Words are stubborn little powerhouses. A few letters assembled into an enormous and enduring galaxy of meanings. Consider for example: "Love." It means remarkably different things when you use it to describe how you feel say about: God...Mom..summer...tomatoes...or painted toenails. The same may be said about that powerhouse word: "Loser."
These days, the loser label covers a monument of ridicule. To be a loser today is to be what what we once might have described as a sinner...a heretic...a social outcast. And not only the person, but most everything the person lives by.
One way of defining a loser circa 2010 is to consider his or her social values. A few leap to mind: Virginity... sentimentality...strict morality...happy or at least honorable endings. I mean, lets get real! People who say they live by such values and expectations are surely out of step with our more honest less hypocritical times. What else can you say...? Loser!
The problem some of us have with this impetuous judgment is it seems to equate behaviors with beliefs. Today's losers don't suggest they and previous generations always behaved this way. What they seem to say is we always believed these were the ways to behave! Idealizing your life and your times is not so much a lie as it is a goal. Humanity forever falls short of its ideals, but without them what is there to reach for?
Every night we have this extraordinary dichotomy on our television screens. The reflections of our America, cinematic-ally captured either in black&white or in color. The old B&W films from mid 20th C Americana weave romances, comedies and dramas around the stuff of virginity, sentimentality, strict morality, and happy or at least honorable endings. The box-office hits from today tend to reflect alternative values (AKA, free love, hard-swaggering cynicism, bendable morality, and endings in which there's often not a dime's worth of difference between the hero and the anti-hero).
Movies aren't life. And yet for a visitor, they are perhaps the handiest way to see and sense how differently we live our lives now long removed from the felicitous ethos of a post-WWII America. For those who have lived in both Americas, it's been an arguable trade-off....
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Jack, yes, movies are not life. But for entertainment, give me the old B & W ones. To me they came to life by people who worked for a living. That's it! Like reading a book. Nothing read into the story. Oh, I haven't been to a movie in 25 years!
ReplyDeleteJerry ~ I'm like you. The only films I see are on TCM where they play the "old" stuff. But old only in vintage, not in quality!!
ReplyDeleteVery True, Jack. But the problem is that as most shows and Films on TV are American, the rest of the World get a very twisted idea of what America is all about. Americans either live in super rich pent houses, or in dark green or brown painted rooms in boarding houses, or run down single room flats..usualy full of drug addicts. Police spend all their time tracking down mass murderers, or having shoot outs in the streets. The Public, are black or espanic if they are 'baddies', or white, and bad..the impression is that you take your life in your hands everytime you leave your home, or Hotel. Yes 'we' know its only a TV Show, or a Film....but many people believe what they see or hear, on their TV, and the Networks, and Movie Producers, do America no favour at all. The 'other' thing on this subject, is that Americans always give the imression in their many war films, that the Only Good Army, is American, and makes people in Britain, or Europe wonder what 'our' soldiers are fighting, and dying for, after all, the Films show that America always wins, on its own...Again, Film Producers are not being very smart...
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