Admire the Rift

Beginning with a grandiose notion I assert that cultural assault has begun on my generation. Which is wholly unfair. Being part of a difficult to describe generation, I latch on to the term "Sampling," a fair way to describe a group which borrows at will from all that has come before it. In this way we choose to define ourselves by the lifestyle we adopt. More like a patchwork though, than a replication of past generations, we strive to find something worth admiring in each age group which has come and gone.

But then I awake this morning, with some prior knowledge, of the assault to come on our culture. Youth culture, that is. Anthony Lane responds to Watchmen (2009) with aggressive misunderstanding, and attacks the very genre that many in this modern world have come to love. Granted, Watchmen was not a perfect film, could have in no way matched the Novel itself, and fell flat at parts. Central to Lane's argument against the film is his lack of familiarity with the novel. He misinterprets the film and fails to grasp, that it exists as commentary not on the nuclear world, but as a conversation on the clash of generations as pre-nuclear and post-nuclear.

Lane writes, "There is Dan (Patrick Wilson), better known as Nite Owl, who keeps his old superhero outfit, rubbery and sharp-eared, locked away in his basement, presumably for fear of being sued for plagiarism by Bruce Wayne." But here what Lane fails to understand is that the similarity to Batman is intentional. Nite Owl's function is that of direct correlary to Batman. In fact all the characters in Watchmen are correllative to the characters of the major Comic producers. The fact that Lane is only able to identify one singular example of this familiarty with comic book lore demonstrates his inability to intelligently dialogue about the film. Here he fails doubly, since his knowledge of the source material is all but missing he could rely on his skills as a film critic to disect the elements of the film itself, like camera work, or performances. Yet, he does little to this effect.

Robert Sullivan writes an article for the New York Times which decries that way in which bicyclists ride in New York City. His primary means for this assertion is that he remembers a time when it was different. To me this screams of generation comparison, in which Sullivan insists that when he was younger, his generation had manners. While I doubt that this is even true, I still see Sullivan struggling with the obvious differences between himself and this younger flock of cyclists, with differnt values, different behaviors. His judgment is, Rude and Dangerous.

But here is the issue in my mind, as my generation comes of age it loses it grip and creative control on the things we enjoy. The same is true with Sullivan and Lane, who struggle to understand a new and different way of percieving the world. Not to argue that the way each successive generation behaves it better, but only to see that your own generation possess that same fault. It may be worse than the one before it. The place of writers like Lane and Sullivan should not be to attack and criticize that which they don't understand, but instead to profess the values they think will aid society the most.