Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?

“Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?” by Henry Jenkins is a very interesting commentary on modern culture and modern filmmaking. Jenkins writes about how with today’s technology, the way culture is shaped and the way Hollywood is run is extremely complex. He talks a lot about how much the average person can participate in culture, and can even make a large impact. Take Perez Hilton for example. Just an average person who decided to write a blog became so famous and is now so influential because he decided he would provide his two sense on pop culture. So by just writing his stories, Perezhilton.com takes in about $45,000 dollars a day in advertisements alone and is viewed millions and millions of times.

The internet in itself has become a huge catalyst for the way today’s popular culture and movie making are developed. It has taken amateur movie making to a whole new level- anyone can become a celebrity on youtube. Jenkins wrote how instead of the home movie being the main use for a camcorder, and its distribution only being to the immediate family, we have tons of people of all ages making movies and writing scripts for videos that can be put on youtube for free to be viewed by the masses. Jenkins uses Star Wars as an example of this- that now amateur film making is like an art form and people put take pride in their parodies or reproductions of Star Wars as if they were a movie genre in themselves.

To think that now, some of our most popular and interesting movies are all based on parodying and reproducing previous movies or series is so accurate it’s almost scary. How many times do we hear about how a movie is “the next Alice in Wonderland” or “the next Wizard of Oz”? Its so true how Jenkins writes about how directors like Tarantino and Groening and Smith all promote media texts that they admire and in doing so, allow their films to be extremely relatable, and in turn very successful. When people in movies are doing what people do in everyday life- like trying to think of as many different episodes of gilligans island as possible or debating over which archie comics characters are gay and straight- we automatically laugh and duplicate that. So basically, in modern culture, all we have is recreation after recration of the same movie/movies. And also, we have movies that combine a few different movies and turn out to be a brand new, very clever, classic.