Is Culture Stuck? Things Have Been Looking the Same.

It made me think about what was the last good new movie I saw. I think it’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Why did I like it? I don’t know. It wasn’t because it was about the plot which centered around the Charles Manson murders. The film seemed to use it as an excuse. An excuse for what? Just to transport you to Tarantino’s lavishly reconstructed LA in 1969 with cars, drive-ins, hot hairy hippie chicks, Margot Robbie’s starlet blonde, Bruce Lee, Brad Pitt playing a cool guy stunt driver and DiCaprio as a former cowboy on his own TV series but is now on a downward career arc. The viewer is transported to a place and time that was filled with cool characters. People looked different, talked different and there was cultural trends happening that were specific to that era.

I really enjoyed that movie; one of the better ones I’ve seen in the last few years. It had no plot to speak of, not did it need one. What it did is completely succeed in making the foreign actually feel foreign. That was a very different time — the people and their concerns were not the same as ours. Their Weltanschauung was completely divergent from our own, and Tarantino is one of the few directors I’ve ever seen successfully capture this.

If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new.

Yes, it is really strange how little culture has shifted in a lot of ways. There have been lurches to increased prudishness and such, but a lot of major things haven’t changed at all since the mid-2000s. As a child of the 1970s, it’s hard to explain to people how quickly fashion and culture changed back then! Because it just does not now. Not even a global pandemic seems to be doing much in that regard.