probabilityfields

There was an article in Slate a while back discussing the uber-hipness of the Gieco auto insurance spokescavemen: ‘They have poetry magnets on their fridge(sic)…in Esperanto.’ The article specifically called out the commercial with the caveman in the airport on a moving sidewalk with his velvet tracksuit and tennis racket that looked like they came–I was gonna say ‘from 1968,’ but the article said, ‘from a Wes Anderson set.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah! Cool,’ because I freakin’ love Wes Anderson.

Flash forward to tonight when The Last Boy Scout comes on and for no reason I notice the absence of cell phones. Then I imagine if they did have a cell phone how hilarious it would look: Bruce Willis holding up a beige brick with an antenna.

Being a hotshot writer/director/producer, I made a note: never include current technology in a movie because it’ll be dated and it won’t be charming; it’ll be corny. Obviously Wes Anderson knew this, if only instinctually, and thus littered his films with anachronistic accoutrements.

If I may restate the obvious, we live in an age where technology moves so fast that the past looks ridiculous. Sure, we laugh when we think about bell bottoms or powdered wigs, and we cringe when we see that pic of our ducktail from 1986 or that video of us doing the Macarena. But the difference is that today we record everyday life so much in photos or videos that we are surrounded by representations of ourselves from only months, days, or hours ago.

So now a paranoia has set in and we avoid trends like the plague, except we fall into a new, safe trend: vintage. We take an old Bon Jovi shirt from Goodwill (more likely Target) and wear it proudly, not because we like Bon Jovi, but because we can make fun of everyone who used to sincerely like his music. It’s sad really. It’s like making fun of love because you’re too scared of getting hurt. (Did you read that sincerely, or with an ironic affectation?)

Of course there’s another, more innocent side to this all: nostalgia. And what are we nostalgic for? I’d venture to guess that in our lonely moments we clutch that original pressing of The Dave Clark Five across our vintage-T-shirt-clad chests and we cry for an imagined past when you could sincerely feel or be something without being bombarded by media, whether commercial or personal, like a funhouse mirror floating three feet in front of us at all times to make us feel like morons.