Rick and Morty as Absurdist Humor, Yet Legitimate Sci-Fi with Family Drama (Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #54)

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | July 30th, 2020

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt address the 4‑season 2013 Adult Swim show, which cur­rent­ly has a 94% crit­ics’ rat­ing on Rot­ten Toma­toes. What kind of humor is it, and how are we sup­posed to take its sci-fi and fam­i­ly dra­ma ele­ments? While its con­cepts start as par­o­dy, with an any­thing-goes style of ani­ma­tion, they’re cre­ative and ground­ed enough to actu­al­ly con­tribute to mul­ti­ple gen­res. How smart is the show, exact­ly? And its fans? Is Rick a super hero, or maybe essen­tial­ly Dr. Who? What might this very seri­al­ized sit-com look like in longevi­ty?

We also touch on oth­er adult car­toons like South Park, Solar Oppo­sites, The Simp­sons, Fam­i­ly Guy, plus Com­mu­ni­ty, Scrubs, and more.

Hear the inter­view we refer to with the show’s cre­ators. Watch the video we men­tion about its direc­tors. Vis­it the Rick and Morty wiki for episode descrip­tions and oth­er things.

Some arti­cles that we bring up or oth­er­wise fueled our dis­cus­sion include:

Also, do you want a Plumbus?

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Devo De-Evolves the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: See Their Groundbreaking Music Video and Saturday Night Live Performance (1978)

in Music, Television | July 23rd, 2020

In 1978, the debut album by a force­ful­ly idio­syn­crat­ic new wave band out of Akron, Ohio both asked and answered a ques­tion: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! When we look back on the still-active group’s career more than 40 years lat­er, we may still ask our­selves who, or what, Devo are. Giv­en that they’re a rock band — albeit only just rec­og­niz­able as one at the time they hit it big — we could define them by their songs. Were Devo made Devo by their their first sin­gle, “Mon­goloid”? Or was it “Whip It,” their biggest hit and the Devo song we all know today?

There’s also a case to be made that few of us would ever have heard of Devo if they had­n’t record­ed their cov­er of anoth­er band’s defin­ing song: the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Sat­is­fac­tion.” Devo’s “wicked decon­struc­tion,” writes All­mu­sic crit­ic Steve Huey, “reworks the orig­i­nal’s alien­ation into a spas­tic freak-out that’s near­ly unrec­og­niz­able.” At The New York­er, Ron Pad­gett tells the sto­ry of the record­ing and release of Devo’s “Sat­is­fac­tion,” a process that began with a rhythm track co-founder Ger­ald Casale calls “some kind of mutat­ed devolved reg­gae.” Aes­thet­i­cal­ly, this tied neat­ly in with the band’s cen­tral con­cept: “that instead of evolv­ing, soci­ety was in fact regress­ing (‘de-evolv­ing’) as humans embraced their baser instincts.”

It was Casale, by day a cat­a­log design­er for a jan­i­to­r­i­al sup­ply com­pa­ny, who dis­cov­ered the bag­gy yel­low waste-dis­pos­al suits Devo would wear in the “Sat­is­fac­tion” music video — a dar­ing enough medi­um to begin with, giv­en the pauci­ty of venues for such pro­duc­tions in the late 70s. But “when MTV launched, in 1981,” writes Pad­gett, “very few bands had videos ready for the net­work to play. As a result, Devo’s ‘Sat­is­fac­tion’ video earned end­less rota­tions.” But the big break came “when they per­formed the song on Sat­ur­day Night Live, wear­ing the suits and pitch-black sun­glass­es, and doing the same jerky robo-motions, as in the video.”

You can see their SNL per­for­mance, intro­duced by the late Fred Willard, in the clip above.  Nego­ti­at­ed by the band’s man­ag­er Elliot Roberts in exchange for bring­ing Neil Young on a lat­er broad­cast, the appear­ance exposed Devo to an audi­ence that includ­ed no few view­ers hun­gry for just the kind of sub­ver­sive­ness the band’s music exud­ed. All this only hap­pened because Mick Jag­ger him­self had giv­en Devo’s spas­tic freak­out his bless­ing — and, as record­ed in the book Devo: Unmasked, some­how man­aged to dance to it as he did so. Lat­er, as Casale remem­bers it, Roberts claimed to have sug­gest­ed in advance to Jag­ger’s peo­ple that he “just says he likes it, because it’s going to make him a lot of mon­ey.” Or could that liv­ing embod­i­ment of rock star­dom be a clos­et sub­scriber to the the­o­ry of de-evo­lu­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Presents His Per­son­al Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

DEVO Is Now Sell­ing COVID-19 Per­son­al Pro­tec­tive Equip­ment: Ener­gy Dome Face Shields

Watch Phish Play All of The Rolling Stones’ Clas­sic Album, Exile on Main Street, Live in Con­cert

The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter” Played by Musi­cians Around the World

A Big 44-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Rolling Stones Albums: Stream 613 Tracks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita, “My Most Difficult Book”: A 1989 Documentary

in Books, Literature, Television | July 21st, 2020

How many of us could write a book with the impact of Loli­ta? The task, as revealed in the BBC Omnibus doc­u­men­tary above, lay almost beyond even the for­mi­da­ble lit­er­ary pow­ers of Vladimir Nabokov — almost, but obvi­ous­ly not quite. It did push him into new aes­thet­ic, cul­tur­al, and com­po­si­tion­al realms, as evi­denced by his mem­o­ries of draft­ing the nov­el on index cards in road­side motels (and when faced with espe­cial­ly noisy or drafty accom­mo­da­tions, in the back­seat of the parked car) while road-trip­ping though the Unit­ed States. The doc­u­men­tary’s sub­ject is the exiled aris­to­crat nov­el­ist’s expe­ri­ence writ­ing and pub­lish­ing Loli­ta, the book that would make him world-famous — as well as the expe­ri­ence that brought him to the time and place that made such a cul­tur­al coup pos­si­ble.

Aired in 1989, a dozen years after Nabokov’s death, My Most Dif­fi­cult Book fea­tures inter­views with the nov­el­ist’s Fer­rari-dri­ving son and trans­la­tor Dmitri, his schol­ar-biog­ra­ph­er Bri­an Boyd, and his younger admir­er-col­leagues includ­ing Mar­tin Amis, A.S. Byatt, and Edmund White. That last describes Nabokov’s nov­els as “great sys­tems of mean­ing in which every ele­ment refers to every oth­er one,” and Loli­ta marked a new height in his achieve­ment in that form.

But the book’s pop­u­lar­i­ty, or at least its ini­tial wave of pop­u­lar­i­ty, may be bet­ter explained by the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing the ele­ments of its by now well-known premise: the refined mid­dle-aged Euro­pean nar­ra­tor, the coarse twelve-year-old step­daugh­ter whom he con­trives to sex­u­al­ly pos­sess — and suc­ceeds in sex­u­al­ly pos­sess­ing — as they dri­ve across Amer­i­ca, a vast land whose look, feel, and lan­guage Nabokov took pains to cap­ture and repur­pose.

“There are a lot of lit­er­al­ists out there,” says Amis, “who will think that you can’t write a nov­el like Loli­ta with­out being a secret slaver after young girls.” That was as true in 1989 as it was in 1955, when the book was first pub­lished, and indeed as true as it is today. Well into mid­dle age, we learn in the doc­u­men­tary, strangers would ask Dmitri what it was like to be the son of a “dirty old man,” and in archive inter­view footage we see Nabokov address the pub­lic con­fla­tion of him­self and Hum­bert Hum­bert, Loli­ta’s pedophil­i­ac nar­ra­tor. A seri­ous chess enthu­si­ast, Nabokov describes him­self as writ­ing nov­els as he would solve chess prob­lems he posed to him­self. What could present a more rig­or­ous chal­lenge than to tell a sto­ry, at a high artis­tic lev­el, from the per­spec­tive of a mon­ster? But Nabokov, as he admit­ted to one inter­view­er, was indeed a mon­ster, at least accord­ing to one def­i­n­i­tion offered by his much-con­sult­ed Eng­lish dic­tio­nary: “A per­son of unnat­ur­al excel­lence.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, and Names the Great­est Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Hear Vladimir Nabokov Read From the Penul­ti­mate Chap­ter of Loli­ta

Vladimir Nabokov on Loli­ta: Just Anoth­er Great Love Sto­ry?

The Note­cards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Loli­ta: A Look Inside the Author’s Cre­ative Process

Vladimir Nabokov’s Script for Stan­ley Kubrick’s Loli­ta: See Pages from His Orig­i­nal Draft

Vladimir Nabokov Mar­vels Over Dif­fer­ent Loli­ta Book Cov­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Twilight Zone Morality Tales: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast Discussion (#52)

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | July 15th, 2020

Some­thing’s strange… Is it a dream? If it’s a moral­i­ty tale with a twist end­ing, you’re prob­a­bly in the Twi­light Zone. Your hosts Bri­an Hirt, Eri­ca Spyres, and Mark Lin­sen­may­er, plus guest Ken Ger­ber (Bri­an’s broth­er) are in it this week, dis­cussing the thrice revived TV series. Does the 1959–1963 show hold up? What makes for a good TZ episode, and does Jor­dan Peele’s lat­est iter­a­tion cap­ture the spir­it? We talk about episodes new and old, the 1983 film, plus com­par­isons to Black Mir­ror and David Lynch.

The clas­sic episodes we focus most on (and might spoil, so you should go watch them) are It’s a Good Life, Will the Real Mar­t­ian Please Stand Up?, What You Need, The Howl­ing Man, Per­chance to Dream, and Nick of Time. The oth­ers Ken rec­om­mend­ed for us are The Obso­lete Man and The Masks. Mark com­plains about Walk­ing Dis­tance.

In the new series, sea­son 1, we do spoil Blur­ry Man and praise (but don’t spoil) Replay. We don’t spoil sea­son two at all, but rec­om­mend Try, Try and Meet in the Mid­dle and pan Ova­tion and 8.

Some arti­cles we looked at include:

A good video on the back­ground of the show is “Amer­i­can Mas­ters Rod Ser­ling: Sub­mit­ted for your Approval,” and you can find detailed dis­cus­sions of many episodes on The Twi­light Zone Pod­cast. Ken rec­om­mends The Twi­light Zone Com­pan­ion. Oh, and Chris Hard­wick real­ly likes TZ.

If you enjoyed this episodes, you might like our pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion with Ken on time trav­el.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This week, we con­tin­ue for more than half an hour, fur­ther dis­cussing the Twi­light Zone with Ken, which includes a look at the 1985–1989 series.

This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Salvador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Contributed “Nothing” to Art (1986)

in Art, Television | July 8th, 2020

Not so very long ago, Sal­vador Dalí was the most famous liv­ing painter in the world. When the BBC’s Are­na came to shoot an episode about him in 1986, they asked him what that exalt­ed state felt like. “I don’t know if I am the most famous painter in the world,” Dalí responds, “because lots of the peo­ple who ask for my auto­graph in the street don’t know if I’m a singer, a film star, a mad­man, a writer — they don’t know what I am.” He was, in one sense or anoth­er, most of those things and oth­ers besides. But we can safe­ly say, more than thir­ty years after his death, that Dalí will be remem­bered first for his visu­al art, with its vast seas and skies, its impos­si­ble beasts, its melt­ing clocks. And what did Dalí him­self believe he had con­tributed to art?

“Noth­ing,” he says. “Absolute­ly noth­ing, because, as I’ve always said, I’m a very bad painter. Because I’m too intel­li­gent to be a good painter. To be a good painter you’ve got to be a bit stu­pid, with the excep­tion of Velázquez, who is a genius, whose tal­ent sur­pass­es the art of paint­ing.” In oth­er words, when Dalí’s ever-present detrac­tors said he was no Velázquez, Dalí’s whole­heart­ed­ly agreed.

Over the past few decades, appre­ci­a­tion of the dis­tinc­tive com­bi­na­tion of vision and tech­nique on dis­play in Dalí’s paint­ings has won him more offi­cial respect (as well as a lav­ish new col­lec­tion pub­lished in book form by Taschen), but the debate about to what extent he was a true artist and to what extent a cal­cu­lat­ed­ly eccen­tric self-pro­mot­er will nev­er ful­ly sim­mer down.

Dalí also claimed to owe his life to paint­ing bad­ly. “The day Dalí paints a pic­ture as good as Velázquez, Ver­meer, or Raphael, or music like Mozart,” he says, “the next week he’ll die. So I pre­fer to paint bad pic­tures and live longer.” That he had already entered his ninth decade by the time Are­na came call­ing sug­gests that this strat­e­gy might have been effec­tive, though he was­n’t with­out his health trou­bles. In his first pub­lic appear­ance after hav­ing had a pace­mak­er implant­ed that same year, he declared that “When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are nec­es­sary for the progress of human­i­ty.” Dalí’s kept his askew arro­gance to the end, even through the con­tro­ver­sial final years that saw him sign off on the large-scale pro­duc­tion of shod­dy lith­o­graphs of his paint­ings. About the peo­ple who made them and the peo­ple who bought them, Dalí had only this to say: “They deserve each oth­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Q: Sal­vador Dalí, Are You a Crack­pot? A: No, I’m Just Almost Crazy (1969)

Sal­vador Dalí Strolls onto The Dick Cavett Show with an Anteater, Then Talks About Dreams & Sur­re­al­ism, the Gold­en Ratio & More (1970)

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

The Most Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Sal­vador Dalí’s Paint­ings Pub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful New Book by Taschen: Includes Nev­er-Seen-Before Works

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks’ Timeless Comedy Sketch: The 2000-Year-Old-Man

in Comedy, Television | July 3rd, 2020

I read the obits. If I’m not in it I’ll have break­fast. —Carl Rein­er

Up until this week week, it seemed as if Mel Brooks and Carl Rein­er could keep their 2000-Year-Old Man rou­tine going for­ev­er.

The premise was sim­ple—Rein­er as the seri­ous mind­ed announc­er, inter­view­ing Brooks as an elder with a Mid­dle Euro­pean Yid­dish accent about some of the his­toric moments, trends, and celebri­ties he’d had per­son­al con­tact with over the years.

The idea orig­i­nat­ed with Rein­er, who, as a young staff writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, thought there was com­ic gold to be mined from We the Peo­ple, a week­ly news pro­gram that dra­ma­tized impor­tant cur­rent events—notably a plumber who claimed to have over­heard some toe curl­ing plans while repair­ing a faucet in Stalin’s bath­room.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, or rather for­tu­nate­ly, no one else in the writ­ers room had caught the show, so he draft­ed cowork­er Brooks to play along, inter­view­ing him as if he were the host of We the Peo­ple, and Brooks were an aver­age Joe who’d been at the Cru­ci­fix­ion:

Mel, aging before our eyes, sighed and allowed a sad “Oooooh, boy” to escape from the depths of his soul…

I pres­sured the Old Man and asked, “You knew Jesus?”

“Jesus … yes, yes,” he said, strain­ing to remem­ber, “thin lad … wore san­dals … always walked around with twelve oth­er guys … yes, yes, they used to come into the store a lot … nev­er bought any­thing … they came in for water … I gave it to them … nice boys, well-behaved… .”

For a good part of an hour Mel had us all laugh­ing and appre­ci­at­ing his total recall of life in the year 1 A.D. I called upon Mel that morn­ing because I knew that one of the char­ac­ters in his com­e­dy arse­nal would emerge. The one that did was sim­i­lar to one he did when­ev­er he felt we need­ed a laugh break. It was a Yid­dish pirate cap­tain who had an accent not unlike the 2,000-Year-Old Man.

The durable, always unscript­ed 2000-Year-Old Man made an instant splash with friends and fam­i­ly, but his accent—which came quite nat­u­ral­ly to the Brook­lyn-born Brooks—caused the duo to ques­tion the wis­dom of trot­ting him out before a wider audi­ence.

In the 20’s and 30’s Yid­dish accents had been a com­ic sta­ple on the radio, and in Broad­way, vaude­ville, and bur­lesque hous­es, but that changed when the Nazis came to pow­er, as Rein­er recalled in his 2003 mem­oir, My Anec­do­tal Life:

…when Adolf Hitler came along and decreed that all Jews were dirty, vile, dan­ger­ous, sub­hu­man ani­mals and must be put to death, Jew­ish and non-Jew­ish writ­ers, pro­duc­ers, and per­form­ers start­ed to ques­tion the Yid­dish accent’s accept­abil­i­ty as a tool of com­e­dy. The accent had a self-dep­re­cat­ing and demean­ing qual­i­ty that gave aid and com­fort to the Nazis, who were quite capa­ble of demean­ing and dep­re­cat­ing Jews with­out our help. From 1941 on, the Yid­dish accent was slow­ly, and for the most part, vol­un­tar­i­ly, phased out of show busi­ness.

Even­tu­al­ly, how­ev­er, the char­ac­ter found his way onto their 1961 LP 2000 Years with Carl Rein­er & Mel Brooks.

They but­tressed his 12-minute appear­ance with sketch­es involv­ing astro­nauts, teen heart­throb Fabi­an, and Method actors, hedg­ing their bets lest the accent flop with both ref­er­ence-chal­lenged WASPs and fel­low Jews ner­vous about rein­forc­ing prob­lem­at­ic stereo­types.

One won­ders what the 2000-Year-Old Man—who as a cave­man had trou­ble deter­min­ing “who was a lady”—would have had to say about the move­ments for Trans Equal­i­ty, #MeToo, and Black Lives Mat­ter.

A quote on Brooks’ web­site may pro­vide a hint:

It’s OK not to hurt the feel­ings of var­i­ous tribes and groups, how­ev­er, it’s not good for com­e­dy. Com­e­dy has to walk a thin line, take risks. It’s the lech­er­ous lit­tle elf whis­per­ing in the king’s ear, telling the truth about human behav­ior.

Brooks delight­ed by putting immi­nent­ly quotable, off-the-cuff punch­lines in the mouth of the 2000-Year-Old Man, hook­ing many young lis­ten­ers, like vet­er­an come­di­an and stand up com­e­dy teacher Rick Crom:

The 2000-Year-Old Man was the first com­e­dy album I ever lis­tened to. I was quot­ing it at 10. I told my Sun­day school teacher that before God, peo­ple wor­shipped “a guy…Phil.”

But it was Rein­er—who main­tained a wish list of ques­tions for the 2000-Year-Old Man and who left us ear­li­er this week at the not-too-shab­by age of 98—who steered the act, often by press­ing his sub­ject to sub­stan­ti­ate his wild claims.

As Anne Lib­era, Direc­tor of Com­e­dy Stud­ies at The Sec­ond City and Colum­bia Col­lege Chica­go, notes:

Carl Rein­er was a mas­ter of the under­rat­ed art of the set­up. Most “straight men” are known for their respons­es that release the laugh. Carl did that too, but even more bril­liant­ly, he sub­tly puts all of the pieces into play for Mel Brooks to push off of into the com­e­dy stratos­phere. You see it in the Dick Van Dyke Show as well —he knew how to cre­ate the exact space for a com­ic char­ac­ter to do their best work.

Copies of the Com­plete 2000 Year Old Man can be pur­chased on Ama­zon.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear 30 of the Great­est Standup Com­e­dy Albums: A Playlist Cho­sen by Open Cul­ture Read­ers

Judd Apa­tow Teach­es the Craft of Com­e­dy: A New Online Course from Mas­ter­Class

Steve Mar­tin Per­forms Stand-Up Com­e­dy for Dogs (1973)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Here lat­est project is an ani­ma­tion and a series of free down­load­able posters, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to wear masks in pub­lic and wear them prop­er­ly. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Michael Jordan’s “The Last Dance” and Hero Worship: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast Discussion (#50)

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sports, Television | July 2nd, 2020

The 10-part ESPN doc­u­men­tary dis­sect­ing Michael Jor­dan and the Bulls’ six cham­pi­onships has pro­vid­ed some much need­ed sports dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, rop­ing in even sports haters with a mix of game high­lights and behind-the-scenes dra­ma.

Your hosts Bri­an Hirt, Eri­ca Spyres, and Mark Lin­sen­may­er are joined by Seth from The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life to inter­ro­gate the event: Was it actu­al­ly worth 10 hours of our time? Did its “time-jump­ing” struc­ture work? Its its treat­ment of Jor­dan real­ly “hagiog­ra­phy” sanc­ti­fy­ing the man, or is the pic­ture of grudge-hold­ing ultra-com­pet­i­tive­ness actu­al­ly pret­ty repul­sive? Why was he like that? Why are sports amenable to cre­at­ing cul­tur­al icons out of its heroes in a way that, say, physics isn’t? Are we going to see many more of these long-form treat­ments of sports heroes?

For more dis­cus­sion, here are some arti­cles we looked at:

If you enjoyed this, check out our episode #25 with sports­cast­er Dave Rev­sine.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A 1947 French Film Accurately Predicted Our 21st-Century Addiction to Smartphones

in Film, Television | July 1st, 2020

When we watch a movie from, say, twen­ty years ago, it strikes us that both noth­ing and every­thing has changed. Apart from their slight­ly bag­gi­er clothes, the peo­ple look the same as us. But where are their phones? Com­pared to the recent past, the look of life today has­n’t changed much, but thanks to the inter­net and even more so to smart­phones, the feel has changed enor­mous­ly. Most lit­er­ary and cin­e­mat­ic pre­dic­tions of the future got this exact­ly wrong, envi­sion­ing flam­boy­ant aes­thet­ic trans­for­ma­tions atop com­plete­ly unchanged forms of human behav­ior and soci­ety.

But more than 70 years ago, J. K. Ray­mond-Mil­let’s film Télévi­sion: Oeil de Demain (“Tele­vi­sion: Eye of Tomor­row”) seems to have scored the bulls­eye few oth­er visions of the world ahead even aimed for.  “This is one extra­or­di­nar­i­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tion in a work of sci­ence fic­tion,” wrote William Gib­son as he tweet­ed out a four-minute clip of the film that has recent­ly gone viral.

Though long regard­ed as a sci-fi prophet, Gib­son is the first to admit how lit­tle about tech­nol­o­gy he’s accu­rate­ly fore­seen: his break­out nov­el Neu­ro­mancer, for instance, fea­tures 21st-cen­tu­ry hack­ers mak­ing calls from pub­lic tele­phone booths.

Hence the impres­sive­ness, here in the actu­al 21st cen­tu­ry, of this vision of a future in which peo­ple stare near-con­stant­ly down at the screens of their hand­held devices: on the train, at the café (vis­it­ed, at 0:13, by what appears to be a time-trav­el­ing Gib­son him­self), in the street, on col­li­sion cours­es with fel­low screen-watch­ers on foot and in cars alike. These hand­held tele­vi­sions remind us of our mobile phones in more ways than one, not least in their being scuffed from sheer use. As with every astute pre­dic­tion of the future, all this may at first strike us denizens of the actu­al future as mun­dane — until we remem­ber that the pre­dic­tion was made in 1947.

Pro­duced as an edu­ca­tion­al film, Télévi­sion (view­able in full here) first shows and tells how the epony­mous, still-nov­el tech­nol­o­gy works, then goes on to imag­ine the forms in which it could poten­tial­ly sat­u­rate mod­ern soci­ety. These include not just the afore­men­tioned “minia­ture-tele­vi­sion devices in pub­lic places,” as schol­ar of tele­vi­sion Anne-Katrin Weber puts it, but “pro­fes­sion­al meet­ings con­duct­ed via pic­ture-phones,” “cars equipped with tele­vi­sion screens,” and “shops pro­mot­ing their goods on tele­vi­sion.”

We also see that “the small hand­held portable devices replace news­pa­pers and air ‘the infor­ma­tion broad­cast, or the polit­i­cal com­ment, the fash­ion show, or the sports bul­letin’, while the tele­vi­sion set at the trav­el agency replaces the paper cat­a­logues and invites poten­tial clients to ‘tele­vi­su­al­ly’ vis­it vaca­tion des­ti­na­tions.” Such tech­nol­o­gy will also offer more “inti­mate sights,” as when “the young woman, step­ping out of the show­er, has for­got­ten to turn off her tele­phone-cam­era and reveals her­self naked to the caller.” Yes, of course, “for­got­ten” — but then, this approach­es aspects of the future in which we live that even the bold­est tech­no­log­i­cal prophets nev­er dared con­sid­er.

via Kot­tke/William Gib­son

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast