At Cultural Attractions: Parents Don't Teach, Children Don't Learn

The Buffalo Zoo celebrated the traditionally-last weekend of summer by offering a ninety percent discount on admission on Labor Day. Since one dollar is something I can just about afford on a good week, I took a holiday-morning bike ride around Delaware Park and then queued up with the mass of people, mostly families with small children, who had just as readily sprung at the opportunity for a cheap cultural activity.

Considering the lines at the gate, I was surprised that the scene inside was not as claustrophobic as it could have been. It took a little jostling or waiting in the wings to get a proper angle, but everyone seemed to get their opportunity to look at the cute, or fearsome, or comic animals. I freely admit that I was mostly there just to take another look at some of my favorite creatures, to watch the polar bear swim in its artificial pond, far from the threatened environment of its natural-born fellows, to grin down on the docile capybaras lounging in the rainforest exhibit, to rediscover my respect for the vulture which I discovered when I wrote a report on the species in elementary school, to look for big cats pacing like in Rilke's description of the panther.

But even though this excursion wasn't exactly intended as a fact-finding field trip, I never go to a museum or zoo or aquarium without trying to learn something about the stuff I'm looking at. Not a heck of a lot changes at the Buffalo Zoo from year to year, and I think I had been there about a year ago, so it's not as if I could have expected to discover an animal the existence of which I was altogether unaware of. But there's only so much I can commit to memory, so naturally I find myself rediscovering things on subsequent visits to the same places of learning. I always seem to forget, for instance, that the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep are capable of running at up to fifty miles per hour. The up-side of my disappointment at not retaining encyclopedic recollections – a failure that seems to become ever-worse as I age – is that I sometimes get to re-experience the joy of learning something interesting all over again.

Even if I don't read all of the wildlife facts, of which there aren't even that many at the Buffalo Zoo, I do at the very least try to get the names of the animals right. This is more than I can say of the vast majority of the other patrons that I encountered yesterday. It having been a year since my last visit, I found myself trying to actively identify each species, endeavoring to commit to memory the ones that escaped me this time around. This is natural to me, and I thought it was part of the essential purpose of going to the zoo. I always took it to be a place where you went not merely to look at animals as in a menagerie, but to find out something about the wider world by discovering what they are and from where they come. I especially thought that that was why parents took their children to the zoo. I'd always assumed that it was meant as a supplement to a child's primary education, a way to instantiate curiosity and gauge the direction of nascent scholarship. Apparently I was quite wrong about this as well.

Most any time that I go to places like zoos or museums and find myself crowded by children and their adult chaperones, I am downright shocked by the lack of interest that parents have in conveying any information whatsoever to their charges, or even in encouraging those children to learn anything on their own. I fear that my disdain paints me as a killjoy and that the average reader will see me as attaching far too much significance to the conduct of people who are on a simple, light-hearted family outing. But that's just the trouble. I worry that people attach entirely too little significance to such everyday opportunities to influence the character, values, and perspective of impressionable children.

As much as Americans today recognize and lament the widespread failure of education and the failure of modern children to live up to appropriate standards, I think commentators and individual parents are too much inclined to see that failure as institutional and too little inclined to consider it as social and cultural. If the behavior of parents at zoos and museums is indicative of their broader attitudes, it suggests that people have widely forfeited the recognition of personal responsibility for the education of their own children, instead handing that responsibility off to schools as if the process of raising an intellectually astute and ambitious child is something that can be consolidated into a specific set of hours in specific locales.

If that is indeed the view – if the need for education is recognized, but only recognized as being needed somewhere outside the home – then I can only conclude that people don't really value education at all. That is, they don't value education as it ought to be valued, for its own sake, as both a public and a personal good. You can't expect children to learn well and perform at a high level in school if the culture that they're coming up in is one that portrays education as a sort of obligation and something that brings good things to the learner, but is not good enough in its own right to be worth pursuing in absence of the social obligations of homework and exams.

What else can I conclude from regularly observing that perfectly middle class parents, far from exhibiting much intellectual curiosity of their own, don't even respond to the intellectual curiosities of their own children. But perhaps that's a little unfair. At the zoo yesterday I did find one or two adults expressing curiosity to the extent that they pressed their faces to the glass and perplexedly asked of no one in particular, “What is it?” They just didn't express a great deal of interest in actually doing anything to satisfy their curiosity. They just couldn't be bothered to walk back two feet in order to read the damn nameplate.

This is entirely their own affair when the adults are on their own and solely responsible for their own edification or ignorance. But it gets under my skin when their own lack of care for finding answers threatens to be transmitted to a child who is still blessed by wide-eyed eagerness to comprehend the world around him, whatever aspects of it should set itself before him.

Just a few exhibits down from where I heard one unresolved ejaculation of “What is it?” I found myself looking at another glass enclosure that housed three wallabies crouching at the back of their habitat, when a family walked around me to look at the same. It was comprised of a couple with a daughter just barely of speaking age and a son perhaps six years old. The parents looked, glassy-eyed, into the scene while the boy excitedly called out “kangaroos!” I had started moving away from the exhibit, but noticing the boy being met with silence, I said simply “wallabies,” partly in hopes that his parents would hear me and realize, if they did not realize it on their own, that their son had made a reasonable but slightly mistaken assumption about what they were looking at.

However, I was essentially met with silence, too, except in that the boy, perhaps hearing me or perhaps just seeking acknowledgment from his parents, repeated “kangaroos.” Noticing that they weren't going to say anything and that their eyes had apparently still not passed over the signs that clearly stated the name of the species, I repeated, with the boy more specifically in mind, “wallabies.” Now looking squarely at me, and inquisitively, the boy again said “kangaroos.” It could not have been more obvious that the child was interested in being corrected. He wanted to learn, as most children do when simply presented with the opportunity. This child was young, but most likely old enough to sound out the word “wall – a – bye” if he knew where to look, and if he was made to realize that he didn't know the answer without looking. But to do that, he would need an example to follow, a pair of parents who had the tools to find out answers for themselves, and cared to give their children the same.

The child looking to me instead of his parents for that meager bit of instruction, I addressed him directly, explaining, “No, these are wallabies. Kangaroos are big; these are smaller.” And at that he turned to his parents and his younger sibling to repeat it to them: “These aren't kangaroos, the man says.” At that I was walking away, and I can only hope that their son's claim finally prompted them to look at the sign and sound out “wall – a – bees.” It was up to them to take an interest on their own, but it seemed to me that the child, being a child, not only wanted to know about these things in the zoo, but wanted others to know about them to.

I experienced the same thing elsewhere. In the crowded rainforest exhibit, I, being a nerd, spoke straight to the capybaras, telling them that I just wanted them to know that they are the largest rodents on Earth, and that that's awesome and they should be proud. A young girl just beside me asked, seemingly of no one in particular, "What are those called?" It could be that she heard me demonstrating some knowledge of them and figured that I had the answer, or it could be that she, like so many young children, thought her parents would have all the answers she sought.

She had not spoken straight to me, and that being the case, I would think that a scientifically interested parent, one familiar with zoos, would say something like, “I don't know, let me look at this information card over here so we can find out.” The parents did not move, of course, so I turned to the child and told her, “Those are called capybaras.” Naturally, she then looked back to her parents and sought to inform them of what they did not inform themselves: “They're called capee-bears.” The parents did not repeat the information; they did not move to confirm it or commit it to memory; they did not give her any indication that she should feel proud of having learned something, that she should be thankful for the knowledge, or that she should seek to learn other things as well.

The desire to learn is so natural and so passionate among children. How poorly we must regard it as a society that students evidently end up so thoroughly dissuaded from eager learning long before reaching the lower threshold of adulthood. What standards can we possibly expect students to meet if we handicap them in all the faculties that might prompt them to aim above the mark. If this culture persists, the most likely solution is simply to expect less of students, as has already become the defining feature of decades in the devolution of higher education.

In the future of this culture, we may as well just rename familiar animals to match the absent understandings of parents and their children. Having been to a couple of zoos and aquariums in recent years I've found that as far as doting children and intellectually incurious parents are concerned, every lemur is called King Julian and every clownfish is Nemo. This really aggravates me. My best friend is terrifically fond of the Niagara Aquarium, so I have gone there with her on several occasions. Upon every visit, without fail, one can hear at least half a dozen parents exclaiming, “All right, let's find Nemo,” or, “There's Nemo.” I think I've heard the word “clownfish” used by a parent to a child exactly once.

I have no doubt that some of these parents are just lazy and find “Nemo” easy to remember, but I warrant that a number of them may have good intentions. They're probably trying to use pop culture as a way to facilitate their children's interest in the natural world. But there's more than one reason why this is misguided. For one thing, having been to the aquarium several times, it's clear that children don't need some secondary point of reference in order to take an interest in the natural world, because the natural world is terrifically fascinating. And that's especially obvious when you're a child.

So using an animated film as a way of connecting with an aquatic exhibit is extraneous, but far worse than that it obfuscates children's understanding of what they're actually looking at. It disregards the separation between fantasy and reality, it suppresses knowledge of the actual species name, and it encourages children to understand the creature through an individual depiction and not through objective facts. And then on top of all of this, for many families the fixation on something that is recognizable from fiction overrides the significance of everything else that's on display. People walk in the door and say, “Find Nemo!” and they breeze through ninety percent of the aquarium to get to something that won't teach a child very much that he doesn't already know. If they didn't immediately put that idea in his head, they might be astonished by how much he doesn't care about the clownfish once he's seen the solitary-social penguins, the balloonfish with their glittering eyes, the sharks skulking past viewing windows, the challengingly camouflaged rockfish, and so on and so on.

When parents almost thoughtlessly constrain the purpose of visits to zoos and aquariums and museums, they probably think, more often than not, that they are doing it for the benefit of their children, that they are moving to retain a young attention span and provide its owner a quick shot of enrichment while they can. In fact, I think such parents and caregivers should consider that they might have it all backwards and that the feelings of stress and impatience are all their own, and merely projected onto their children. They should concern themselves less with what their children are looking to get out of the experience, and more with what they themselves are after. If the answer isn't “knowledge, and lots of it,” they can probably expect much more of their children's interest in the moment. But they likely won't be able to go on expecting it as those children age in the presence of a society that doesn't care particularly much for learning.

I Hope His Obituary Mentions His Name First

It’s always a risk to engage in commentary that might be viewed as trivializing suicide or untimely death, but I have something to say that I worry some will construe that way, and still I think it is worth saying.

Sometimes my eye catches sight of top trending web searches, and when something strikes me as interesting or unusual I feel compelled to click through to see why that particular item is in the news. That was the case just before 9:00 tonight when I saw that Rita Hayworth was the most popular topic on Bing. Why on earth, I wondered, would Rita Hayworth, now long dead be suddenly so newsworthy. When I clicked on her name I saw that the relevant headline didn’t refer to her specifically, but to “Rita Hayworth’s grandson” who was found dead in an apparent suicide.

Note that that was the headline exactly: “Rita Hayworth’s grandson found dead in NYC.” His actual name, Andrew Embiricos, was secondary because, after all, who would recognize it. Embiricos was not famous, Hayworth was. Over thirty years ago. Consequently, no one who didn’t know him personally would have recognized his picture either, which is presumably why UPI accompanied the story with his a picture of his grandmother, in her prime, seated beside William Randolph Hearst. The article even went so far as to conclude with a list of Hayworth’s film credits.

I honestly am not trivializing the young man’s death. It’s not as though I’m asserting that his death at twenty-five is any less tragic because he was not the sort of movie star for whom this sort of headline would usually be reserved. Nor am I saying that his life was not significant enough to be newsworthy, given that the article announcing his death mentions his involvement in several charities.

I don’t wish to trivialize anyone’s death, and that’s why it bothers me that news agencies choose to report on deaths such as these, as it effectively trivializes the untimely death of anyone who isn’t Hollywood royalty. Plenty of people die at early ages. Many of them are suicides. Many of the victims are wealthy and philanthropic. None of this is why Embiricos’ death became known in an instant to most of America. His death is common knowledge because he was Rita Hayworth’s grandson. That fact was right in the headline. People knew that Rita Hayworth’s grandson had died before they knew that Andrew Embiricos had died.

This story grabs my attention because it really seems to say something about the modern zeitgeist with respect to celebrity. I knew that our obsession with it had gotten particularly mindless. It has, of course, been a part of our culture for many decades now, but it is only quite recently that it has become commonplace to be famous just for being famous. It is only in the last decade or so that children have begun to report that they aspire to be famous not for doing anything in particular but just as an end in itself. I didn’t realize how far the trend had gotten until I saw this headline and realized that the fascination with inherited celebrity is not limited to the Lohans and Kardashians of the world, but now extends into history and seeks out the forgotten heirs of long-dead movie stars in order to give them a posthumous coronation as princes of American culture.

A man is dead. Let his family and friends remember him as he actually was, and come up with another occasion to rent a Rita Hayworth film and remember her as she was in her time, long ago.

Analysis: Current Film Trailers and Franchises

I tend to be behind the times with respect to pop culture. Given my interests and my aspirations, that probably isn’t good. I took some time to indulge curiosity and watch a few movie trailers for coming attractions today. I confess that I had no idea what was slated for release, so forgive me if I’m talking about old news as if it’s current. But then, doing so is perfectly in keeping with Hollywood’s model for movie making.

Several weeks ago, I was walking by a local movie theater with a friend, and I stopped in my tracks and dragged her in front of the marquee and asked her to look down the list and take note of the pattern. At that time, every movie that was showing save one was a sequel, remake, or part of an existing franchise. And that one exception was just a romantic comedy that in all likelihood followed the exact formula of all of its predecessors. Even the things that don’t carry familiar names sometime appear to build on a franchise.

Observing this week’s trailers, I find that in some instances, film makers succeed in building new appeal into arguably trite concepts, but all too often they attach a dollar amount to something unoriginal and go no further than that.

Paranormal Activity 3

As I said, I have no idea what’s forthcoming on the pop culture scene, so I managed to be surprised to see this trailer on the current list. I thought the first sequel was a silly effort at capitalizing on a title that the studio didn’t believe in in the first place, but made an unexpectedly huge profit on, yet I found the film entertaining on its own merits. It demonstrated a capability for bringing a moderately larger budget to bear on elaborating on the mode of presentation that made the original film so effective. It was by no means as good as that low budget, high-concept original, but it was somewhat visually and atmospherically impressive, as I basically expected of it. What I did not expect, because apparently I am still as naive as a child, was a storyline that leveraged in small roles by the characters from the original, and established an unnecessary and ultimately detrimental prequel to the first film. Somehow I had gotten the impression that the studio was going to do the smart thing and make a sequel that created a franchise on the basis of the visual content and overall character of the films, rather than a conjoined cast and story arc.

The strength of the first Paranormal Activity was never its plot. The story was little more than an escalating series of events, and it was the vicarious experience of those events that made it frightening and engaging. The dialogue about the entity having followed the Katie character throughout her life, and other allusions to her past were interesting, but they did not need to be explained. To the contrary, they simultaneously added elements of mystery and vague explanation, which tied together the various occurrences, but by no means drove the film forward. Paramount Pictures should have recognized that they had a film executive's wet dream on their hands - a franchise to which plot is irrelevant, even to highly analytical people like me. The strength of the film was the creative and intimate presentation of its content, and further films should have carried its name on that basis, rather than on the basis of sharing characters, including an invisible demon.

Why is film and television so averse to the idea of creating conceptual sequels, as opposed to direct ones? Do they think that audiences develop loyalty to franchises on the basis of a personal relationship with the characters, rather than, say, on the basis of their enjoyment of each subsequent film in the series?

I remember when the Fox television series 24 premiered in November of 2001. It was heavily marketed for the gimmick of presenting each episode as one real-time hour in a day that was to span the season. That was so strongly emphasized that it seemed that the show wasn't strictly about about a counter-terrorism operation or anything else. It was about the day during which it took place, and audiences were expected to be interested on the basis of the unique presentation of the sequence of events. That is, that was expected to be the source of interest for two or three episodes, after which Jack Bauer, his family, the soon-to-be president and other identifiably participants in the storyline were the only thing that was expected to bring the audience back next week and next season.

But I recall thinking that that show would have presented an excellent opportunity to introduce new characters and news situations with each season that the show was renewed. If we were allowed to continue thinking that the reason for the show was to present each tense hour in a fraught twenty-four hour period, it might have provided a marvelous opportunity for the studio to offer the audience fresh new material each year under the same brand, while saving money by not having to pay increasingly large salaries to an established cast on a successful show. It might also have made the continued use of the twenty-four hour narrative device markedly more plausible. Instead, we got eight seasons of increasingly familiar and increasingly absurd situations faced by the same Kiefer Sutherland character, each of whose active adventures seem to take place over the course of one sleepless twenty-four hour period.

I still think that show was a missed opportunity to break with the orthodox practice of always keeping as much of the same cast as possible in sequels and renewals, but that wasn't so obviously preferable an option as is the case with Paranormal Activity 3. We don't need to see the characters of the first two films as children. The original storyline will not be benefited by further stripping it of the intrigue of unanswered questions, and trying to add content earlier in the overall story in the hopes that it will be even scarier only serves to make the later events seem dull and almost routine. It would automatically be a better film for leaving these characters behind and letting some other family experience paranormal activity somewhere.

The tired formula of sequels has gotten us accustomed to the ridiculous tendency of the same things to happen repeatedly to exactly the same people, but if there's one franchise-defining series of events that should be common to more than one set of characters, its the act of recording a bunch of weird goings-on in an otherwise normal suburban home. That can scare us no matter who it happens to, and it's more likely to do so if we aren't perplexed by questions about why over the course of twenty years, an entire family that is plagued by recurrent supernatural activity never calls in a bevy of professional exorcists, or goes to a university or media outlet with their absolutely copious amounts of irrefutable video evidence of malevolent ghosts.

The Amazing Spider-Man

I'm still fascinated by the idea of a series reboot coming only ten years after the first entry in the original series. I think this new film looks terrible. After a minute and a half of overreaching melodrama surrounding foundational plot points with which we are already well-familiar, the only genuinely original content that we're introduced to is a special effects cluster fuck that is supposedly intended to wow us visually and make us beg to fork over extra money for 3-D glasses. But since I first saw blind faith in computer generated magic showcased in The Matrix: Reloaded, I've been continually frustrated with the common belief among film makers that they can replace entire segments of a film with animated sequences and expect it to meld seamlessly with footage of real people and locations.

I can be wowed with pure visuals, but this trailer did not cut it for me, and regardless, I need some other reason to see the movie, and I'm certainly not getting that here, especially given the line they thought would provide an excellent final punch to the trailer at the moment that the image of a computer-generated Spider-Man was revealed: "We all have secrets - the ones that we keep from others, and the ones that are kept from us." If you think about it for half a second, that means nothing. It means less than nothing in the context of a Spider-Man story.

Dream House

I cycled through several reactions to this trailer as I was watching it. It is visually compelling from the start, due entirely to cinematography and editing, and it does a fine job of building tension through a skillful use of music, before we have any idea what we're watching. But at about fifty seconds in, I am convinced that what I'm watching is a preview for a new take on The Amityville Horror. It's that tried and true plot about a house that is so haunted by its dark legacy that it unseats the sanity of its new occupant. The similarity grows for thirty seconds up to the confrontation of the protagonist with the image of a perpetrator that looks just like him, but then this film leaps in another direction by saying that they actually are the same person and making the protagonist's conflict curve around uncertainty about what is real.

It remains grounded in an extremely familiar concept - the house with a repeating history, which terrorizes a tight-knit family, the struggle of the head of household to retain (or perhaps forfeit in this case) sanity. There is still that shouted emphasis, "There's something wrong with this house!" It builds on established tropes, but it may just build on them in creative and satisfying ways. I'd be interested to see this film. It may give me hope that Hollywood is capable of being original within the context of its love of repetition. But I worry that the best it can be is the exception to the rule.

Analysis vs. Escapism

Almost exactly three years on from its original release date, I’ve finally gotten around to seeing Wall-E. It has still be quite low on my Netflix queue, but a friend of mine had it lent to her, and she offered that we watch it together. I knew to expect an excellent, critically acclaimed film, and I knew to expect a post-apocalyptic setting. My friend, however, was apparently completely free of any expectations. By the end of it, she was crying almost openly. The word “almost” is important there, because when the credits began to roll, she conspicuously avoided looking in my direction and said, “That was a stupid movie.”

I struggled to try to get her to elaborate. It was extraordinarily well animated, it was touching, it had moments of terrific suspense, and highly relevant themes. But when I asked her just what it was she didn’t like about it, the best response I was able to get from her was a synopsis of some of the plot points, which she gave while dabbing her eyes with a crumpled napkin.

The friendship that she and I share is of an odd sort. We have a scant few points of profound similarity, and apart from that we have virtually nothing in common. She is also not forthcoming with opinions or explanations of her beliefs or feelings, so gathering a better understanding of her takes a substantial bit of labor. One of the things that has long puzzled me about her is her taste in movies. That is, there seems to be no coherent pattern to what she chooses to watch and what she reports that she enjoys. She scoffs at some of the suggestions that I offer, but then speaks highly of films in the same genre, with similar styles or themes. She pretends not to like a particular class of film, but then eagerly embraces an individual film that is perfectly representative of it.

Eventually, after working to understand why she indicated that she didn’t like Wall-E in spite of clearly having been affected by it, I came to the conclusion that our distinct viewing habits were not exactly indicative of different tastes in film. Rather, they speak to differences in the very way that each of us consumes media. She felt shocked an uncomfortable after watching Wall-E because when viewing an animated film, she doesn’t expect an emotional rollercoaster or an overall challenge to the lifestyles of modern society. She only expects to be entertained.

I believe that that’s exactly the way that it is with her and virtually every move that she chooses to watch. She finds a film’s trailer appealing because it looks like the feature will be entertaining, and that it will provide good, non-threatening escapism. I have never been that way. I have never found appeal in pure escapism. Everything I watch, read, or listen to, I do so because I expect to get something out of it, something that speaks to the human conditions, or issues facing modern man, or at least the contemporary cultural aesthetic. Even if I find myself consuming a piece of media idly, I do not then merely let it wash over me. My mind’s tendency toward analysis never remains switched off for long, as so I’m eager to find emotional or intellectual content in even the simplest, most casual things, like television commercials.

It is always difficult to fully comprehend the notion that other people think differently than you do, and it is an essentially foreign concept to me that some people consume media as little more than a distraction. When I am challenged to think about it, however, I wonder whether fans of pop culture are more likely to do just that than they are to take my approach to the enjoyment of media. For me, real enjoyment only comes from the belief that something I am doing, whether actively or passively, is contributing to who I am as a person, what I understand, and how I think. Am I correct to surmise that this is something of a cultural divide within the population, and if so, am I in the minority of it? Am I an anomaly, and is there anything damning or self-injurious about over-thinking as I do, and striving to see that none of the themes of a work of art escape my attention, even if it’s a children’s movie?

Film Comment: Dracula (1979)

Last night, I had the pleasure, for the first time, of watching the 1979 version of Dracula, with Frank Langella in the title role, and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing. I was quite taken with the stylistic presentation, as well as with the performance of the cast, particularly Langella’s sympathetic portrayal of the Count.

I am rather familiar with the 1992 Dracula film by Francis Ford Coppola, as I first saw it when I was about eight, and now, having seen another version that predates my very life, it does not escape my attention how much the Dracula of my childhood owes to this one. Aspects of the atmosphere and certain shots like the creepy image of Dracula crawling down a wall are reflected from one into the other. And more significantly, the romantic emphasis is present in both, and with it the impulse to humanize the character.

I noticed the interesting choice made in the screenplay for the Langella film, deviating slightly from a well-known line from the iconic 1931 version, which was in turn taken from the book. The original Dracula listens to the baying of wolves and comments, “The children of the night: What music they make!” But in 1979 he says instead, “what sad music they make,” and this prompts a few moments of dialogue during which the humanized vampire expresses melancholy at being unable to walk in the daylight. The scene deftly suggests a Dracula who is an outcast and a tragic character, and more than that, it gives voice to the contrasting impulses and experiences of human existence that are vitally important to understanding the vampire mythos.

It is extremely interesting to me to observe how much art and media has evolved in its treatment of the archetypes that our culture has created and let develop for periods of decades or centuries. The first impulse, I think, is always to give the most simplistic, one-dimensional reading to these things, and so Dracula has traditionally been interpreted as something that is purely and simply evil and threatening, and on that reading, subtext is not a major concern.

The same impulse to simplicity persists today, in the vampire mythos and in all shared folklore. In the case of stories with their genesis vaguely placed in the Dracula story, however, the impulse works towards the exact opposite side of the character, making the archetype exciting and attractive, and forgetting the rest. But the best vampire will always have an element of both: the sexual and the deadly, the thrilling and the terrifying. I think the 1979 version gets the balance of elements almost spot on.

Not all treatments of the character or those of his kind are so thoughtful, however. I daresay very few are. And we’ve had well over a hundred years of Dracula during which to refine the way we perceive him, and centuries more with the folklore on which he is based. I usually thumb my nose at remakes, but there’s something remarkable about culturally shared intellectual property like this story. Part of what’s remarkable about it is that it may take dozens of reinventions of a character or storyline to help us effectively draw out the meaning behind them, and to prompt good dialogue about metaphor and interpretation.

Or, put in a much more derisive way, we really might be so dumb as a culture that it takes us years to turn our interpretative eye toward character development, and many more years of phasing between emphasizing and ignoring it before we reach an intellectual breaking point and recognize that such a thing really is important to the story, no matter how it is otherwise being presented.

Now Let's All Be Ballerinas!

Are we done with this royal wedding thing now?

Actually, it is perhaps a bit hypocritical of me to derisively ask that, considering that I'm certain to be checking on the story in the morning in order to see what the ratings were for the coverage of the event. But personally, the only thing I find interesting about this is the public's interest in it. So I'm paying some attention to it until it goes away, in hopes that it does so swiftly.

That's not to say that I don't understand the appeal. These are profoundly difficult times for many of us, and something so romantic and lavish as a royal wedding provides a marvelous fantasy and an opportunity to live vicariously through princes and princesses for a day. I understand it, but I disapprove. I don't begrudge anyone an appeal to escapism, but this sort of cultural voyeurism inhibits breaking points.

We have two main options when something like this is positioned to dominate the media - aside from ignoring it. We can imagine what it would be like to be there, and make believe until reality melts away for a little while, or we can recognize that we could never be there, that this is put forward as a point of stark contrast with our actual, down in-the-dirt lives, and that these are real people we're watching, for whom this kind of excess is commonplace. The former point of view is comfortable; it helps us to coast through an ordinary day on dreams of a different, regal life, but ultimately we do have to come back to a fuller awareness of where we actually stand.

The second option is cynical and seemingly self-defeating, and I prefer it hands down. It robs us of an opportunity to take second-hand pleasure from a rare, beautiful occasion, but at least it doesn't give us over to further delusions. It gives us a better sense of reality, a clearer vision of how what is painfully familiar looks when set against the dazzlingly vibrant backdrop of an alternative that is inaccessible to anyone who isn't born into it. And anything that makes us see more clearly also lets us better identify what is worth pursuing and what is worth rebelling against.

You have to be willing to put aside small joys sometimes, in favor of always keeping in mind the truth of what is going on and how it affects you. That is how we reach a breaking point.

Mainstreaming Conservatism

Kristina Loew at the Revealer has recently made an interesting comment about pop culture. She says:

“From movies to music, conservative voices have cornered the tween scene, that 12 – 13 year old demographic which often looks to their favorite stars for moral guidance (and ways to spend their parents’ paychecks). “

Loew calls this “the mainstreaming of conservatism,” and wonders if it is time for parents to ask if it has gone too far. Of course, for those of us in opposition to the worldview upheld by Twilight, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Justin Bieber, the answer is clear. But the vast majority of parents of tweens are likely in support of the evidently uniform worldview of their cultural role models.

For me, the basic observation raises a different question: Who’s to blame?

Just why is it that the only persons put forward in the popular tween market are ones who have been instilled with thoroughly conservative perspectives on sex, religion, and other potentially divisive social topics? Are these just the sorts of people of whom tweens demand more, or are tweens simply swallowing whatever they are being fed? If a roomful of record executives and casting agents are determining the moral content of the stars they introduce to the public, are we to lay blame on them for pulling the strings, or on the young consumers for applauding the puppet show? And what motivation is there for that manipulation in the first place? Do the men in power strive to control the culture of the emergent generation, or is it something less conspiratorial – that they simply fear outcry from parents if their kids are introduced to threatening, progressive ideas too early in life?

Perhaps that fear is justified. Let us not forget the tear-filled testimonies that fill the media every time the television exposes unprepared audiences to a one-second flash of a nipple or half of a swear word. A culture of sensitivity is no doubt providing at least a partial underpinning to a culture of mainstreaming conservatism, and who is to blame for that? Is the moral make-up of modern parents really so staunchly conservative, or are liberal parents simply not doing enough to make their voices audible? Is that even feasible, or does the media drown them out by privileging one side over another?

But then, why are there any sides on the issue of what values and ideologies we should be introducing our children to through their pop stars? I’m not one to claim that teens or even pre-teens can’t understand issues of social and political import, but I would much prefer that they be given a broad span of time to arrive at their ideas about them independently. I have much respect for some young people. I actually think that I myself was smarter at fifteen than I am now at twenty-five. But in my perhaps glib estimation, the more mature teens and tweens, with more thoroughly formulated ideals, are the least likely to admire the pop stars available to them in the mainstream. If that’s true, then the children whose views are likely to be shaped by the dominant culture are the ones who simply haven’t thought much about the topics about which it’s telling them what to think.

If some kids just want to listen to syrupy pop music and watch vampires proselytize about Mormonism, let them. There is no reason for the makers of that material to be bound up with social views that, as near as I can tell, even they haven’t fully formulated yet. Why do we think they should be role models, rather than just entertainers? Why is there even cause to seek Justin Bieber’s sage counsel on women’s reproductive health? Why not let him sing and earn his six figures, and wait until both he and his audience have grown up enough to develop opinions that they hold with serious conviction?

This post consists of a lot more questions than opinions. All I know is that something’s got to give. There’s got to be a breaking point that keeps us from introducing our least reflective youths to our most conservative ideas, and growing them into the social structure that keeps recycling that dynamic. It may come by unseating the cultural powers-that-be, or just by raising our voices over theirs, or by teaching our children to think for themselves earlier and more often, but whatever the means, let it come.