A while ago I shared this opening scene of the film "Les Quatre Cent Coups," a French New Wave film by François Truffaut. Although on the melancholy side, it was one of my favorites that we watched in my French and Italian cinema class [below are several screenshots from the scene in question].
A few days ago I was watching the movie Monte Carlo with my sisters and I realized this scene below (yes this is a terrible quality video-of-a-screen excerpt) very obviously references this opening scene by Truffaut! I'm glad to know Monte Carlo is not lacking entirely in substance as it lends some validity to the guilty pleasure status of such a movie. (They also watch "To Catch a Thief," a Cary Grant and Grace Kelly favorite, during the movie—more bonus points with its allusions to the setting of the film, character/actor's names, and jewel thievery.) That and the one liners are too good (my sister, as I found out, knows them ALL; "Precious cargo!").
(further reading if you're interested: I love
this analysis of the scene from Les 400 Coups)
I've been thinking a lot lately about pop culture and the level to which I partake of it. What with the second installment of the Hunger Games movies, "Catching Fire" coming out recently, I've had a number of conversations at work and with friends about those movies and books and others, about who has or hasn't seen or read this or that.
When the first Hunger Games movie was coming out a couple summers ago, I had not read the books merely on principle, merely because everyone else was reading them. Upon learning more about the story and ideas in the books, I realized that was a dumb reason, so I read the first book just as the movie was released in theaters. A couple weeks ago my sister got midnight-showing tickets for the second movie, so I got my act together and spent an afternoon the weekend prior reading the second book. I have not yet read the 3rd book, but I probably will, as I enjoyed the first two as far as young adult literature goes. On an intellectual level, I found the cultural subtexts very interesting, in particular the reference to the ancient use of the Colosseum and the commentary on the modern-day American fascination with reality TV shows.
In thinking about pop culture, I remembered a passage from a book I recently finished reading and went back to reread it:
"[These] are both "memes," to use a term coined by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day's Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, "Where's the beef?," and of course the notion of the meme itself. Dawkin's theory is that memes are to cultural evolution what genes are to biological evolution. ... Memes are a culture's building blocks, passed down from brain to brain in a Darwinian process that leads, by trial and error, to cultural innovation and progress. The memes that prove themselves best adapted to their "environment"—that is, the ones that are most helpful for people to keep in their brains—are the ones most likely to survive and replicate and become widely regarded as good, true, or beautiful. Culture at any given moment is the "meme pool" in which we all swim—or rather, that swims through us.
"Cultural change occurs when a new meme is introduced and catches on. It might be romanticism or double-entry bookkeeping, chaos theory or Pokémon. (Or the notion of memes itself, which seems to be catching on today.) So where in the world do new memes come from? Sometimes they spring full-blown from the brains of artists or scientists, advertising copywriters or teenagers. Often a process of mutation is involved in the creation of a new meme, in much the same way that mutations occur in the natural environment can lead to useful new genetic traits. Memes can mutate when they get combined in new ways, or when someone working with them makes a mistake—misreading or misinterpreting an old meme in such a way as to yield something new."
—Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p. 148-149
This context, that of the relevance of memes and the role of pop culture as a vital part of our cultural consciousness, puts things in a new light. Certainly there are pop culture fads that are strictly fluff or otherwise deplorable, but many others draw on cultural history to interpret current ideas in a new light and to tie the popular trends in with the classic, persisting ideas that define the human race or a particular nation and cultural identity. As I have discovered lately, creating these kinds of connections between the two brings an additional richness to life, to the quotidian barrage of information, news, and media in the unexpected instances where those connections occur.
(On a similar pop-culture confessions note, I have been listening to JB's Christmas album... I am not ashamed)
