FROM OSCARE WILDE TO SEPIA MOVIES

OSCAR WILDE vs JOHN WAYNE

As the Olympics come to an end, they leave us with this thought. The distinction between say the Luge and Figure Skating. In effect, the difference in life between raw power and delicate power.

Would it be correct to say raw power has helped tame the world and the animals around us, and that delicate power has then helped civilize that world? It's something like the image of our Wild West first being tamed by rugged individuals like trappers, miners and marshals; later being civilized by rooted groups like farm families, schools and churches.

Today's America has experienced sharp cultural shifts. The John Wayne images have in part yielded to the Tom Hanks images. We still cheer our rugged Charles Bronsons and Clint Eastwoods, but brains and gentility have won equal favor. Intelligence need not take a backseat to brawn; nerds are envied more than ridiculed.

Some call this the feminization of America. Perhaps Oscar Wilde put it differently: "America is the only culture that has gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." Hmmm...?

WHEN EXACTLY DID I BECOME SEPIA-TONED

Society lives not only by its laws, but also by its conventions. Collectively accepted habits whose use shortcut the need for a lot of explaining. The conventions employed in our films are especially interesting, for they not only reflect us. Sometimes they help shape us.

For instance, the convention of conveying the passage of time by the slow fadeout....the convention that in the world of action, men buddy-up...then there's the convention that getting in a car almost always means a wild chase, a fiery crash and bodies flying into the camera...the most enduring convention of course is that no matter how brutal and disastrous the plot line, we almost always end with boy & girl getting each other.

OK, no argument. Hollywood has the aesthetic right to choose it's own conventions; and, I suppose, to leave its audiences motivated to somehow match them in real life.

However, I'm desperately curious about one particular cinematic convention. Whenever any story takes place in the 30s and 40s, we're all in sepia tone! Has a nice visual effect, and by now it rigorously establishes the time frame. But when and where and how did my generation get to be sepia toned?? I just never noticed...