“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.
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4 comments:
It's true, most entertainment today is a remake of something done in the past. Old movies are constantly being remade. We see novels being turned into films as well. Songs that our parents listened to are redone or sampled by artist we listen to. The list goes on and on. When I read your post I was reminded of Benjamin's thoughts on art, authenticity, and aura. Recreations and reproductions, whether it be in art, film, music, etc. are so prevalent in our society. It brings up the idea that the "fixed inner quality" or the "magic" art has might be lost with reproduction. Does this mean that all our art today isn't really authentic? It's all ends up in this endless cycle questioning the authenticity and aura of our art today.
Stefanie Garcia
I don't think that because so much of art is reproduction, and so many movies are just remakes or based on books, that art today isn't really authentic. Most media is just composed of the same story being passed on and on, with new artists giving their take on it. One wouldn't say that the Lord of the Rings domination of pop culture when the trilogy came out a few years ago was not an authentic work by Peter Jackson and all the people who worked on it, simply because it was based on the books by Tolkien. And Star Wars itself was of course based on other stories/movies that George Lucas was influenced by. It's all about influence, really, I think ... not so much loss of authenticity. We have to be inspired by something.
Sgt28 I was thinking of exactly the same examples in which I recall when I think of how many times I think a song or movie is new to only listen to an oldies station on the radio and hear some strange version of something that is obviously from like the fifties, completely throwing me off guard. Regardless of the media used ideas are being shared over time, slashes and put back together to mean something else or just bring it back and freshen the old version up if it is classic, they must keep up with what is now if it is something nobody really wants to forgt about. Although somethings really are best untouched -they are what they are -Great- why try changing it. (Forget what could be refined)
An example of a contemporary film that is a reproduction (modern adaptation?) of an older movie is "Disturbia." Disturbia, a film about a teenager under house arrest, who while spying on his neighbors thinks he may have seen someone murdered, has a lot of similarities to the Alfred Hitchcock film, "Rear Window." Even though Disturbia was clearly an homage to Rear Window, there were some differences. However, one of the most stark contrasts was the amount of marketing and product placement in the film. In Disturbia, there were iPods, xboxes, magnavox televisions, twinkies, etc..In the last, 15 years or so, product placement seems to have been taken to a whole new level. I think this is part of convergence because it shows how different companies unite under the dollar to advertise their products in as many different mass media forms as they can.
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