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That is, Star Wars is not a single movie, nor a lonely cliché floating in ether. It is “movies,” the gathering of hundreds of clichés from several genres, celebrating a reunion in outer space.
Fictional vampires are tall, thin, gaunt, sly, and patrician.
Stories are a kind of sorcery. Like repetition and anaphora, they can seduce the mythmaking mind and can suppress the kind of deeper thinking that is also quite necessary to understand the truth of things. A great story that serves the wrong purpose is a dangerous thing.
A child’s early years are key to the development of language, motor skills, and behavior. It is far easier to learn a second language as a child than as an adult, and deaf kids who don’t learn sign language in early life struggle to become proficient, even if they practice for decades.
After most people are in their twenties or thirties, the soft clay of taste and ideology has hardened.
Hollywood storytellers are caught in a trap of their own design. Audiences expect and prefer vulnerable female characters, having been instructed by the history of film that likable women ought to be feminine. The only way to break the cycle is to break expectations. Forward-thinking writers should just write kickass female leads and stop asking audiences for their permission.
Bigots are made, not born. But deep compassion also requires teaching, and a great story can be a persuasive lesson.
Indecent: 10 years before its time Shameless: 5 years before its time Outré (Daring): 1 year before its time Smart: Current fashion Dowdy: 1 year after its time Hideous: 10 years after its time Ridiculous: 20 years after its time Amusing: 30 years after its time Quaint: 50 years after its time Charming: 70 years after its time Romantic: 100 years after its time Beautiful: 150 years after its time
“My doctor said I was in terrible shape. I told him I needed a second opinion. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re also quite ugly.’”
“Two atoms are walking down the street. One of them turns to the other and says, ‘Hold up, I think I lost an electron.’ The first atom replies, ‘Are you sure?’ The second atom shouts, ‘Yes, I’m positive!’” This joke has nothing to do with power. The last word of the story arrives as a small yet meaningful surprise. But to
“Chasing and tickling are both the threat of an attack, but without an actual attack.” By this theory, a good comedian chases with impropriety and tickles with wordplay, but does not deeply wound the audience’s social mores.
Culture doesn’t stop surprising us. In fact, culture doesn’t stop at all. Anything can be a fashion.
But the oldest examples of prehistoric art date to about 50,000 BCE, suggesting that modern humans have spent far more time wandering the earth without written expression as we have spent surrounded by art and writing.
Whatever the opposite of “going viral” is, that’s what writing did for the majority of its time with humans. It steadfastly refused to catch on. Literacy rates in European countries like France did not cross 50 percent until the 1800s, and half of the world could not read and write as late as 1960.
In the pamphlet In Praise of Scribes, the fifteenth-century abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote, “He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.” In the final analysis, the apparent blasphemy of the machine did not outweigh its convenience.
Thus writing, once slandered and then sacred, gave way to book printing, once slandered and then sacred.
The teenager emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, thanks to the confluence of three trends in education, economics, and technology. High schools gave young people a place to build a separate culture outside the watchful eye of family. Rapid growth gave them income, either earned or taken from their parents. Cars (and, later, another mobile technology) gave them independence.
As soon as teenagers were invented, they were feared. Many social critics made no distinction between the young car-jacking thieves and the comic readers. To an old worrywart, they were all feral gypsy sprites.
For MAYA’s sake, “cool” means Most Autonomous Yet Appropriate.
When you’re young, every rule is illegitimate until proven otherwise. It is precisely because they have so little to lose from the way things are that young people will continue to be the inexhaustibly neophilic motor of culture.
So most people don’t think in percentages. They process the world in stories—actions and reactions; causes and outcomes; post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Any story is better than chaos. In fact, one might say that the chaos of life is a chronic condition for which stories are the remedy.
One of the laws of chaos is that a microscopic change in the present trajectory can lead to wildly different future outcomes; the Brazilian butterfly shakes her wings, and a Pacific typhoon forms off the coast of Indonesia.
When some products hit, they don’t just leave a mark; they sunder the landscape, change the atmosphere, usher in the extinction of an old order.
There is no language in the world more universal than heroes destroying bad guys, with the help of explosions.
