Baby Boomers (born from 1946 to '64) as a percentage of big-time political office-holders (current figures for the U.S.).
President: 100%
Governors: 78%
House Reps: 75%
Senators: 63%
Supreme Court Justices: 56%
And the majority of the non-Boomers are not X-ers but Silents -- the hidden generation that has tag-teamed with the Boomers in bankrupting and destroying Western economies and polities (a topic for an upcoming post).
By this point, the fix is in -- why bother voting? I've been old enough to vote since the '98 elections, and have cast it exactly once -- for Nader in 2000. (Not terribly different from Buchanan -- populist leftie vs. populist rightie.)
The Millennials are starting to become more numerous than the Boomers in the general population, after the aging process has winnowed out a fair number of Boomers, and as the echo boom has worked its way into the 20-something age group. The baby busters of Gen X tried holding up the fort the best they could while they were vastly outnumbered, so now it's on the Millennials to launch the attack on the Boomers.
True, they're introverted, awkward, and bratty. But awkwardness just means they won't make change in a face-to-face, storm-the-castle kind of way. They could still pull a lever in the cocoon of a voting booth.
And just maybe their brattiness can be harnessed to defund the preposterous and unsustainable entitlements for, e.g., prescription drugs through Medicare -- AKA, Boomers stubbornly continuing to eat junk food like children, getting diabetes and metabolic syndrome broadly, and wanting healthy younger people to foot the bill. And all without having to alter their diet, as a token of good faith and atonement, but feeling entitled to binge on carboholic junk until they drop dead.
And all those later-in-life health consequences of debauchery when they were young. Think of how much poor health, especially cancer, is the sum of all sorts of cryptic STDs and lingering side-effects of hard drug use. "Hey man, it was the Seventies, we didn't know any better... now pay our Medicare bills -- or don't young people have a sense of responsibility anymore?"
Gen X likes to rag on how lame the Millennials have turned out, but politics makes strange bedfellows, and as usual the future will prove to be an interesting time indeed.
June 5, 2014
June 4, 2014
Overuse of close-up shots in movies: not a borrowing from TV
Those who can stand to watch Millennial era movies more than I can have noticed that there are way too many close-up shots nowadays. See David Bordwell on the topic here and here, as well as a lengthy thread on the forums at cinematography.com.
Close-up shots allow us to read detail on the face, but obscure body language and posture, as well as the setting. We generally only see one person at a time, so we don't get to see the interaction between characters — only cutting from one to another. Other people are part of the setting, so we also can't see how the characters are placed with respect to one another in space, nor where they're facing (e.g., are two characters looking at each other during an exchange, or is one of them facing / looking away?).
A common complaint is that this overuse of close-ups makes a movie "look like TV," where the norm is one close-up shot alternating with another for each line of dialog, on and on and on.
I don't care for contempo TV shows either, so this sounds a little off. My hunch is that TV didn't used to rely so heavily on close-up framing and shot / reverse shot editing. That would mean the trend has affected both TV and movies, though perhaps being even more common on the small screen.
Let's investigate, shall we? I'll take it for granted that today's lame-o shows follow the close-up approach, if everyone says so. But I also checked the trailers on YouTube for the first and second seasons of Orphan Black, one of those trendoid "edgy" shows that styles itself as breaking new ground but is jumping on the bandwagon of the look du jour. It too is mostly close-ups, and minimal movement from either the camera or the actors.
What about older TV shows? Sit-coms are out because comedy, even today, is shot from farther back so we can see the characters interacting with each other, and see their reactions to each other in real time rather than interrupting one's expression to catch a glimpse of another's. That leaves action and drama, which have both undergone the shift toward close-ups. Fight scenes today are shot close up and tight around the characters. And drama unfolds in alternating close-ups of two people standing still or sitting down.
Well, I've already written an off-the-cuff post about how engaging the camera work was on Magnum, P.I., so why not continue with that example? It was one of the highest-rated shows in the '80s, its theme song landed on the Billboard charts, and it's one that anyone would nominate for definitive '80s TV shows. So this isn't cherry-picking.
It's also worth studying because it was an even mix of action and adventure with drama and mystery — and not comedy. Does the dramatic dialog unfold in shot / reverse shot while close up? Does the action lock right onto subjects, blocking out the arena that it's taking place in?
I'm certainly not going to review every episode, or even do a close reading of one scene in one episode. That could be cherry-picking. Instead I've put together an array of 20 screenshots that come from the thumbnails of full-length episodes available on YouTube. This places each shot halfway through the episode, not at a spot that I purposely chose to make old TV look better than new movies. I didn't cherry-pick which episodes I included either — the first ones that came up in the search results.
Here is a just-dropping-in look at a couple dozen episodes of Magnum, P.I. (click to enlarge):
None is shot up so close that only the face is in view. The single shots are from far enough back that we typically get a sense of place from the setting. The somewhat closer-up shots are two-shots where we see characters interacting with each other, using their hands and upper body language. Plus that two-shot of the not-so-friendly dogs. Just think of how much we'd lose if we only had a close-up framing the dogs' heads -- are they even facing toward some character, or are they just the type that barks indiscriminately? Quite a few have more than two characters interacting, and placed at different distances from the camera.
Read that earlier post on the show for a closer reading of how particular sequences tend to play out. The blocking is not just "enter room, walk straight to standing / sitting spot, and start blathering for five minutes." Actors move around the setting, often at different distances (e.g., someone pacing nervously in the foreground, while another leisurely strolls around in the background, with a wall separating them so neither is aware of the other, but with a window through it so that we can see both movements).
Lots of examples too of what Bordwell calls "the cross," where A begins on the left and B on the right, and their paths lead A to the right and B to the left. Simple switching like that makes us attend more to the action, rather than tune out spatially once we know that A has plopped down here, B has plopped down there, and they'll never move around until they need to leave the scene.
While on YouTube, I watched some scenes from an episode of Columbo, and there too there was no heavy use of close-ups. Indeed, the most famous staging of characters on that show has Columbo in a medium or long shot, almost ready to leave the setting when he remembers "just one more thing" that leads him to backtrack into a closer-up shot to ask the suspect another couple of questions. Like Magnum, P.I., that show combined mystery and drama, though not action (or comedy).
That's my take on what's going on in both TV and movies from the past 20-odd years — a shift away from mystery, anticipation, and tension, and toward obviousness and instantaneous reflexive responses.
Before, you could clearly perceive the configuration of the characters relative to one another, relative to the larger setting, and their trajectories (relative to each other and within the setting). You can't anticipate with projecting a current movement forward. No path of motion, no anticipation. But anticipated outcomes are not actual outcomes — you're held in suspsense until the climax or pay-off where you see if what you were projecting actually took place or not.
With super close-up shots, all that stuff that would've been included in the frame of reference has been sealed out, and you can't project where anything is heading. If there's no action, the result is dull. If there is action, the result is disorienting rather than engaging. Either way, close-up after close-up alienates the audience.
This ties into a separate but related shift in editing away from longer shots and toward a rapid pow-pow-pow rhythm. A single fluid shot allows you to anticipate the outcome, be held in suspense for a little bit, and then see if it happened or not. The interrupting back-and-forth rhythm prevents a physiological reaction from building in intensity, or develop into a full emotion or thought. It's like your sex partner switching positions every 1.5 seconds — dammit, just hold still for a little while so we can get it on.
But the ziggy-zaggy rhythm is a topic for another post. (See how annoying these abrupt cuts are?)
Close-up shots allow us to read detail on the face, but obscure body language and posture, as well as the setting. We generally only see one person at a time, so we don't get to see the interaction between characters — only cutting from one to another. Other people are part of the setting, so we also can't see how the characters are placed with respect to one another in space, nor where they're facing (e.g., are two characters looking at each other during an exchange, or is one of them facing / looking away?).
A common complaint is that this overuse of close-ups makes a movie "look like TV," where the norm is one close-up shot alternating with another for each line of dialog, on and on and on.
I don't care for contempo TV shows either, so this sounds a little off. My hunch is that TV didn't used to rely so heavily on close-up framing and shot / reverse shot editing. That would mean the trend has affected both TV and movies, though perhaps being even more common on the small screen.
Let's investigate, shall we? I'll take it for granted that today's lame-o shows follow the close-up approach, if everyone says so. But I also checked the trailers on YouTube for the first and second seasons of Orphan Black, one of those trendoid "edgy" shows that styles itself as breaking new ground but is jumping on the bandwagon of the look du jour. It too is mostly close-ups, and minimal movement from either the camera or the actors.
What about older TV shows? Sit-coms are out because comedy, even today, is shot from farther back so we can see the characters interacting with each other, and see their reactions to each other in real time rather than interrupting one's expression to catch a glimpse of another's. That leaves action and drama, which have both undergone the shift toward close-ups. Fight scenes today are shot close up and tight around the characters. And drama unfolds in alternating close-ups of two people standing still or sitting down.
Well, I've already written an off-the-cuff post about how engaging the camera work was on Magnum, P.I., so why not continue with that example? It was one of the highest-rated shows in the '80s, its theme song landed on the Billboard charts, and it's one that anyone would nominate for definitive '80s TV shows. So this isn't cherry-picking.
It's also worth studying because it was an even mix of action and adventure with drama and mystery — and not comedy. Does the dramatic dialog unfold in shot / reverse shot while close up? Does the action lock right onto subjects, blocking out the arena that it's taking place in?
I'm certainly not going to review every episode, or even do a close reading of one scene in one episode. That could be cherry-picking. Instead I've put together an array of 20 screenshots that come from the thumbnails of full-length episodes available on YouTube. This places each shot halfway through the episode, not at a spot that I purposely chose to make old TV look better than new movies. I didn't cherry-pick which episodes I included either — the first ones that came up in the search results.
Here is a just-dropping-in look at a couple dozen episodes of Magnum, P.I. (click to enlarge):
None is shot up so close that only the face is in view. The single shots are from far enough back that we typically get a sense of place from the setting. The somewhat closer-up shots are two-shots where we see characters interacting with each other, using their hands and upper body language. Plus that two-shot of the not-so-friendly dogs. Just think of how much we'd lose if we only had a close-up framing the dogs' heads -- are they even facing toward some character, or are they just the type that barks indiscriminately? Quite a few have more than two characters interacting, and placed at different distances from the camera.
Read that earlier post on the show for a closer reading of how particular sequences tend to play out. The blocking is not just "enter room, walk straight to standing / sitting spot, and start blathering for five minutes." Actors move around the setting, often at different distances (e.g., someone pacing nervously in the foreground, while another leisurely strolls around in the background, with a wall separating them so neither is aware of the other, but with a window through it so that we can see both movements).
Lots of examples too of what Bordwell calls "the cross," where A begins on the left and B on the right, and their paths lead A to the right and B to the left. Simple switching like that makes us attend more to the action, rather than tune out spatially once we know that A has plopped down here, B has plopped down there, and they'll never move around until they need to leave the scene.
While on YouTube, I watched some scenes from an episode of Columbo, and there too there was no heavy use of close-ups. Indeed, the most famous staging of characters on that show has Columbo in a medium or long shot, almost ready to leave the setting when he remembers "just one more thing" that leads him to backtrack into a closer-up shot to ask the suspect another couple of questions. Like Magnum, P.I., that show combined mystery and drama, though not action (or comedy).
That's my take on what's going on in both TV and movies from the past 20-odd years — a shift away from mystery, anticipation, and tension, and toward obviousness and instantaneous reflexive responses.
Before, you could clearly perceive the configuration of the characters relative to one another, relative to the larger setting, and their trajectories (relative to each other and within the setting). You can't anticipate with projecting a current movement forward. No path of motion, no anticipation. But anticipated outcomes are not actual outcomes — you're held in suspsense until the climax or pay-off where you see if what you were projecting actually took place or not.
With super close-up shots, all that stuff that would've been included in the frame of reference has been sealed out, and you can't project where anything is heading. If there's no action, the result is dull. If there is action, the result is disorienting rather than engaging. Either way, close-up after close-up alienates the audience.
This ties into a separate but related shift in editing away from longer shots and toward a rapid pow-pow-pow rhythm. A single fluid shot allows you to anticipate the outcome, be held in suspense for a little bit, and then see if it happened or not. The interrupting back-and-forth rhythm prevents a physiological reaction from building in intensity, or develop into a full emotion or thought. It's like your sex partner switching positions every 1.5 seconds — dammit, just hold still for a little while so we can get it on.
But the ziggy-zaggy rhythm is a topic for another post. (See how annoying these abrupt cuts are?)
June 3, 2014
Luddite experiments: the rollerball mouse
I've been using an old rollerball style mouse at my desktop computer for the past three or four weeks, and have found it better than the laser style mouses that replaced them over the last 5 to 10 years. It's a three-button scroll wheel model by General Electric (model 97859).
Here are a few thoughts on the differences:
1. The older ones are heavier, from the ball and the mechanical guts. Even the casing feels strongly built, not flimsy. More importantly, the added weight dampens your hand motion, so that the mouse doesn't take off with a typical movement. A lighter mouse almost has you making an unconscious effort to bring the movement to a stop, like a slight step on the brakes.
2. There's more friction between the mouse and the surface underneath, as the ball runs over the mousepad. This adds to the dampening of motion, like the old school steering wheels that gave the driver tighter control (unlike the newer, looser wheels where you turn too far and need to turn back to compensate).
3. The movement is smooth, fluid, and analog, as the ball spins the wheels in contact with it. It's not noticeably smoother than the laser mouses, but not less smooth either, as lazy thinking about "old technology" would predict.
4. There's more feedback, as a result of the above features. You're just more in-touch with what you're doing, whereas the laser model has a weightless quality that removes the feedback that should be going to your sense of touch. Both models give you visual feedback (the pointer moving on the screen), but the rollerball provides a redundant channel of sensory feedback. It's like using a keyboard with buttons rather than a touchscreen "keyboard".
5. The mouse buttons require a bit more force to press down, and there's a more audible click. They're still simple to use, but that extra bit of resistance and noise provides good feedback when clicking on something. The weightless, mushy, quiet mouse buttons actually require more monitoring on your part because they're so easy to press that they accidentally get pressed more often, and there's no "warning" click that goes off when this accident happens. This is an older vs. newer difference, not necessarily a rollerball vs. laser difference.
6. They're larger and fit more comfortably in the (adult male) hand. Another older vs. newer difference. The small and flimsy types require a somewhat tighter grip whenever your hand is on the mouse, which strains the hand muscles or tendons over time. You can't sense this from only moving it around for a second or two, but that added flexing / gripping adds up over a session of computer use. With a larger mouse, it's more like you're just pushing it around, while your hand rests on top.
The closest analogy I can think of is that rollerball mouses are like paintbrushes, pens, pencils, or crayons going over paper, canvas, or some other rough-ish surface, while the laser type is like the stylus for a touchscreen.
So, they're better functionally and ergonomically. The only downside is their higher maintenance, from the dust that is swept up inside the mouse whenever the ball is rolling. From my level of usage, I've had to clean out the mouse once a week, which takes all of a minute or two. For those who don't remember doing this, you remove the ball cover on the bottom, set the ball aside, and use your fingernail or something small and scrape-y to remove the ring of dust stuck around the two wheels inside. I don't need to clear it out with compressed air or anything extreme.
That downside is by far the most common complaint about them, but from the hysteria you'd think they required laborious scrubbing every couple of hours. Over the course of a week, you spend more time and calories brushing your teeth. But, in our throwaway culture we reject anything that requires even minimal maintenance. Your paintbrush has paint on the bristles and needs to be rinsed off? Nah, fuck it, just toss it out and buy a new brush.
You won't like the rollerball mouse if you prefer the weightless, friction-less experience where ultimately we'll just think of where we want the pointer to go, and it'll go there. If you prefer to keep in closer contact with the tools you're using, give them a try. The difference is not major, but enough to be worth it -- especially considering how cheap they are nowadays. I got mine at a thrift store for a dollar.
Bonus feature: they almost all use the PS/2 connector, freeing up your USB ports for things that you will plug and unplug frequently (not a mouse).
Here are a few thoughts on the differences:
1. The older ones are heavier, from the ball and the mechanical guts. Even the casing feels strongly built, not flimsy. More importantly, the added weight dampens your hand motion, so that the mouse doesn't take off with a typical movement. A lighter mouse almost has you making an unconscious effort to bring the movement to a stop, like a slight step on the brakes.
2. There's more friction between the mouse and the surface underneath, as the ball runs over the mousepad. This adds to the dampening of motion, like the old school steering wheels that gave the driver tighter control (unlike the newer, looser wheels where you turn too far and need to turn back to compensate).
3. The movement is smooth, fluid, and analog, as the ball spins the wheels in contact with it. It's not noticeably smoother than the laser mouses, but not less smooth either, as lazy thinking about "old technology" would predict.
4. There's more feedback, as a result of the above features. You're just more in-touch with what you're doing, whereas the laser model has a weightless quality that removes the feedback that should be going to your sense of touch. Both models give you visual feedback (the pointer moving on the screen), but the rollerball provides a redundant channel of sensory feedback. It's like using a keyboard with buttons rather than a touchscreen "keyboard".
5. The mouse buttons require a bit more force to press down, and there's a more audible click. They're still simple to use, but that extra bit of resistance and noise provides good feedback when clicking on something. The weightless, mushy, quiet mouse buttons actually require more monitoring on your part because they're so easy to press that they accidentally get pressed more often, and there's no "warning" click that goes off when this accident happens. This is an older vs. newer difference, not necessarily a rollerball vs. laser difference.
6. They're larger and fit more comfortably in the (adult male) hand. Another older vs. newer difference. The small and flimsy types require a somewhat tighter grip whenever your hand is on the mouse, which strains the hand muscles or tendons over time. You can't sense this from only moving it around for a second or two, but that added flexing / gripping adds up over a session of computer use. With a larger mouse, it's more like you're just pushing it around, while your hand rests on top.
The closest analogy I can think of is that rollerball mouses are like paintbrushes, pens, pencils, or crayons going over paper, canvas, or some other rough-ish surface, while the laser type is like the stylus for a touchscreen.
So, they're better functionally and ergonomically. The only downside is their higher maintenance, from the dust that is swept up inside the mouse whenever the ball is rolling. From my level of usage, I've had to clean out the mouse once a week, which takes all of a minute or two. For those who don't remember doing this, you remove the ball cover on the bottom, set the ball aside, and use your fingernail or something small and scrape-y to remove the ring of dust stuck around the two wheels inside. I don't need to clear it out with compressed air or anything extreme.
That downside is by far the most common complaint about them, but from the hysteria you'd think they required laborious scrubbing every couple of hours. Over the course of a week, you spend more time and calories brushing your teeth. But, in our throwaway culture we reject anything that requires even minimal maintenance. Your paintbrush has paint on the bristles and needs to be rinsed off? Nah, fuck it, just toss it out and buy a new brush.
You won't like the rollerball mouse if you prefer the weightless, friction-less experience where ultimately we'll just think of where we want the pointer to go, and it'll go there. If you prefer to keep in closer contact with the tools you're using, give them a try. The difference is not major, but enough to be worth it -- especially considering how cheap they are nowadays. I got mine at a thrift store for a dollar.
Bonus feature: they almost all use the PS/2 connector, freeing up your USB ports for things that you will plug and unplug frequently (not a mouse).
Jennifer Lopez wondering if the whole fake gay boyfriend thing was worth it
If you keep in touch with Blind Gossip, you've already known about J.Lo's "boytoy" serving as nothing more than a gay eunuch for an aging woman who's already been through three divorces. In reality, she's getting bonked by her bodyguard. See here and here.
Today the news is coming out in the mainstream media that the queer is involved with some tranny. Try keeping a lid on your fake relationship now. Her publicists will have to work overtime to spin this as one of those things that a modern woman just couldn't see coming, how awful it is for a man to cheat, and so on.
With someone whose time has passed and has already gotten divorced three times, you can understand her wish to maintain a semblance of desirability by officially dating someone, while not wanting to get close enough to get burned again. But, grow up and become a spinster.
By refusing to age gracefully, the modern career gal who takes on a gay eunuch faces the inevitable moment when his filthy faggotry will come to light. They aren't exactly known for their discretion in sexual behavior. ("Hey, random dude who I just followed into a public bathroom, can I suck your cock?")
Even if your publicist does successfully spin the story as the poor trusting woman caught unawares by the crafty queer, the public is still going to view you as a pitiful, clueless dupe — not a shrewd modern woman who's still got it goin' on.
I can't wait until this happens with Anne Hathaway's fake gay husband. Couldn't happen to a nicer person...
Today the news is coming out in the mainstream media that the queer is involved with some tranny. Try keeping a lid on your fake relationship now. Her publicists will have to work overtime to spin this as one of those things that a modern woman just couldn't see coming, how awful it is for a man to cheat, and so on.
With someone whose time has passed and has already gotten divorced three times, you can understand her wish to maintain a semblance of desirability by officially dating someone, while not wanting to get close enough to get burned again. But, grow up and become a spinster.
By refusing to age gracefully, the modern career gal who takes on a gay eunuch faces the inevitable moment when his filthy faggotry will come to light. They aren't exactly known for their discretion in sexual behavior. ("Hey, random dude who I just followed into a public bathroom, can I suck your cock?")
Even if your publicist does successfully spin the story as the poor trusting woman caught unawares by the crafty queer, the public is still going to view you as a pitiful, clueless dupe — not a shrewd modern woman who's still got it goin' on.
I can't wait until this happens with Anne Hathaway's fake gay husband. Couldn't happen to a nicer person...
June 1, 2014
The Catholic church and Boy Scout abuse scandals as part of the '80s revival in the wake of 9/11
The bulk of sexual abuse cases within the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts were part of the broader rising-crime trend of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Yet it took until 2002 for the Catholic church scandal to break, and 2007 for the Boy Scouts scandal. (The Washington Times did a series on the Scouts in '91, but it did not reverberate throughout popular awareness.)
Fast-forward to 2014, and we aren't dealing with these topics anymore — not because we've become desensitized, accepted them, and come to expect such behavior. If it hasn't been a hot topic for awhile now, we can't be desensitized to it. And those who weren't tuned in to the period when it was a hot topic, like the younger Millennials, ought not to be desensitized, and should be raising a stink.
It's just something we don't want to think about anymore. The Boy Scouts are going to let faggots back into the ranks of troop leaders any day now, and no one is making the obvious jokes about what that just might lead to. We're supposed to trust the experts and authorities within the organization and any governmental supervisors, and go along with it. Thinking about, let alone talking about, y'know... sex, especially when it's perverted, harmful, and offensive, would just be... well, awkward.
What was it about the climate of 2002 to the late 2000s that allowed these topics to surface and be taken at least somewhat seriously among the elite and the general public alike? You didn't see this level of outrage during most of the '90s or during this decade so far.
I think the public response to cope with 9/11 put folks in a more open mood, both the victims who were coming forward and the audience who could've chosen to tune them out. When people sense a rise in the level of dangerous attack, they naturally band together and support each other more than when they feel like the world is safe enough to go it alone.
So, from about 2002 or 2003 through I'd say 2007 or '08, the social climate suddenly got more open, engaging, and freewheeling. There was also a revival of pop culture from the later half of the '70s and especially the '80s, as we sensed that those rising-crime times had lessons to teach us in our post-9/11 world. However, after 5 to 10 years of no more 9/11 style attacks, we gradually came to view the original attack as an awful fluke, and resumed the closed-off cocooning trend that began back in the '90s.
Not only, then, was that climate more favorable to discussing an epidemic of sexual abuse in the abstract, it was even more open to these concrete scandals because they took place primarily in the '70s and '80s. We weren't remembering only the uplifting parts of life in the good old days, but the darker current running under everyday life back then as well.
In 2014, high school kids couldn't find it any uncooler than to sport the American Apparel / '80s aerobics look that their counterparts were in 2006, and bringing up the depravity of homo leaders in a major church or youth organization would just be... y'know, awkward. It almost feels like we're back to the second Clinton administration, only more so, with neo-Hanson and neo-Spice Girls music on the radio, and with sex scandals striking audiences as titillating (at most sordid) rather than disturbing.
Fast-forward to 2014, and we aren't dealing with these topics anymore — not because we've become desensitized, accepted them, and come to expect such behavior. If it hasn't been a hot topic for awhile now, we can't be desensitized to it. And those who weren't tuned in to the period when it was a hot topic, like the younger Millennials, ought not to be desensitized, and should be raising a stink.
It's just something we don't want to think about anymore. The Boy Scouts are going to let faggots back into the ranks of troop leaders any day now, and no one is making the obvious jokes about what that just might lead to. We're supposed to trust the experts and authorities within the organization and any governmental supervisors, and go along with it. Thinking about, let alone talking about, y'know... sex, especially when it's perverted, harmful, and offensive, would just be... well, awkward.
What was it about the climate of 2002 to the late 2000s that allowed these topics to surface and be taken at least somewhat seriously among the elite and the general public alike? You didn't see this level of outrage during most of the '90s or during this decade so far.
I think the public response to cope with 9/11 put folks in a more open mood, both the victims who were coming forward and the audience who could've chosen to tune them out. When people sense a rise in the level of dangerous attack, they naturally band together and support each other more than when they feel like the world is safe enough to go it alone.
So, from about 2002 or 2003 through I'd say 2007 or '08, the social climate suddenly got more open, engaging, and freewheeling. There was also a revival of pop culture from the later half of the '70s and especially the '80s, as we sensed that those rising-crime times had lessons to teach us in our post-9/11 world. However, after 5 to 10 years of no more 9/11 style attacks, we gradually came to view the original attack as an awful fluke, and resumed the closed-off cocooning trend that began back in the '90s.
Not only, then, was that climate more favorable to discussing an epidemic of sexual abuse in the abstract, it was even more open to these concrete scandals because they took place primarily in the '70s and '80s. We weren't remembering only the uplifting parts of life in the good old days, but the darker current running under everyday life back then as well.
In 2014, high school kids couldn't find it any uncooler than to sport the American Apparel / '80s aerobics look that their counterparts were in 2006, and bringing up the depravity of homo leaders in a major church or youth organization would just be... y'know, awkward. It almost feels like we're back to the second Clinton administration, only more so, with neo-Hanson and neo-Spice Girls music on the radio, and with sex scandals striking audiences as titillating (at most sordid) rather than disturbing.
May 31, 2014
IMAX in the broader revival of Midcentury aesthetics
The sudden explosion of 3D movies in the 21st century is not a revolution, a game-changer, or whatever else it's supposed to be. It's simply a return to Midcentury preferences, which favored as complete of a sensory immersion as possible at the movies.
By the '80s, audiences had undergone a change of mindset -- sensory immersion was felt to be obvious gimmickry that took you out of the moment. You wanted to listen in on the movie, and behold the movie -- from somewhat of a distance, as with any form of popular art -- not to escape into it physically as though it were a two-hour amusement park ride.
Along with 3D, there's been an explosion in IMAX, not only in blowing up ordinary films to the mammoth size of the IMAX screens, but also shooting more and more of the original on IMAX film itself, which is a much larger format than the standard 35mm film. How does this tie in with the general resurgence of Midcentury aesthetics in the Millennial era?
Well, the mammoth size of the screen is easy enough to understand. Folks in cocooning times are not very excitable, and the falling crime rates that go along with cocooning leave them cushion-brained from reading the daily news. They prefer vegging out in front of one kind of idiot box or another -- today, the internet and TV; in the Midcentury, radio and TV. Movie studios felt they had to really "wow" them at the theaters in order to lure them out of their domestic cocoons.
Remember, that was the era of the drive-in restaurant, church, and yes, movie theater. If they didn't even want to leave their cars when they ventured away from home, they would really need a spectacle to get their butts in the movie theater seats.
By contrast, the fun-loving folks of the '80s already had their motor going in daily life that they didn't need the movie projector and speakers to shock them awake like a heart defibrillator. And the rising crime rates put them in a higher state of arousal in everyday life. They didn't need to get woken up by melodramatic acting, bombastic musical scores, or gory details.
But now we're back to Midcentury levels of cocooning and falling crime rates, so audiences need to get whacked over the head to feel like the trip to the theater was worth it. You can't get your eardrums blown out at home!
There's something more going on than the sheer size of the screen, though. The size of the image as it is captured on film itself is much larger than usual. The standard since forever has been film that is 35mm wide and 4 perforations high, so that the image occupies a frame that is 20.3 mm by 15.2 mm, with an area of 309 mm squared. The film used for IMAX cameras, however, gives a frame that is 69.6 mm by 48.5 mm, with an area of 3376 mm squared -- or nearly 11 times as large of area as the 35mm image.
What does this larger image size on the film get you? A much higher resolution when it is projected. IMAX was originally used for nature and other documentary approaches that sought to deliver the most lifelike picture possible. It is like shooting a movie on "medium-format" film used in still photography (in this case, near the 6x7 size for 120 film). There, too, the larger image size on film gives much higher resolution than the standard 35mm format (the kind of film you used to buy when you used to shoot on film yourself).
It's not hard to see how the far greater resolution and more lifelike picture ties in with the rest of the whole "movie as sensory immersion in another world" phenomenon.
So, was there a counterpart in the Midcentury? My research wouldn't amount to much if there wasn't. And there was: 70mm film. It mostly went under the names Todd-AO or Super/Ultra Panavision 70, depending on whose cameras were used, but the image size on film was the same -- 48.5 mm by 22.1 mm, or 1072 mm squared. That's more than 3 times the area of standard 35mm film, although below the mammoth size of IMAX images.
And its marketing appeal was the same as that of IMAX today -- a more lifelike resolution that you were never going to get from watching TV in your home. Or even from watching standard movies. The 70mm format produced such Midcentury spectacles as South Pacific, Cleopatra, The Sound of Music (on Todd-AO), Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (on either Super or Ultra Panavision 70).
In fact, the first two major hits for Todd-AO -- Oklahoma! and Around the World in Eighty Days -- were also shot in a higher frame rate than usual, at 30 frames per second instead of 24. Note the parallel to today where Peter Jackson is trying to push 48 frames per second because it looks more lifelike than 24.
Yet the more it looks like real life, the less it looks like a movie. And, sure, if it doesn't look real at all, it won't look like much of a movie either. Somehow the degree of realism has been snuggled into a happy middle spot -- fairly realistic, but not too realistic -- since movies have had spoken dialog. A 35mm 4-perf frame, and 24 frames per second. Once you move far enough away from that optimum, it gets into the realm of virtual reality and escapism rather than stylized reality with a clear distinction of roles between performers and spectators.
I'm worried how Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie Interstellar will look, given that he's shooting more of it on IMAX than anything else he's done, including The Dark Knight Rises, which already had over an hour of IMAX-filmed scenes.
The lenses on IMAX cameras are spherical, not anamorphic, so they don't give you that sublime shallow focus that good ol' Panavision does. Oddly enough, in still photography shooting on a larger film format gives a shallower depth-of-field. Evidently, though, this effect is swamped out by the loss of the anamorphic lens when shooting on IMAX, since it gives deeper rather than shallower focus.
In my review of The Dark Knight Rises, I noted how confusing the melee scenes were because they were filmed in IMAX rather than Panavision -- too many of the crowd members' faces and bodies were in decent focus, and Bane and Batman were not singled out from the rest to be shown in focus. You didn't know where to look, and the melee looked jumbled rather than striking.
And that was with ace cinematographer Wally Pfister at the helm -- you can imagine where things will go when filmed-on-IMAX becomes as ubiquitous as 3D, and every tentpole project will try to outdo the others in how much of their movie can be shown in an overly realistic resolution.
On a broader social note, we can foresee the end of the cocooning phase of our society within the next probably 5 to 10 years. The last time around, the peak of sensory immersion and virtual reality hit between roughly 1955 and '64, a decade defined by shifting the gears from cocooning to connecting (and as a result of the more outgoing climate, a steady rise in the crime rate). So if you aren't a fan of IMAX, rest assured that it won't last that much longer. In the meantime, you'll just have to hope that they don't abuse it... but with Hollywood I wouldn't get your hopes up.
By the '80s, audiences had undergone a change of mindset -- sensory immersion was felt to be obvious gimmickry that took you out of the moment. You wanted to listen in on the movie, and behold the movie -- from somewhat of a distance, as with any form of popular art -- not to escape into it physically as though it were a two-hour amusement park ride.
Along with 3D, there's been an explosion in IMAX, not only in blowing up ordinary films to the mammoth size of the IMAX screens, but also shooting more and more of the original on IMAX film itself, which is a much larger format than the standard 35mm film. How does this tie in with the general resurgence of Midcentury aesthetics in the Millennial era?
Well, the mammoth size of the screen is easy enough to understand. Folks in cocooning times are not very excitable, and the falling crime rates that go along with cocooning leave them cushion-brained from reading the daily news. They prefer vegging out in front of one kind of idiot box or another -- today, the internet and TV; in the Midcentury, radio and TV. Movie studios felt they had to really "wow" them at the theaters in order to lure them out of their domestic cocoons.
Remember, that was the era of the drive-in restaurant, church, and yes, movie theater. If they didn't even want to leave their cars when they ventured away from home, they would really need a spectacle to get their butts in the movie theater seats.
By contrast, the fun-loving folks of the '80s already had their motor going in daily life that they didn't need the movie projector and speakers to shock them awake like a heart defibrillator. And the rising crime rates put them in a higher state of arousal in everyday life. They didn't need to get woken up by melodramatic acting, bombastic musical scores, or gory details.
But now we're back to Midcentury levels of cocooning and falling crime rates, so audiences need to get whacked over the head to feel like the trip to the theater was worth it. You can't get your eardrums blown out at home!
There's something more going on than the sheer size of the screen, though. The size of the image as it is captured on film itself is much larger than usual. The standard since forever has been film that is 35mm wide and 4 perforations high, so that the image occupies a frame that is 20.3 mm by 15.2 mm, with an area of 309 mm squared. The film used for IMAX cameras, however, gives a frame that is 69.6 mm by 48.5 mm, with an area of 3376 mm squared -- or nearly 11 times as large of area as the 35mm image.
What does this larger image size on the film get you? A much higher resolution when it is projected. IMAX was originally used for nature and other documentary approaches that sought to deliver the most lifelike picture possible. It is like shooting a movie on "medium-format" film used in still photography (in this case, near the 6x7 size for 120 film). There, too, the larger image size on film gives much higher resolution than the standard 35mm format (the kind of film you used to buy when you used to shoot on film yourself).
It's not hard to see how the far greater resolution and more lifelike picture ties in with the rest of the whole "movie as sensory immersion in another world" phenomenon.
So, was there a counterpart in the Midcentury? My research wouldn't amount to much if there wasn't. And there was: 70mm film. It mostly went under the names Todd-AO or Super/Ultra Panavision 70, depending on whose cameras were used, but the image size on film was the same -- 48.5 mm by 22.1 mm, or 1072 mm squared. That's more than 3 times the area of standard 35mm film, although below the mammoth size of IMAX images.
And its marketing appeal was the same as that of IMAX today -- a more lifelike resolution that you were never going to get from watching TV in your home. Or even from watching standard movies. The 70mm format produced such Midcentury spectacles as South Pacific, Cleopatra, The Sound of Music (on Todd-AO), Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (on either Super or Ultra Panavision 70).
In fact, the first two major hits for Todd-AO -- Oklahoma! and Around the World in Eighty Days -- were also shot in a higher frame rate than usual, at 30 frames per second instead of 24. Note the parallel to today where Peter Jackson is trying to push 48 frames per second because it looks more lifelike than 24.
Yet the more it looks like real life, the less it looks like a movie. And, sure, if it doesn't look real at all, it won't look like much of a movie either. Somehow the degree of realism has been snuggled into a happy middle spot -- fairly realistic, but not too realistic -- since movies have had spoken dialog. A 35mm 4-perf frame, and 24 frames per second. Once you move far enough away from that optimum, it gets into the realm of virtual reality and escapism rather than stylized reality with a clear distinction of roles between performers and spectators.
I'm worried how Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie Interstellar will look, given that he's shooting more of it on IMAX than anything else he's done, including The Dark Knight Rises, which already had over an hour of IMAX-filmed scenes.
The lenses on IMAX cameras are spherical, not anamorphic, so they don't give you that sublime shallow focus that good ol' Panavision does. Oddly enough, in still photography shooting on a larger film format gives a shallower depth-of-field. Evidently, though, this effect is swamped out by the loss of the anamorphic lens when shooting on IMAX, since it gives deeper rather than shallower focus.
In my review of The Dark Knight Rises, I noted how confusing the melee scenes were because they were filmed in IMAX rather than Panavision -- too many of the crowd members' faces and bodies were in decent focus, and Bane and Batman were not singled out from the rest to be shown in focus. You didn't know where to look, and the melee looked jumbled rather than striking.
And that was with ace cinematographer Wally Pfister at the helm -- you can imagine where things will go when filmed-on-IMAX becomes as ubiquitous as 3D, and every tentpole project will try to outdo the others in how much of their movie can be shown in an overly realistic resolution.
On a broader social note, we can foresee the end of the cocooning phase of our society within the next probably 5 to 10 years. The last time around, the peak of sensory immersion and virtual reality hit between roughly 1955 and '64, a decade defined by shifting the gears from cocooning to connecting (and as a result of the more outgoing climate, a steady rise in the crime rate). So if you aren't a fan of IMAX, rest assured that it won't last that much longer. In the meantime, you'll just have to hope that they don't abuse it... but with Hollywood I wouldn't get your hopes up.
May 9, 2014
Cocooning on public transportation: Victorian, Midcentury, and Millennial snapshots
Now that folks are becoming aware of how pervasive and stifling the trend toward cocooning has gotten, the awkward army has begun to mount a more active defense.
“OK, so we’re physically cutting ourselves off from one another -- is that really the worst thing in the world? Maybe we’re truly connecting over the internet anyway.”
Uh no, dork, batting five-word texts back and forth over the course of a few hours is not emotionally connecting like a simple two-minute conversation, voice-to-voice or, God forbid, face-to-face. And it doesn't answer the original charge of being anti-social -- even if you were connecting normally with the person you're texting while riding the subway, you're still closing yourself off from everyone else on the damn subway, and blocking out your surroundings when walking down the street, sitting in a coffee shop, etc.
This response is obvious and persuasive to all normal people, so that the cheerleaders of cocooning have taken a new approach to attempting to normalize abnormal social behavior -- “people used to act this way before.” How warped could such behavior be, if it had persisted for so long during an earlier time?
Here is an item by some airhead opinion writer expressing the new approach, referring to “old pictures” that show subway riders staring down at their newspapers rather than engaging one another in conversation. Nothing new to see with the phones-everywhere trend, just a contempo variation on a timeless theme, so move along folks, back to your cyber-cocoons and man-caves.
The writer must be a Millennial if she doesn’t remember the ‘80s, and is left to speculate what the past was like by lazy Googling rather than asking someone who knew, which would’ve quickly set her straight. (Real-life contact wins again.) It’s striking, though, how little awareness Millennials have of the past even from mediated sources like TV, movies, and pop music. Where are they getting the image of subway riders staring at newspapers?
In fairness, they may be thinking further back to the Midcentury, when public cocooning was in fact common. This is giving them too much credit for being aware of the world before they were born, but I can’t think of a better way to get to the snapshots of earlier cocooning periods that the title of this post promised.
First, here is a collection of complaints from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, when cocooning was reaching its peak before folks started to socialize and connect more during the Ragtime and Jazz Age. One complains about people using newspapers as distracters and fencer-off-ers while they sulk around on public transit. Sound familiar? But notice again how the complaints trail off during the 1910s and are gone by the Roaring Twenties.
But the Jazz Age wouldn’t last forever. Here are some “old pictures” showing Midcentury subway riders, who are indeed wrapped up in their own private little worlds despite being packed in like sardines, using a mass media product to focus their attention no further than their personal space and to physically fence themselves off from their fellow travelers.
These pictures do disprove the idea that we are forced into cocooning nowadays because of technological changes. Folks in the ‘40s and ‘50s didn’t need portable electronics, let alone web browsers, to isolate themselves in public. It goes the other way around -- there’s a change in the social mood, and people use whatever is available to further their new goals. Back then, it was newspapers, now it’s devices for web-surfing and texting.
But what happens when the mood changes, and people don’t feel like cocooning anymore? Hard as it is to remember, there was just such a time in the not too distant past.* All of a sudden, newspaper-starer-at-ers become rare on the subway, and appear to be mostly members of the Silent Generation (the Millennials of their day), whose formative years were shaped by Midcentury cocooning. The pictures below were a thing a few years ago -- “Woah, look how different the New York subway used to be!” -- but even the past five years are too long to remember for people who want no connection to people other than themselves.
Not only did these people have newspapers still available, they had paperback books and toward the end of the period, portable stereos, casette players, and CD players. Yet, it looks nothing like the world 15 to 20 years later, when everyone would be locked into their book, iPod, or smartphone:
True, people from the '70s and '80s are not engaging each other in lively conversation -- they’re strangers riding mass transit in a high-density hive of alienation. It is unrealistic to expect them to chat as though they were suburban dwellers recognizing one another at church.
And yet, they’re at least giving each other their undivided attention. They don’t appear to be focusing on anything in particular, and are “leaving the door open” like college freshmen do when they’re waiting for someone to invite them to something somewhere.
They look unsettled because of the rising crime rate and the growing sense that nothing could be done about it, that you just had to get used to it and cope with it as best as you could, of course with the support of others, who were going through the same situations themselves. Most of them are looking through a thousand-yard stare even inside of a narrow subway car.
If you look through “old pictures” or old videos from the ‘80s and early ‘90s, you’re struck by how dissociative the people look, talk, and move. Not necessarily glum, as on the subway, but just focused outwards and not monitoring the self inside. Every moment looks like it was an out-of-body experience. See this video clip of the Jersey Shore from 1994, thanks to a commenter from awhile ago, and this post and the gallery in the first link, showing the mall culture circa 1990.
Perhaps the tiny uptick in complaints about web browsers everywhere is a signal that the cocooning trend will bottom out in the next five years or so. The complaints of the late Victorian era set the stage for the more outgoing climate of Jazz Age, just as the complaints of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and The Feminine Mystique heralded the more outgoing clmiate of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.
It’s not an attitude that can be forced to speed up the process. We just have to keep our eyes and ears open to see when others start showing signs that they’re ready to connect again after hibernating for so long.
* Those who were there have managed to block it out because of all the “awkward!” memories they have of more free-wheeling times, while Millennials refuse to explore that time more out of resentment over missing the boat. It’s more than mere incuriosity (though lord knows that’s another defining trait of theirs). They feel gipped that their whole upbringing has been full of lies about how the world would explode if they didn’t wear two bike helmets or didn’t let their parents know where they were going for the day.
May 4, 2014
Cookers vs. cleaners
We hear the phrase "cooking and cleaning" so much that we might think the two activities naturally go together. All they share, though, is their private, domestic setting — the phrase usually signals how domestic or not-so-domestic a woman is, or is expected to be.
Cookers are more corporeal and in touch with their senses, capable of feeling joy, and attentive to others. Cooking can be a social activity, at the very least the meal is social (unless you're dining alone). The cook makes a choice to include others in the meal (they could have prepared a smaller quantity of food), which shows their thoughtfulness.
Cleaners are more cerebral and cut off from their surroundings (which they feel are dangerous or contaminating), rarely experience elation, and are more self-focused. Cleaning is never fun, social, or for the benefit of others (always for the self — get those yucky germs away from me / straighten up the living room, and if it happens to benefit others living here or passing through, then lucky for them.)
Cookers are more likely to be found in pastoralist cultures, while cleaners are more likely to hail from farming cultures. Farming leads to sedentary high-density living, making for a dirtier and more infectious environment, and putting farmers more on their guard for tidying up and napalming household surfaces. Livestock herding allows people to spread out more thinly and to pick up and move away from a nasty area, not to mention the central role of hospitality and providing meals for guests. The culture of honor is the culture of hospitality -- an obsession with reciprocity, whether in a helpful or harmful manner.
You don't find too many symmetric-stackers and containerizers in Southern Europe, where they'd prefer to prepare sensual meals that hit the spot. Farther toward the Balto-Slavic Northeast, people are more likely to be vacuum junkies and make a point of showering every day. Along the faultline running through Germany, folks are known for both — the Swabian housewife who is always sweeping outside her house, in between preparing homecooked meals for her family and the community. Even if they're outside their native habitat, like the Alpine Amish in America.
Southern cooking, but Northern efficiency.
That ought to be a warning sign about women — those who bring up how much they like to clean, trying to lure the man in with dreams of domestic devotion, only to find out that she cannot and will not cook, and that her senses don't light up even when someone else prepares a sumptuous meal for her. Like, what response were you expecting from a neat freak?
Also ties in with the con-artistry of Balto-Slavic gold-diggers and Asian mail-order brides. The magazine holder is dust-free, but my belly is empty. A word to the wise.
Cookers are more corporeal and in touch with their senses, capable of feeling joy, and attentive to others. Cooking can be a social activity, at the very least the meal is social (unless you're dining alone). The cook makes a choice to include others in the meal (they could have prepared a smaller quantity of food), which shows their thoughtfulness.
Cleaners are more cerebral and cut off from their surroundings (which they feel are dangerous or contaminating), rarely experience elation, and are more self-focused. Cleaning is never fun, social, or for the benefit of others (always for the self — get those yucky germs away from me / straighten up the living room, and if it happens to benefit others living here or passing through, then lucky for them.)
Cookers are more likely to be found in pastoralist cultures, while cleaners are more likely to hail from farming cultures. Farming leads to sedentary high-density living, making for a dirtier and more infectious environment, and putting farmers more on their guard for tidying up and napalming household surfaces. Livestock herding allows people to spread out more thinly and to pick up and move away from a nasty area, not to mention the central role of hospitality and providing meals for guests. The culture of honor is the culture of hospitality -- an obsession with reciprocity, whether in a helpful or harmful manner.
You don't find too many symmetric-stackers and containerizers in Southern Europe, where they'd prefer to prepare sensual meals that hit the spot. Farther toward the Balto-Slavic Northeast, people are more likely to be vacuum junkies and make a point of showering every day. Along the faultline running through Germany, folks are known for both — the Swabian housewife who is always sweeping outside her house, in between preparing homecooked meals for her family and the community. Even if they're outside their native habitat, like the Alpine Amish in America.
Southern cooking, but Northern efficiency.
That ought to be a warning sign about women — those who bring up how much they like to clean, trying to lure the man in with dreams of domestic devotion, only to find out that she cannot and will not cook, and that her senses don't light up even when someone else prepares a sumptuous meal for her. Like, what response were you expecting from a neat freak?
Also ties in with the con-artistry of Balto-Slavic gold-diggers and Asian mail-order brides. The magazine holder is dust-free, but my belly is empty. A word to the wise.
May 2, 2014
Why has Gen X always been the focus of reality TV dramas? Are Millennials too boring?
As the reality-drama genre has steadily taken over TV programming during the last 20 or so years, it's striking how consistent the generational background of the characters has remained — mostly Gen X, particularly the ground zero ones born in the late '60s and early '70s.
The first reality show phenomenon was The Real World on MTV in the mid-1990s. The cast were younger 20-somethings, with the occasional late teenager. It had already lost relevance among youth audiences — its only target audience — by the turn of the millennium. It has long featured stock character stereotypes for the benefit of the autistic youth audience made up more and more of Millennials. The last time there were memorable and distinct individuals was probably the 1995 season in London, when middle X-ers were the cast and late X-ers were the audience.
Big Brother in the early part of the last decade picked up where The Real World left off, only with a now older age group on camera — still late Boomers and X-ers, though.
There's also been a string of "celebreality" shows that followed the lives of famous people who ranged from early Boomers like Ozzy Osbourne up through late X-ers like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.
Now the hot thing seems to be housewives, husbands, moms, dads, and other folks in their 30s and 40s. This genre was completely absent during the '90s and even the first half of the 2000s. Boomer parents in the '90s apparently were not thought to be worth the gamble to put on camera. Only when the early X-ers had kids old enough to be active in the background did this genre take off, during the past 5 to 10 years.
Why haven't the Millennials taken the place of the X-ers once the latter had outgrown a given niche? They've been old enough to star on The Real World for at least five years now, but they haven't turned it back into a thing. Nor have they simply made a related but different show a thing. Well, who would want to tune in to awkward brats diddling their digital devices for 60 minutes?
Some of the early Millennials are now also old enough for Big Brother type shows, though again imagine how boring it would be to watch them sulk around, mumble less than ten words per day, and surf the web on their phone.
Ditto for celebreality shows — Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie were 23 when their show The Simple Life became a hit. Early Millennial celebrities have been that age since 2010, yet none of them have spawned hit shows that document their lives.
Sure, they're not old enough to star on shows about housewives raising a family with school-age children. But how did it even get to this point, where housewives and middle-aged husbands are more interesting to watch than college students? It was the other way around in 1992, when The Real World debuted.
For whatever it's worth, Gen X has the qualities that are needed to make watchable TV dramas taken from real-life people: they are sociable like the Boomers, but self-monitoring like the Millennials. Gregarious enough to get involved in other people's lives, and introspective enough to reflect on what the right thing to be doing is.
A Boomer cast would be up to a lot of activity, but there would be little self-awareness among them, hence no internal conflict, just one glib rationalization after another in the confessional. A Millennial cast would be paralyzed by their constant self-monitoring, and would not have much in the way of choices to examine in any case, since they keep to themselves all the time. No actions means no consequences of your actions to reflect on.
This generational influence extends further to that whole adrenaline junkie genre that began with Jackass and continued through Survivor and Fear Factor. Millennials are too fearful and too crippled by OCD to go anywhere near that kind of thing. Their mindset about where the proper boundaries are was shaped by the helicopter parenting culture of the past 20-odd years — not just in the home, but anywhere that their parents held influence (playgrounds, pools, schools). Their idea of livin' on the edge is playing their video games without automatic health regeneration.
The Gen X guys from Jackass etc. grew up when you not only didn't have to ask permission from your parents to leave the house, but you typically didn't even make a point of leaving a note to let them know. You were just "going out," and if they noticed you weren't home, they assumed you had "gone out" and would "be back." Pretty simple, really.
Of course I'm not holding up any of these reality show casts as paragons of personality. But they do reflect differences in the general public that might be otherwise hard to put your finger on. "Come to think of it, who would want to watch a reality show about Millennial phone-fondlers or Boomer blindness?" Reality TV may be near the bottom of the barrel, but think of how much worse it could get if the characters weren't at least somewhat gregarious and somewhat introspective.
The first reality show phenomenon was The Real World on MTV in the mid-1990s. The cast were younger 20-somethings, with the occasional late teenager. It had already lost relevance among youth audiences — its only target audience — by the turn of the millennium. It has long featured stock character stereotypes for the benefit of the autistic youth audience made up more and more of Millennials. The last time there were memorable and distinct individuals was probably the 1995 season in London, when middle X-ers were the cast and late X-ers were the audience.
Big Brother in the early part of the last decade picked up where The Real World left off, only with a now older age group on camera — still late Boomers and X-ers, though.
There's also been a string of "celebreality" shows that followed the lives of famous people who ranged from early Boomers like Ozzy Osbourne up through late X-ers like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.
Now the hot thing seems to be housewives, husbands, moms, dads, and other folks in their 30s and 40s. This genre was completely absent during the '90s and even the first half of the 2000s. Boomer parents in the '90s apparently were not thought to be worth the gamble to put on camera. Only when the early X-ers had kids old enough to be active in the background did this genre take off, during the past 5 to 10 years.
Why haven't the Millennials taken the place of the X-ers once the latter had outgrown a given niche? They've been old enough to star on The Real World for at least five years now, but they haven't turned it back into a thing. Nor have they simply made a related but different show a thing. Well, who would want to tune in to awkward brats diddling their digital devices for 60 minutes?
Some of the early Millennials are now also old enough for Big Brother type shows, though again imagine how boring it would be to watch them sulk around, mumble less than ten words per day, and surf the web on their phone.
Ditto for celebreality shows — Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie were 23 when their show The Simple Life became a hit. Early Millennial celebrities have been that age since 2010, yet none of them have spawned hit shows that document their lives.
Sure, they're not old enough to star on shows about housewives raising a family with school-age children. But how did it even get to this point, where housewives and middle-aged husbands are more interesting to watch than college students? It was the other way around in 1992, when The Real World debuted.
For whatever it's worth, Gen X has the qualities that are needed to make watchable TV dramas taken from real-life people: they are sociable like the Boomers, but self-monitoring like the Millennials. Gregarious enough to get involved in other people's lives, and introspective enough to reflect on what the right thing to be doing is.
A Boomer cast would be up to a lot of activity, but there would be little self-awareness among them, hence no internal conflict, just one glib rationalization after another in the confessional. A Millennial cast would be paralyzed by their constant self-monitoring, and would not have much in the way of choices to examine in any case, since they keep to themselves all the time. No actions means no consequences of your actions to reflect on.
This generational influence extends further to that whole adrenaline junkie genre that began with Jackass and continued through Survivor and Fear Factor. Millennials are too fearful and too crippled by OCD to go anywhere near that kind of thing. Their mindset about where the proper boundaries are was shaped by the helicopter parenting culture of the past 20-odd years — not just in the home, but anywhere that their parents held influence (playgrounds, pools, schools). Their idea of livin' on the edge is playing their video games without automatic health regeneration.
The Gen X guys from Jackass etc. grew up when you not only didn't have to ask permission from your parents to leave the house, but you typically didn't even make a point of leaving a note to let them know. You were just "going out," and if they noticed you weren't home, they assumed you had "gone out" and would "be back." Pretty simple, really.
Of course I'm not holding up any of these reality show casts as paragons of personality. But they do reflect differences in the general public that might be otherwise hard to put your finger on. "Come to think of it, who would want to watch a reality show about Millennial phone-fondlers or Boomer blindness?" Reality TV may be near the bottom of the barrel, but think of how much worse it could get if the characters weren't at least somewhat gregarious and somewhat introspective.
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