There is an alarming tendency for pop cultural references to double back on themselves, reversing cause and effect. This is understandable. Pop culture is, by nature, a vulturous beast, consuming gobfuls of source material in its insatiably cavernous maw, as it digests anything and everything in its massive gelatinous path to a soft syrupy pulp.<\/p>\n
Which sometimes results in an odd sort of reverse peristalsis. The very food upon which pop culture feeds becomes regurgitated and turned upside down. When this happens, people can become confused.<\/p>\n
Case in point: In the era when “Star Trek, the Next Generation” was on the air, that intrepid Starship captain Jean-Luc Picard was the man of the moment. I remember students, upon first encountering the films of Jean-Luc Goddard, being amused that this french filmmaker had the same first name as the captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise.<\/p>\n
Of course they had it all backwards. J.J. Abrams and his associates had named Jean-Luc Picard in homage to the great nouvelle vague<\/i> director, a point that was missed entirely by these students.<\/p>\n
Similarly, people who were raised on “Pinky and the Brain” cartoons might be taken aback the first time they see a performance by Orson Welles. “Gee,” they might think, “this guy sounds a lot like that little cartoon mouse.” Same goes for anybody who watched “Ren and Stimpy” as a child, upon first encountering a Peter Lorre movie. Or anybody who sees a film with Lionel Barrymore only after having watched “Underdog”.<\/p>\n
People introduced to Bach after hearing the intro to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” might wonder whether this guy ripped off her style. Young people with a bad sense of chronology might wonder whether Dylan Thomas was named for Bob Dylan, or whether Richard Burton, the geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat, was named for Richard Burton, the actor.<\/p>\n
And of course, anyone under a certain age, upon visiting a Scottish castle for the first time, will probably be astonished at how faithfully somebody managed to recreate Hogwarts. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is an alarming tendency for pop cultural references to double back on themselves, reversing cause and effect. This is understandable. Pop culture is, by nature, a vulturous beast, consuming gobfuls of source material in its insatiably cavernous maw, as it digests anything and everything in its massive gelatinous path to a soft syrupy pulp. … Continue reading “Cultural reverse peristalsis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7458,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457\/revisions\/7458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}