Current Trends

I'm disturbed by a lot of the current trends, in movies, television, popular culture...which makes me an old fuddy-duddy. But I don't understand what the excitement is about in relation to Avatar, Inglorious Basterds, Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway, Twilight, texting, and so on and so forth...even that admirable film about sappers in Iraq was, I thought, just an admirable film, not a landmark event in film worthy of Academy Award-level attention. What's disturbing is that the common denominator in all of it seems to be, a search for sensations on the most primitive level.

Yes, I do sound like a fuddy-duddy, I know...I watched plenty of Bugs Bunny cartoons well into my early teens, out of a desire for sensation and silly spectacle, not out of a desire for beauty and higher meaning. I just hope--I'm just hoping like mad that my son will reject most of what our culture is dishing out these days, not out of disdain or to be a fuddy-duddy, but because life is so short and his hunger for books like Walden and Pride and Prejudice, for artworks like Michelangelo's David and Giotto's Arena Chapel, for music like Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, is so enormous.

But it's not just that, I'm suddenly realizing...it's not that our culture chooses Avatar over the Arena Chapel; I wouldn't mind that, as long as people accepted the Arena Chapel's value as an artwork of timeless beauty. But it seems to me that recently, what's obviously light entertainment has started passing itself off as a cultural event of great importance. What happens then is that a lot of amazing artworks like the Arena Chapel simply get shoved aside; they fall entirely out of people's consciousness. And that makes it far less likely that my son will ever be exposed to them. And that disturbs me. A lot.