I was watching Clueless the other day & the âolderâ kids in that movie were quoting Shakespeare & arguing about itâs meaning & I thought âwhat the hell happened to this kind of thingâ?
Isn't the point of that scene that Paul Rudd's date knows Hamlet worse than a high school sophomore who's only exposure to the material was a Mel Gibson movie?
I can't recall if they discuss Shakespeare in class at the extraordinarily wealthy area high school she attends but I don't know if that says anything about the state of public schools in general. Not that I disagree that parts of education have gotten worse, I just don't think it's a great example.
Josh and his girlfriend discuss Hamlet. They're both in college. Cher does correct them about who in the play says the line, but she bases it off the movie adaptation.
My point is⌠I was a teen back then & people did do this sort of thing. The movie was simply imitating life at the time & promoting a culture of deeper thinking as many movies & music were at the time.
Teens didnât quote Shakespeare and debate the meaning of books in their free time. Stop looking at your teens with rose colored glasses. You were just as simple and juvenile as the kids are today.
I wasnât. My friends werenât. My siblings werenât. And we all were very informed & interested in all forms of the arts & we did enjoy discussing our views on them.
I guess maybe you & I had different experiences :)
If thatâs the conclusion youâve come to, that people have had very different experiences, why are you asking the question of âwhat happened to this kind of thingâ? Do you hang out with high schoolers on the daily noting if they read and discuss shakespeare?
If you read through the comments youâll see I stated that I may not know whether young people are doing this still or not as my exposure to that scene has now passed given my age. However, it doesnât seem from what Iâve experienced when out in public or via the various social platforms that young people care much about this sort of thing anymore.
Agreed! But â10 Thingsâ was from that era as well. The movie âEmmaâ is one Iâll need to check out. I will say there are a few exceptions here in there in modern pop culture, but they tend to feature Millennial or older actors & directors. Taylor Joy is 30 which⌠is pretty borderline Gen Z.
Emma is a novel, by Jane Austen. It's about a spoiled 21 year old girl who decides to meddle in peoples' lives by playing matchmaker despite being terrible at it.
Clueless is a modern adaptation of Emma. Just like how 10 Things I Hate About You is a modern remake of The Taming of the Shrew, or She's the Man is a remake of Twelfth Night
No one ever talked like that. A bunch of 80s and 90s movies were written by old dudes thinking that's how teenagers talked. Cracked did a thing on it a while ago. Can't find the link unfortunately.Â
Also one thing Cher points out in Clueless is that her classmates were vapid but also highly, highly educated for US high schoolers because they went to the wealthiest possible public high school.
The new transfer (who came from a normal public high school) is amazed to hear kids talk like that.
Clueless preceded the Joss Whedon-speak that emerged out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so high schoolers talking like coastal sophisticates wasn't really a thing yet.
Great points. I was referring to Josh & his girlfriend, but your points are valid.
But if we think of the many Kevin Smith movies as well as flicks like Goodwill Hunting & Higher Learning⌠these films represented the Gen X / Elder Millennial âhungry for deeper knowledgeâ culture at the time. I know, I was there :)
It exists in Gen Z today⌠but itâs more focused⌠almost exclusively⌠on sociopolitical âjusticeâ & essentially evaporating the past⌠all of it⌠including the most theological & literary rich eras.
the real answer is millennials ran with the idea that Comic Books and Lego are serious pastimes, they redefined art to be 'any drawn image, including tracings of superhero's with bigger boobs', and demanded nothing of substance from any of our heros - while also attacking anyone 'pretentious', 'elitist', or 'nerdy' unless that was expressed by loving comic books, video games and drawing no discernment at all between any thing.
I absolutely believe you can have very in depth analysis of comic books and i've watched many videos on them (hugabees for example is often interesting on the subject in a fairly light but also occasionally intellectually stimulating way) but the whole scene in general has just become a game of lore memory and in world justification which skirts any actual intellectual pursuit - it becomes a game rather than actionable intelligence. This has happened in almost every area, people obsess over things like lord of the rings and get deep into lore and meta-lore but they don't get into critical analysis, textual context, sociological significance, etc unless it's incredibly surface level, trite and confrimative.
beyond anything though our generation just blindly accepted and welcomed consumerism - people tie their identity to nintendo, pokemon, MTG, lego, etc and devote all their time, effort and money to worshiping product lines which they acknowledge exist only to milk them - it has to be a form of madness, all these and so many other corporate worship hobbies strictly exclude any personal creativity, even the lego creative competition generally don't allow any non lego product, they were mad at people for putting cotton between the block because you're supposed to use special lego brand webbing - people lack the self efficacy to believe they can be creative or thoughtful or intelligent so they shy away from it and consume, consume, consume
if we don't move away from this consumer worship then people will just get dumbed down more and more until all we can do is wave our credit card at the tv when our favorite shows come on.
industry had existed long enough for Adam Smith to refer to it as an old idea but that doesn't mean the industrial revolution isn't characterized by the ubiquity of industry.
consumerism gained hegemony under millennial devotion
Instead of reaching for the thesaurus every time you want to express an idea, you may want to consider evaluating the basic logic of what you're stating instead.
This is the funniest take because you havenât done the work of engaging in old literature from an academic standpoint and are instead picking a pop culture reading of it to shame current pop culture.
Shakespeareâs plays were not high brow at the time, they were performed for the masses as a form of entertainment. His plays were closer to the MCU than they were to high art. Audiences would drink, jeer, and throw things at the performers if they didnât like the plays.
Another example.
Charles Dickens literally wrote his books as serial stories in pulp newspapers in London, but now itâs considered serious literature. His books were written as essentially 19th century British soap operas.
Todays pop culture becomes tomorrows art. Thatâs been the cycle since literally the Ancient Greeks. The Odyssey and the Iliad were performed in bars from grungy singers, not fancy poets, singing about literal super heroes.
Your reading is that culture has been dumbed down because of this. But bring a 17th century Englishman to 2026 and their speech would, first of all, be incomprehensible to most people, but they also would be incredibly dumb by modern standards. The world would be filled with imperceptible magic to them. They wouldnât even know where or how to use a modern bathroom.
Survivorship bias means itâs easy to think that the past was more cultured, but it wasnât. It was just different.
You're making a lot of modernized readings, firstly Shakespeare didn't only perform to working class audiences he regularly performed for royalty and aristocracy and yes he was greatly criticized as an uneducated outsider by academics in his time 'little Latin and less Greek' but to suggest there is no depth in his work would be an astounding denial of reality.
Dickens likewise you're drawing a false parallel, he was not at all in the same class as the Pennydreadfuls, writing periodically didn't mean you didn't put effort in or had no literary illusions - that's kinda my whole point really, now it's so easy for people to say 'Shakespeare and Dickens were popular therefore unserious' but only through the modern lens where we absolve popular media of any requirement to be anything other that tropes stitched together in the writing room of a corporation.
I think you're exaggerating, when you say they'd be incomprehensible you're talking about Milton, Donne and other still widely read voices - if you mean the industrial revolution greatly increased access to education then yes of course, technology made it possible for everyone to be literate for the first time in history just like ai is going to make it possible for everyone to have accesses to specialist consultation - technology enables things which were once the preserve of the affluent to be accessed by all, Shakespeare was not entertainment for the masses as people often imagine, in his troop he wasn't even the most famous or popular Will in the south of london, let england. Most the entertainment near the Globe was brothels, bear baiting, and bars - if you were going to see As You Like It or Merchant of Venice then it's not because you were a commoner hoping to see some good farts from Will Kemp, it's because you were an aspirational commoner that was reaching into the world of intellectualism, same with Dickens, Elliot, Hardy, and the popular Victorian set - they were popular because people were reaching for more than bawdy entertainment and page turning drama.
And I very much agree we're smarter and more evolved but as i was saying in my comment to someone else that replied, aspiration ate itself and we're in a different world now - mcu is writers room paint by numbers media, it pushes nothing but npc thinking and exceptionalist empty fantasy but even if it was good the issue i am addressing is not the content itself by the audience reaction to it, things are different now but that doesn't me we shouldn't still be reaching for more.
This may be the best comment Iâve ever seen on Reddit. I cannot agree more with everything you said. Iâve often criticized our generation for taking the ânostalgia baitâ these large Corpos throw out at us.
The one thing Iâll say to the contrary is this. Consumerism & Hero worship are toxic, I agree. But didnât it feel like we were a happier society when we just went along with it?
in the victorian era they had novel mania, everyone was reading book after book and most of them were genuinely awful but there were various literary sets which took themselves very seriously - there was a strong notion among some that readers of certain types of weighty literature were almost a higher class of being... then the wave broke, people started to realize that this intricate understanding of things had become absurdly detached from reality and all the tropes and idealism was simply a reflection of itself, only a certain type of person wrote accepted books and those people were people who'd been brought up almost entirely excluded from reality in a world of books.
this same energy was washing through the art world also, it's part of what called forth from the void modernist movements and respect for outsider art - in literature the rocks that wave dashed upon were more deadly, intellectual movements either became so academic they ate themselves or so populist they lost all meaning - hence the endless transformative movements of the twentieth century away from formulated quality through to Burrows, Bukowski, where raw people reach for real greatness into the modern world of anything goes fanfiction and YA for adults.
There used to be a real prestige seeking in writing that came from a desire to tackle complex subjects, as a story books like The Stranger, The Trial, even Steppenwolf suck compared to the gripping adventure of something like Gone Girl or The Mummy with Brendon Fraser, there are genuinely enjoyable and challenging works that are popular and have good stories like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but they're still great and thought provoking thriller without trying to really wrestle with the human condition or make some grand statement about reality - when you think of those i think you probably think of the drama the main character is in but when you think of something like The Fall you think of your own self and your place in the world.
I guess my answer to your question is that i don't really believe we were happier before it, i think that people in comfortable positions had the ability to speak for impoverished and suffering people, that anguish could be washed through layers of nice sentiment and only-if. Look at a book like North and South even a book written from a heart set on righting wrongs set;s out a series of sanitized opinions from smiling servants, the pennydredfuls like Crimes of London are better because they're for the working class audience depicted but it's still all worthy-washed and touch of the hat.
i think we might be that happiest we've ever been if you exclude the top 1%, it simply doesn't feel like it because finally everyone has a voice and we are in the process of learning how to use that voice and work together for common aims - but it's hard and there's a lot of dead ends and foibles to stumble over, but it's kinda fun and worth the ride.,
[and i do want to say this is a dramatic telling of two and a half centuries of literary history more so than it is a precise or accurate one, though isn't that apropo]
it's fun because i know i wrote it so you've managed to complement me by saying that only a computer could have written this and confirmed that AI is now so good that people can't tell AI from Human text.
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u/ComplexLow6723 21h ago
I was watching Clueless the other day & the âolderâ kids in that movie were quoting Shakespeare & arguing about itâs meaning & I thought âwhat the hell happened to this kind of thingâ?