Cultural Gap Film #1: Apollo 13

Relevant element: "Houston, we have a problem."

Why it resonated: The combination of a well-known story of surviving a series of catastrophic failures and the pithiness of military-style understatement made this instantly recognizable shorthand for any bad situation. Did you just realize, as your dog was emptying his bowels, that you're out of waste disposal bags? "Houston, we have a problem." Have you just dropped a birthday cake on the floor? "Houston, we have a problem."  

General comments on the film: If you've never seen this movie, just take about 20 seconds to imagine what it's like. Got it? You're exactly right. Not a single element of Apollo 13 surprises you--not the casting, not the plot, not the dialogue, not the cinematography, definitely not the music.... 

That's not to say it's a bad film. It does a solid job of telling a can't-miss dramatic true story. But if you share my low tolerance for unrelenting earnestness, the pure twinkling Hanksianism of the movie wears on you pretty quickly. So does the sledgehammer foreshadowing, as people harp on the unluckiness of the mission number, small children ask their astronaut fathers if another disaster could happen, and astronauts' wives drop their wedding rings down shower drains. All of this pushes it into the territory of fiveshadowing, which seems a touch unnecessary when we all know what's coming before the movie even starts.

But Ron Howard has never been the kind of director who lets an emotional button go unpushed. The swelling score might as well include choirs of thousands singing, "This is inspirational" over and over. And what could be more essential to the story than the mission commander's elderly mother defiantly asserting that her son could land a flying washing machine safely? Similarly, Howard never lets you forget for a second that it's 1970, even though it's unlikely that you would. We're given multiple "But mom, I want to be a hippie!" scenes, and there always seems to be a radio on in the background playing a seminal song of the time.   

On the plus side, Clint Howard is always a welcome inclusion, and it is a darn good story about people fighting against the slings and arrows of a world seemingly governed by Murphy's Law.      

Minding the Gaps

As a followup to my previous exercise of identifying the 200 most culturally relevant films for today's America, I'm starting a new endeavor: filling in my own gaps on that list. I've seen most of the movies on the list, but there are some I've avoided on purpose and some I just never got around to watching for some reason or another.

Before I start this project in earnest, though, I want to set up a framework--a list of objectives, maybe--that helps provide a perspective from which I'll be viewing these films. I won't be watching them for content; the very fact of their cultural relevance means that I already know what they're about, and even know the general plot points of most of them. For instance, I've never seen Pretty Woman, but I know the premise, several scenes, and the overall plot structure. And I'm not going to be watching them for entertainment purposes, though it won't be the worst thing in the world if I happen to enjoy some of them. 

What I'm really interested in is why they're culturally relevant. Why did they resonate enough that they became a seemingly integral part of our culture? What values or ideas do they put forth? What function do they serve in our lives, and has that function changed since the moment of their first appearance? These are the kinds of questions that I'm interested in answering, but I'd like to hear some suggestions for other things I should consider.

In a way, I've already started this project. Since I first starting thinking about the topic of culturally relevant films, I've been going out of my way to watch movies that I'd often heard referenced but had never seen. In the past month or so, for instance, I've watched Ghost, Thelma and Louise, Mr. Mom, Sleepless in Seattle, and Good Will Hunting for cultural studies purposes. I have thoughts about each of them, you won't be surprised to hear, but I won't be writing full posts about them because my viewings of them predate the official start of this exercise. 

Here's a list of some films from the list (or from suggestions to the list) that I haven't yet seen:

Apollo 13
Beaches
Beverly Hills Cop
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Bridget Jones' Diary
Cast Away
City Slickers
Dead Poets Society
Flashdance
Footloose
Gone with the Wind
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Home Alone
Love Story
Mr. Holland's Opus
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Old School
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Philadelphia
Pretty Woman
Rudy
Saving Private Ryan
Saw
Singin' in the Rain
The Great Escape
The Sound of Music
Titanic
Twilight

So, does anyone have any suggestions for things I should be considering when I watch these movies or for which movie I should see first?   

A Brief Musing about Information

I think it's important to know things.

That shouldn't be too surprising to hear from an professional educator, and you probably wouldn't think that many people in the general population would disagree with the sentiment. But more and more in my classes, I've run up against a contrary mindset.

When a student would declare that America fought the Nazis in World War I, or (to borrow an example from a recent episode of The Amazing Race) claim that he or she has never heard of Stonehenge, my instinct used to be to shake my head in disbelief that such basic pieces of information haven't lodged in their heads. What started to strike me after a while, however, was not that they didn't know things, but that they had no problem with not knowing things. In fact, they thought I was kind of weird for thinking it was important for them to walk around with that kind of information in their heads all the time.

Naturally, I started asking them questions to figure out why there was such a gap between our worldviews. As someone who loves information for information's sake to the point that he made up trivia cards about the bride and groom for his wedding, I had to put aside my assumptions and consider their perspective, and here is my best estimate of the situation.

When I was growing up, information was something you had to seek. If you were watching a TV show and saw an actor who looked familiar, but you couldn't quite remember how you knew him, what could you do to get an answer? You wouldn't know his name, so you would have to wait for the end credits and hope to see it as it flashed by. If you were lucky enough to get his name, you would need to ask other people what else he was in or go to a library to try to find some publication with a list of shows and cast information or track down the phone number of a studio or agent or something and then call and ask, or...well, you get the picture. The effort needed to find things out made information valuable to hold onto when you came across it, like water at an oasis.   

My students have always lived in a world in which information is readily accessible. You could even say that it's the medium in which they live. It pulses through the very air they breathe and shows up on their electronic devices wherever they are. If they see an actor and want to know why he seems familiar, they can find out in less than a minute from nearly anywhere at any time with a minimum of effort. And once they find out that piece of information, why would they keep it in their head? They can get it again just as easily if they ever need it in the future. Why carry a bottle of water when you're swimming?

Add to this scenario the element of social networking and it seems even more logical that the idea of any one person burdening himself or herself with information that costs mental energy to pick up and carry sounds ludicrous to my students. As long as someone somewhere can find it out, no one person needs to know it. 

Again, my instinct is to shake my head at the state of things. But little good has ever come from that kind of handbasket grumbling, and it's worth asking what the consequences of this shift really are. Maybe my students have a point when they complain that it's a sadistic exercise to make them memorize and regurgitate facts they can easily look up. Or maybe their reliance on the surrounding stream of information substantially changes their experience of the world in negative ways. What happens when you encounter every new thing empty-handed, without the weight of information to help contextualize it? I'm sure we'll find out the answer to that question, even if that answer is then immediately dropped right back in the information pool.