Love the way Mike articulated this, because it highlights something I’ve worried about a lot lately. In particular, I found the more I spend long stretches of time without catching up with my friends group, the harder it gets to relate to them. It really feels like our cultural interests in movies, shows and videos get increasingly hyper specific to our own tastes, identities, and habits that by the time we’re trying to have a talk again, it feels like we’ve drifted off into completely different universes since our last interaction. We’ll just be there making cultural references to each other that more and more fly over each others heads, with the only commonality becoming the old media we consumed back when we were kids and monoculture was still basically a thing. Just the sheer amount of videos and streaming content is really making us more scattered and disconnected as a community, and sad,y it becomes more necessary for you to rely on online communication like zoom calls and social media to find people you can have commonality with.
@@bigduke5902 Individualism is great - the best thing - but a society needs to have common ground, or else it will be in constant turmoil against itself, or alienated from itself.
@@bigduke5902 NO, it is actually very very bad for cultural cohesion. Imagine never being able to talk to anyone about a TV show you love because you don't know anyone else who watched it.
@bigduke5902 hey WHERE did you learn that COOL way of typing and REPEATING your main point like that? Is it an ORIGINAL move or are you COPYING the culture you're deCRYING?
I still love RLM, but they've been pulling punches lately. It seems to me they have become very careful in demonstrating that they are not something they are concerned they may be associated with.
@@AbrasiousProductions I didn't quite say that. It's more like they are very careful to demonstrate that they are not the other extreme. I personally feel they have become too aware of their own fanbase, at least the ones that comment on their videos.
I was born in the 80’s and I am so sick of the nostalgia for that era. We’ve been nostalgic for it since the 2000’s and it won’t stop because it’s the tail end of the monoculture.
I was over the nostalgia for the 60's, when it was still popular 20-30+ years ago, because we had to sell crap to Boomers. Nostalgia about the 80's (I was around when the 80's happened) just makes me laugh because it's feels like delayed post-70's trauma with more gilded gold plating on it.
@@JP-1990 you could argue the 90's were. Sure, things were more "smart alec", but there was still a sense of fun and that optimism was still hanging around. I think it was 9-11, the last space shuttle blowing up (and getting the space program cancelled) and just the absolute failure of leadership from Bush and Obama that wrecked everything.
Over the last 15 years, I have seen this trend occurring in my classrooms. I teach rhetoric at the university level, and have witnessed this effect continue to erode the ability to determine any cultural reality. Aristotle and other philosophers discussed the theory of commonplaces - those cultural or even empirical touchstones which are generally agreed upon realities by even disparate groups. For those who think this is just nostalgia, Mike is correct in his assessment of media, but cultural 'fragmentation' is more worrisome than just about which films we all enjoy. Without common ground to stand on, we struggle as a society.
I think many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s miss the monoculture effect, where a particular artform or individual artist became a shared cultural experience. There's so much information that we absorb on a daily basis that there's little chance of any one thing having that kind of impact anymore. For movies, it means that even a big movie will come and go and even if it's really really really good, the chance of it having a lasting impact is low.
Yes, this is why I clipped this part of their conversation. While in some ways culture is the same everywhere (eg airports, fashion, technology etc), in other ways culture has diffused since the Internet, and film is an example of that.
What they're saying about theaters is true about the internet now. The primary difference is anyone can put anything online, whereas with the era of theater they were discussing, everything was essentially curated by the industries that produced their individual forms of entertainment (cinema, television, music, etc.) We used to be taught to find and figure out yourself and relate with one another on shared commonalities. Now, we teach completely dismantling yourself and creating whatever new persona(s) we can conceive, making your identity(ies) your brand and marketing it and rejecting commonalities in favor of tribalism. Success can't be found without enough commonality from a large enough group to sustain. Hollywood is chasing a mostly phantom audience that it believes shares their politics and priorities. Most average people, regardless of their backgrounds, seek out entertainment for enjoyment's sake, as simple as that. Hollywood is on a holy crusade and that's not entertaining. It's like every out of touch boss you'd see in an episode of Undercover Boss, it's gotten so far way from the foundational principles of what it's industry is based on and what keeps the machine chugging.
America has never really been that homogeneous. White neighborhoods and black neighborhoods have been pretty sharply divided from one another for as long as they've existed. Some like MLK Jr tried to bring the two together in the hopes of gaining prosperity for his people, while others like Malcolm X asked poignantly why would black people want to be like white people? And he had a point. Why can't people be different, and also respected at the same time? Jame's Baldwin had similar questions to Malcolm X and I believe is the greatest heroes of the civil rights era, not MLK Jr (though they are all heroes in their own rights). I think perhaps MLK Jr sounded the most reasonable at the time, but I do believe James Baldwin was far more correct, exact, and precise. Cultural differences between groups of Americans have been a long-standing boogeyman, and I hope that it's changing, although when times get more polarized tolerance goes down on all sides. I hope someday we can see that different cultures isn't the boogeyman so much as the fear of differences is. The risk is it leads to fascism, where everything is shoved into such extreme forced homogeny that not one person feels free and all are tortured.
I don't know if this is actually true. We remember those times through the lens of being "young", and remember interacting with other young people. When they say "everybody" knew about ET, etc., that's just not true. Many older people didn't go to movies at all, and certainly wouldn't have gone to Back to the Future or ET. My grandmother called ET "that abomination", apparently only seeing a few seconds of a tv commercial for the movie. My other grandmother didn't know about it at all, and when it finally came out on VHS around the holidays one year in the late '80s, she fell asleep before the first scene was over. If THAT's how "everybody" knew about ET, is that really knowing about it?
I was born in 1981 and was keenly aware about 80s pop culture because my mom, dad, three brothers, and grandparents were sharing in it, ET included, as long as we're going by anecdotal evidence. What you are describing is my experience with the 8- and 16-bit era of video games. And speaking of grandmas and shared experience, we will in our lifetime lose all frame of reference to the idea of "grandma's home cooking". This cultural diffusion thing goes away beyond entertainment.
@@bigduke5902 I didn't mean *zero* old people went to some of these movies. But I do mean that many older people (40-80) went to zero movies, and didn't care about movies at all, much less the big movies with a sci-fi bent. The movies they liked and went to were decades before--westerns, mostly. (I remember my best friend's grandpa asking him about the Star Wars magazine he had. "What you got there? Return of the Jed-ee. Well, isn't that somethin'?" My friend proceeded to throw a tantrum because the movies were famous--at least, to us--and had been out for 6 years, yet his grandpa had never heard of a Jedi or Star Wars. His grandpa just ignored his tantrum and continued doing whatever he was doing. Kids nowadays. Am I right?
@@greyeyed123 R-rated entertainment made for adults like Robocop, Rambo, Terminator, Alien, and even Police Academy had toys made for children. I can't think of better evidence for demographic crossover than that. I don't think you can count the taste of the 40+ demographic among those influencing media in any decade after the 1940s.
@@greyeyed123 R-rated genre films like Robocop, Terminator, Rambo, Aliens, and even Police Academy all had lines of children's toys for children and not adult collectors in the 80s and 90s, some even had animated Saturday morning cartoon shows. I can't really think of better evidence than that of audience crossover. You're talking about people aged out of a target demographic that has been in place since at least the 1960s.
@@bigduke5902 But the CROSSOVER is going toward MY point and not yours. Many kids were going to movies. Many 40 and older were not going to Robocop and Aliens. And the older people who were not going to Robocop also were not going to children's movies.
Love the way Mike articulated this, because it highlights something I’ve worried about a lot lately. In particular, I found the more I spend long stretches of time without catching up with my friends group, the harder it gets to relate to them. It really feels like our cultural interests in movies, shows and videos get increasingly hyper specific to our own tastes, identities, and habits that by the time we’re trying to have a talk again, it feels like we’ve drifted off into completely different universes since our last interaction. We’ll just be there making cultural references to each other that more and more fly over each others heads, with the only commonality becoming the old media we consumed back when we were kids and monoculture was still basically a thing. Just the sheer amount of videos and streaming content is really making us more scattered and disconnected as a community, and sad,y it becomes more necessary for you to rely on online communication like zoom calls and social media to find people you can have commonality with.
He's absolutely right. We're so fragmented now. There's not so much 'common culture', no common cultural touchstones.
And that's a GOOD thing.
@@bigduke5902 Individualism is great - the best thing - but a society needs to have common ground, or else it will be in constant turmoil against itself, or alienated from itself.
@@thealmightyaku-4153 And that's a GOOD thing.
@@bigduke5902 NO, it is actually very very bad for cultural cohesion. Imagine never being able to talk to anyone about a TV show you love because you don't know anyone else who watched it.
@bigduke5902 hey WHERE did you learn that COOL way of typing and REPEATING your main point like that? Is it an ORIGINAL move or are you COPYING the culture you're deCRYING?
I love these guys so much, I don't always agree with Mike & Jay but they're true, honest film critics and the world needs more of them❤
You right as hell
I still love RLM, but they've been pulling punches lately. It seems to me they have become very careful in demonstrating that they are not something they are concerned they may be associated with.
@@bigduke5902 yeah I've noticed that too.. they do sometimes tend to have SJW takes on things that rubs me the wrong way.
@@AbrasiousProductions I didn't quite say that. It's more like they are very careful to demonstrate that they are not the other extreme. I personally feel they have become too aware of their own fanbase, at least the ones that comment on their videos.
@@bigduke5902 yeah and I don't like that, they're playing it too safe, I hope they don't go full woke.. I pray to god that never happens.
I was born in the 80’s and I am so sick of the nostalgia for that era. We’ve been nostalgic for it since the 2000’s and it won’t stop because it’s the tail end of the monoculture.
I was over the nostalgia for the 60's, when it was still popular 20-30+ years ago, because we had to sell crap to Boomers.
Nostalgia about the 80's (I was around when the 80's happened) just makes me laugh because it's feels like delayed post-70's trauma with more gilded gold plating on it.
The 80's were the last decade of American optimism.
@@JP-1990 you could argue the 90's were. Sure, things were more "smart alec", but there was still a sense of fun and that optimism was still hanging around. I think it was 9-11, the last space shuttle blowing up (and getting the space program cancelled) and just the absolute failure of leadership from Bush and Obama that wrecked everything.
@@TheRealNormanBates Perhaps one could say that the 90's were the Indian Summer of American optimism.
@@TheRealNormanBates (pops popcorn)
Over the last 15 years, I have seen this trend occurring in my classrooms. I teach rhetoric at the university level, and have witnessed this effect continue to erode the ability to determine any cultural reality. Aristotle and other philosophers discussed the theory of commonplaces - those cultural or even empirical touchstones which are generally agreed upon realities by even disparate groups. For those who think this is just nostalgia, Mike is correct in his assessment of media, but cultural 'fragmentation' is more worrisome than just about which films we all enjoy. Without common ground to stand on, we struggle as a society.
When empires are falling, cultural diffusion is inevitable
or.. cultural diffusion is promoted to make a culture fall.
America is already on track to becoming the most strongest and diverse nation of all time.
@bigduke5902 nice one, look at the national debt
@@TheRealNormanBates that is not what is meant by cultural diffusion genius.
@@MrHumanforlife Of what?
culture in america, sure.
I think many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s miss the monoculture effect, where a particular artform or individual artist became a shared cultural experience. There's so much information that we absorb on a daily basis that there's little chance of any one thing having that kind of impact anymore. For movies, it means that even a big movie will come and go and even if it's really really really good, the chance of it having a lasting impact is low.
Yes, this is why I clipped this part of their conversation. While in some ways culture is the same everywhere (eg airports, fashion, technology etc), in other ways culture has diffused since the Internet, and film is an example of that.
What they're saying about theaters is true about the internet now.
The primary difference is anyone can put anything online, whereas with the era of theater they were discussing, everything was essentially curated by the industries that produced their individual forms of entertainment (cinema, television, music, etc.)
We used to be taught to find and figure out yourself and relate with one another on shared commonalities.
Now, we teach completely dismantling yourself and creating whatever new persona(s) we can conceive, making your identity(ies) your brand and marketing it and rejecting commonalities in favor of tribalism.
Success can't be found without enough commonality from a large enough group to sustain.
Hollywood is chasing a mostly phantom audience that it believes shares their politics and priorities.
Most average people, regardless of their backgrounds, seek out entertainment for enjoyment's sake, as simple as that.
Hollywood is on a holy crusade and that's not entertaining. It's like every out of touch boss you'd see in an episode of Undercover Boss, it's gotten so far way from the foundational principles of what it's industry is based on and what keeps the machine chugging.
America has never really been that homogeneous. White neighborhoods and black neighborhoods have been pretty sharply divided from one another for as long as they've existed. Some like MLK Jr tried to bring the two together in the hopes of gaining prosperity for his people, while others like Malcolm X asked poignantly why would black people want to be like white people? And he had a point. Why can't people be different, and also respected at the same time? Jame's Baldwin had similar questions to Malcolm X and I believe is the greatest heroes of the civil rights era, not MLK Jr (though they are all heroes in their own rights). I think perhaps MLK Jr sounded the most reasonable at the time, but I do believe James Baldwin was far more correct, exact, and precise. Cultural differences between groups of Americans have been a long-standing boogeyman, and I hope that it's changing, although when times get more polarized tolerance goes down on all sides. I hope someday we can see that different cultures isn't the boogeyman so much as the fear of differences is. The risk is it leads to fascism, where everything is shoved into such extreme forced homogeny that not one person feels free and all are tortured.
okay doomer
Where is the cultural blurring effect thing from? It’s a Plinkett video?
I don't know if this is actually true. We remember those times through the lens of being "young", and remember interacting with other young people. When they say "everybody" knew about ET, etc., that's just not true. Many older people didn't go to movies at all, and certainly wouldn't have gone to Back to the Future or ET. My grandmother called ET "that abomination", apparently only seeing a few seconds of a tv commercial for the movie. My other grandmother didn't know about it at all, and when it finally came out on VHS around the holidays one year in the late '80s, she fell asleep before the first scene was over. If THAT's how "everybody" knew about ET, is that really knowing about it?
I was born in 1981 and was keenly aware about 80s pop culture because my mom, dad, three brothers, and grandparents were sharing in it, ET included, as long as we're going by anecdotal evidence. What you are describing is my experience with the 8- and 16-bit era of video games. And speaking of grandmas and shared experience, we will in our lifetime lose all frame of reference to the idea of "grandma's home cooking". This cultural diffusion thing goes away beyond entertainment.
@@bigduke5902 I didn't mean *zero* old people went to some of these movies. But I do mean that many older people (40-80) went to zero movies, and didn't care about movies at all, much less the big movies with a sci-fi bent. The movies they liked and went to were decades before--westerns, mostly. (I remember my best friend's grandpa asking him about the Star Wars magazine he had. "What you got there? Return of the Jed-ee. Well, isn't that somethin'?" My friend proceeded to throw a tantrum because the movies were famous--at least, to us--and had been out for 6 years, yet his grandpa had never heard of a Jedi or Star Wars. His grandpa just ignored his tantrum and continued doing whatever he was doing. Kids nowadays. Am I right?
@@greyeyed123 R-rated entertainment made for adults like Robocop, Rambo, Terminator, Alien, and even Police Academy had toys made for children. I can't think of better evidence for demographic crossover than that. I don't think you can count the taste of the 40+ demographic among those influencing media in any decade after the 1940s.
@@greyeyed123 R-rated genre films like Robocop, Terminator, Rambo, Aliens, and even Police Academy all had lines of children's toys for children and not adult collectors in the 80s and 90s, some even had animated Saturday morning cartoon shows. I can't really think of better evidence than that of audience crossover. You're talking about people aged out of a target demographic that has been in place since at least the 1960s.
@@bigduke5902 But the CROSSOVER is going toward MY point and not yours. Many kids were going to movies. Many 40 and older were not going to Robocop and Aliens. And the older people who were not going to Robocop also were not going to children's movies.