bad names, so if he calls those big boys over there a swear word, they won't be like Uncle Agnostic, and they'll punch him in the face, beat him up, and never want to play with him again.

It's no wonder the Millennials continue to act so retarded and disrespectful well past their college years. Socialization grows out of socializing. A generation of micro-managed drones content in the snugness of their cocoons cannot turn out other than dismissive or mousy as adolescents and adults.

So pitch in everyone, and paddle a preschooler today. Let's all help to keep our community clean.

Playing with your parents instead of on your own

Every time I see my nephew, who's now 4 years and 9 months old, it crystallizes something I'd already seen more broadly but not as vividly. For example, children these days have almost no interest in playing on their own or with others their own age, especially if it's playing outside.

Instead, they want to stay indoors, and they keep bugging you to join in their activities -- not just here or there, and not just to bring something to your attention for approval, but like you have to play along with them whenever they get into something. And they don't just single out a particular family member -- everyone present has to drop the grown-up things they're doing and play with or supervise the kiddies.

Back in the '80s, all I wanted my parents to do regarding toys was to buy them and if necessary put them together. On special occasions they might take pictures, shoot a home movie, or have us speak into the microphone for a tape recording. But on the whole, we wanted to play with our toys, run around the yard, and play in the sandbox without adult supervision, let alone adult participation. Even better if we could take off altogether on our bikes, skates, or on foot, to go visit a friend's house, the park, the pool, the arcade, the mall, or any other place our parents did not control.

And our parents were only too happy to leave us be. They had socializing of their own to carry on, TV shows of their own to watch ("aw man, the grown-ups are hogging the TV for Jeopardy and Matlock again), or just relax on their own free from the distractions of Hey look at this! and Hey look at that! Yeah, they interacted with us here and there, but mostly they left us to our world and we left them to theirs. The only times that they would usually get involved were those where we couldn't do something by ourselves, like reading us a book.

These kinds of dependent behaviors show that the social isolation of children over the past 20 years is not only due to helicopter parents struggling to lock up their kids, but just as well to the stunted goals of the kids themselves. In the good old days, if our parents wanted to imprison us when we really wanted to have fun, we might've just flown the coop.

Differential survival of rituals from pagan vs. classic world religions

During the lead-up to Christmas, you may have heard two polar opposite camps pushing the same message -- that Christmas is not a True Christian (TM) holiday, so it would be best if we just dumped it. Those groups are, first, the hardcore new atheist types, who think they're pulling the rug out from under the pretensions of tradition for a practice that only got going during the Victorian era; and second, the church of hardcore Christian Cosplayers for whom any deviation from authentic practice of ye olden days, like 1000 years ago or longer, is heresy.

The new atheist types offer nothing to replace our existing set of rituals, and can therefore be dismissed right away. Some fraction are just lamewads who don't want any special rituals in their lives at all, and the other fraction are those who accept some ritual component to life, but only if it's asocial or anti-social, such as camping out for Hobbit tickets or clawing your fellow man during a Black Friday looting session, respectively. Coming together to go caroling, non-ironically, would be beyond the pale.

But the Cosplay Christian objection must be taken more seriously, because they do propose specific holidays to focus on more than Christmas, whether earlier Catholic traditions like Advent or even further back like keeping the Sabbath, observing Passover, etc., as the Jews in Jesus' time would have. Whatever they include, they definitely exclude practices from the pagan or barbarian groups from the Medieval period and earlier. In particular Christmas and Easter would be out due to their pagan roots.

Still, we should keep traditions that are worth keeping. How can we distinguish those that do their job well as traditions from those that do not? One quick check is to see how well it has fared over time. By this measure, following kosher food taboos would seem to be fair game for junking, as just about every religious group has done that descends from the religion of the Jews in Jesus' time. Moving from the realm of rituals to beliefs, the vivid pictures of Heaven and Hell -- of the land of the dead in general -- are among the most memorable and widely held beliefs, even though they're derived more from Proto-Indo-European and other pre-Christian religions, such as Zoroastrianism. Their success would recommend that we keep them.

In fact, when we look at our most enduring holiday rituals, it seems like most of them have pagan rather than strictly Christian roots -- not just the overall spirit of Christmas but specific activities like caroling, the rite of spring that accompanies Easter, the harvest-time indulgence of Thanksgiving, the carnivalesque role-reversal of Halloween, the calendrical rite of the New Year, and the patriotic celebrations of the Fourth of July. Or at least as these holidays existed up through the 1980s, before becoming more atomized and drained of spectacle. But hey, lasting all that time is still pretty damn good.

Is this part of a more general pattern? Indeed it is. Here is a wonderful, brief cross-cultural review of rituals and their relationship to societal structure. (They also look at how different parts of the ritual relate to each other, apart from social context.) The authors Atkinson and Whitehouse look separately at dysphoric and euphoric rituals -- the former are painful ones like initiation rites, and the latter are more enjoyable ones like public celebrations.

Their data come from a compendium of anthropological fieldwork, so they have no idea how long the practices have been in practice. But what appears to give a ritual a better chance of being passed on through the generations is a high level of arousal -- that feeling of elation or even getting pumped up. Rushing around the mall with only thoughts of gifts for others on your mind, as well as anticipating what you'll be getting in your turn, the thunder and explosion of fireworks on the Fourth of July, getting sloshed and dancing the night away on New Year's Eve, taking on a different, more hell-raising persona on Halloween without fear of being punished for it later. It's no wonder these traditions survived as long as they did -- they're just so much fun! They lift you up out of your ordinary routine and throw you into a special experience.

What societal variables have an influence on how arousing a group's euphoric rituals are? Controlling for other factors, it was only the presence of classical religion (i.e. the major "world religions" like Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.). And that influence was negative. As the authors discuss, these religions tend to have a more literate and doctrinal emphasis, not simply a set of energetic corporeal activities that everybody just joins in without knowing exactly -- or even remotely -- "what it's all about". World religions try to domesticate the wild frenzy of earlier religious rituals.

And yet just reciting the catechism is not enough to glue the adherents together. Look at how pitiful the track record is for the various sects of Marxism / Communism. They had their own guides written in question-and-answer format, derived from some higher authority, allowing them to be transmitted quickly and widely. Yet by not offering anything exciting to ever take part in, they failed to replace religion. Far and away the strongest repulsive force of leftist sects is their joyless treadmill of an alternative lifestyle, one damned meeting after another.

Unlike modern systems of doctrine, those spawned by the world religions could only have caught on by tolerating or even encouraging the adopters to carry on some of their traditional rituals. Today, although belief in those doctrines has been fading, the pagan rituals haven't suffered as precipitous of a decline. (Though there too people these days don't seem as interested in losing themselves in ritual -- they'd rather continue their boring, never-ending session of web-surfing.)

The power of religion to bind members of a community together and guide them in their daily lives cannot be denied. But as we grope our way forward in a de-Christianizing phase of history, we should keep our eyes open to what has served us well in the past, and try now as then to incorporate those rituals into whatever new system we converge toward. Again the non-answers of new atheists means we can ignore them when trying to figure out what to replace existing rituals with, or how to modify them. At the same time, only an idiot would dismiss the Greek and Roman heritage as mere pagan philosophy and barbarian mythology, let alone the broader Proto-Indo-European tradition.

Given how uncertain this process will be, it doesn't make sense to chart out a blueprint and start ticking off the boxes once we've exchanged this ritual for that one, or modified this one in such-and-such a way. It will involve lots of trial and error, but then it always has. Still, we should remember that traditional traditions have withstood a stronger test of time than new-fangled traditions, and that we might end up relying heavily on the barbarians for our rituals, even as we rely on the civilized for our doctrines.

The anti-social '90s: Compost piles

When people feel more like secluding themselves from the rest of their neighborhood, they think primarily about the kinds of spaces and structures that they'll be inhabiting on a daily basis. The built environment therefore shows some of the most striking changes over time, as societies cycle through more outgoing and more cocooning phases.

Earlier I looked at the rise of privacy fences over the past 20 years, and still have yet to keep my promise to cover the same trend during the mid-century. It was there; I just haven't felt like writing it all up yet.

Another example came from a source that wasn't even trying to brainstorm all the various ways that we started cocooning more over the past 20 years. Last night I caught an episode of That's So '90s on the DIY network, and it covered all sorts of trends and fads from that decade. One was the proliferation of compost piles -- basically a large, smelly heap of yard waste, food scraps, and critter shit.

They showed clips from '90s-era home & garden TV shows advising how to set it up, and they all placed them along a fence, i.e. next to your property line. Hey, what better way to drive away your neighbors than to pile foul odors right up against their supposed backyard sanctuary? Whenever we started ours in the mid-'90s, I remember placing it along a fence, and I think the neighbors on the other side had theirs there too. Shoot, our compost piles socialized with each other more than we did!

Converting a small chunk of your backyard into a garbage dump also had the side effect of keeping you out of your own backyard. You holed up indoors not only to avoid the nearby compost piles, but your own as well. If everybody just pitched in to make the whole block smell like grunge, then we could all enjoy the feeling of never wanting to hang out in our backyards. Talk about neighbors helping neighbors.

Returning to a point I brought up in the post on perfume, we tend not to remember smells too well. A good number of books have been written detailing what different periods looked like, sounded like, and felt like. Taste and especially smell don't leave such strong memories, so reconstructing their histories is much harder to do. But when evoked, these memories -- or even vivid descriptions to someone who wasn't there -- can be powerful. Someone wrote that in the 1970s, New York City smelled like piss and sex. Well, in the 1990s, suburban backyards smelled like shit and mold.

Why are they not as prevalent now as during the '90s? Some trends of that decade represented an overshooting of anti-socialness. It was the acrimonious initial phase of the divorce of every individual from their community. After the split had been completely effected, we didn't need to act so hostile -- by now, it's understood that we don't want anything to do with each other. So although we are more fragmented now than in the '90s, we're at least more amicable than we were then, although obviously far less so than during the '60s through the '80s.

Sit-coms with two interacting situations

Was TV always so dumb and predictable? I've been tuning in to some classic shows after visiting home for Christmas, and it's striking how even ordinary sit-coms from the good old days show craftsmanship in their writing. Nothing mind-blowing, but novel and unexpected enough to catch your attention, and with the narrative threads woven together naturally.

This prevents the tedium and predictability of more recent comedy shows and movies where one major thread is pursued. Two equally important plotlines allow the possibility of a problematic interaction which is later resolved. With one, the only thing that can get in the way of the plot advancing are separate little obstacles that are eventually surmounted. The weaker strength of these often contrived obstacles don't allow much tension to build up -- you sense that the main plotline is too dominant, and it'll just bulldoze clumsily over the mini-obstacles. If there is a second plotline at all, it unfolds entirely independently of the main plotline. Family Guy on TV and Superbad on film are two examples of this recent trend toward comic narrative monotony.

And the unpretentious nature of TV and film from back then steered clear of the opposite extreme, where two supposedly strong and independent threads are headed on a collision course that you can see coming from a mile away. That announces the writer's authorship too loudly. It also defuses the unpredictability that comes from an episode where the two threads have no obvious relationship to each other. In this latter case, you're wondering, if they interact at all, how and when it'll all come together. It keeps things exciting.

An example of the telegraphed-crash approach is the movie Rushmore, where early on two main characters first develop an unusual friendship (one teenaged, one middle-aged) and then fall for the same woman. It's obvious how it will roughly end, since the woman is an adult teacher at the school where the younger guy is a student, while the middle-aged guy is a wealthy industrialist. Clearly she'll choose the older over the younger of the two. Whatever other little surprises this may allow, it still gives the movie a fatalistic rather than spontaneous quality.

I can't think of sit-coms that go to this other extreme, perhaps because the narrative structure is more suited to feature-length comedy-drama movies. I mention it mainly to show that older comedy shows maintained an artful balancing act, not merely choosing one extreme over another.

To give one quick example, I just saw a 1978 episode of Three's Company which begins with two separate plotlines: 1) Jack sucks up to Janet in the hopes that she'll give him, rather than Chrissy, a pair of Frank Sinatra tickets so he can impress a girl with a classy date, and 2) Mr. Roper buys a parakeet as an anniversary gift for his wife, but gives it to Jack, Janet, and Chrissy to watch over it and keep it a secret before the day arrives. These threads have no obvious connection at all, and don't interact until near the end.

Jack has won the Frank Sinatra tickets and starts getting all swaggery as he calls up the girl to ask her out. In his excitement during the phone call, he plops down on the couch and squashes the box that the parakeet had been kept in. Mr. and Mrs. Roper show up so that he can present her with her gift, but with the bird dead, Jack quickly improvises and hands Mrs. Roper the concert tickets as the anniversary gift, with Mr. Roper playing along, his wife none the wiser, crisis averted.

In a final flourish, Chrissy reveals that she'd let the bird out of the box earlier, so that Jack has sacrificed his tickets -- and a good shot at scoring with a Swedish babe -- all for nothing. I think that was the gist anyway, as I got distracted at that point by the credits rolling in a pop-up box as the show was still going. Even re-runs these days are sliced up to fit in another 3 or 4 minutes of ads.

In any case, the interaction between the two plotlines was not foreseeable, and neither was the resolution. Instead of mindlessly marching forward, these ornamental twists and turns give the show a spontaneity and energy that's been lacking in more recent sit-coms. It's not the stuff of storytelling legend, but then it's only meant to be an enjoyable 30-minute romp, and surprises like that make it worth tuning in for. You don't really notice how boring the newer TV shows are until you watch something from a time of skilled narrative decoration.

Perfume ads, pre-pornography

It's taken so long for the idea to even occur to me, but I haven't looked into the history and cycles of perfume and cologne. Seems natural enough after looking into the visual culture, music, literature, etc., to see if they too track the trend in the crime rate. Because they leave no trace, it's hard to know what scents were popular when and among whom, without first-hand testimony. Fortunately it seems like there's enough written down to piece together the history.

Before writing that up, though, I thought it'd be worth taking a quick look at what the industry's ad campaigns used to look like. Today, they're certainly the first ones we'd think of when calling to mind examples of trashy or offensive ads.

My earliest memory of fragrance ads are the Kate Moss campaign for Obsession. She's nude and looks to be about 13 -- which I didn't mind back in 1993, when I was also 13. But taking a second look nearly 20 years later, yeah, I see why everybody got so worked up over them, especially since they were plastered everywhere.

I never noticed any change away from that trend in the meantime, so I'd always assumed they were like that back through, well, I didn't think about it exactly, but probably back through the 1970s and late '60s.

It turns out the mainstream porno perfume ad is a product of the past 20 years. It's unrelated to the sexual revolution -- indeed, it sprung up just as young people began to have less sex and with fewer partners. Real life was becoming more prudish, so people wanted to look at really bizarre ads to shock themselves awake? I don't know.

An easy way to see these changes is to look at the ad campaigns for a single perfume over time. Ideally you'd want to look at the ads for many popular perfumes in a given year, and do so across however many years. But the quick way works pretty well too.

Here is a gallery that shows the evolution of the ads for Coco by Chanel, starting with its debut in the mid-1980s. You can find other popular perfumes by decade by searching Fragrantica and then doing a Google image search for their ads.

To anyone whose memories only go back to the naked pedo-looking Kate Moss, the ads of the '80s appear to come from an earlier, defunct civilization. The women are glamorous, mysterious, and playful, rather than cheap, obvious, and bitchy.

The main difference, at least for me, is how the '80s babes may come off as mischievous, but it's all in the spirit of good fun, wanting to challenge the men to approach them and see how well they can do. Their followers from the past 20 years give off a haughty and bored-with-you kind of vibe, while still showing way more of their bodies -- combined, they project a harsh warning of "look but don't touch". They're attention whores who don't need to interact with someone else to please themselves.

That focus on sassiness actually detracts from all the skin shown by the recent models: a half-naked woman who insists on keeping the man at arm's length appears uncomfortable with her own body. Just by looking, you can tell it'd be like making it with a sack of potatoes. The earlier pictures, although revealing less skin, show a more sensual woman.

Also note the total lack of shock value in the earlier ads. Even in the one from '88-'89, it takes awhile for the mind to register that you're looking at a woman with no top on. It's not so on-the-nose. Desperate attempts to shock the audience, like the S&M, heroin, and generic prostitute imagery of the past 20 years, only shows how vegetative the viewers' daily lives must be. Back in the '80s, you didn't need to shake them awake -- they were already rarin' to go.

If you're still skeptical, just see for yourself. Find some popular perfumes from previous decades with the Fragrantica search thingie, then check out their ad campaigns on Google images. Especially if you were born after the early '70s, you'll be surprised by how tasteful, if provocative, the perfume ads used to be.

The Hobbit's high frame rate as mid-century revival

Judging from the Lord of the Rings movie that I fell asleep during, the new Hobbit movie must be a real snoozer -- blowing a kid's movie up into a hundred-hour trilogy? Jesus.

Although I won't go see it, I was interested to hear that Peter Jackson has been trying to push for a new technology in recording and displaying the movie -- capturing it at 48 frames per second, or twice the standard rate. It's actually closer to the frame rate used for TV shows. By taking twice as many snapshots per unit of time, the result is more photorealistic.

And yet by pushing photorealism too far, it winds up looking merely like TV. Here's someone's attempt to re-create the effect as accurately as possible through a YouTube video:



Now, 24 frames per second has been the industry standard since the birth of the talkie era in the late 1920s. It provides just enough of a flow of images to be convincing, yet not so much flow that it looks ordinary. It conveys that the movie is something special, like the brushstrokes of a painting.

As it turns out, there was an earlier attempt to boost the frame rate of blockbuster movies, then as now to achieve less flicker and more realism. When would you guess that was? That's right -- the 1950s. Oklahoma! (1955) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), both of which landed in the top 10 at the box office, were filmed at 30 fps when the Todd-AO process began taking the industry by storm.

They soon dropped the technology and returned to 24 fps for their subsequent hit movies like South Pacific, Cleopatra, and The Sound of Music. Based on the tepid reaction to the Hobbit's high frame rate, I assume it too will become marginal after perhaps another couple of trials.

The approach to movie-making in the mid-century might be best described as the Bombastic Ordinary. And in so many ways, movies of the past two decades have slowly revived that approach: not only taking a stab at higher frame rates, but also running times well over 2 hours, epic themes and plotlines overflowing with backstory, a long depth of field that displays too many distracting objects in clear focus, the worsening of that problem by the use of 3-D, other sensory gimmicks like vibrating the theater seats, and dull visual effects, whether the rubber suit of many a cheesy '50s sci-fi flick or the porridge-like CGI of today.

The general audience in both periods has so little appreciation for the unusual, the sacred, or the sublime that no profit-seeking movie producer would make something that stood out as visually special. It has to look as much as possible like everyday real life. And yet audiences "won't leave their homes" unless there's some kind of different experience, hence the bloated narratives, pretentious acting, and fantasy settings that don't feel tantalizingly exotic, but too remote to get truly lost in.

Our Neo-Fifties zeitgeist is easiest to see in the visual culture because it's palpable rather than abstract, and because the visual culture of the past is fairly well preserved, unlike fuzzier social trends. Those who refuse to believe that teenagers these days have such low sex drives cannot wave away how similar our movies look and feel to mid-century movies.