If you rent Must Love Dogs, do you also hate freedom?
By Nicholas Kaufmann
Here's a hypothetical situation: You're standing in a bookstore checkout line when you suddenly realize the people around you are looking at you funny. Is it untamed hat-hair? Did you accidentally tuck your skirt into your underwear again? Nope, it's because they're all buying important, politically aware books like James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration, or Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, and all you've got to show for yourself is the Jackie Collins novel you're now hugging guiltily to your chest.
Maybe you've experienced this embarrassing scenario firsthand, or maybe for you it was your coworkers gawking at you like you just kicked a puppy after you admitted to missing a politically charged Frontline special because a new episode of Grey's Anatomy was on. Whatever the exact situation, it happens to all of us often enough to make us wonder: Are they just being judgmental jerks, or are they onto something? Does our personal taste in recreational interests really dictate how aware we are of the world around us?
I decided to find out. As a clerk at a popular, independent video store in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn—a mixture of old-world Italian and Hispanic families that have lived there for ages, young hip twenty-somethings just out of college, and so many yuppie families fleeing Manhattan that the neighborhood is now a contender for Doublewide Stroller Capitol of the U.S.—I realized I could take advantage of the unique access my job gives me by creating an anonymous survey to poll the customers. Knowing I had to keep it short to get anyone to take part (this is always-in-a-rush New York City we're talking about), I posed only two questions. The first asked what movie or movies they were renting today. For the second, I didn't want participants putting on airs or answering dishonestly about their own social awareness, even though the survey was anonymous, so I asked what they thought the "the spirit of the times" is right now. (To put people at ease in the face of such an ambitious question, I made it clear they could write as much or as little on the subject as they wanted. I wasn't looking for long essays; a single word or sentence would do.) The survey remained in the store for six days, Friday through Wednesday, for maximum exposure to the clientele. In the end, only twenty-one customers took part, but since that's about twenty more than I thought would actually fill out some random video store clerk's survey, it would do.
Because taste is impossible to measure scientifically (after all, one man's Godfather is another man's White Chicks), my only choice was to break down the results of the first question by genre rather than by making any good movie/bad movie judgment calls. Drama renters ranked the highest, comprising 43% of the completed surveys, while comedy renters comprised 24%, action/thriller renters 14%, documentary renters 10%, and foreign film renters 9%. Keeping in mind that drama, documentary and foreign are supposed to be the serious films, while comedy and action/thriller are generally considered the mindless popcorn movies, it was time to run the numbers and see if intellectually stimulating fare truly leads to more social awareness, and if brainless entertainment really does lead to living with blinders on.
Crunching the Numbers
The first thing I noticed was that the majority of respondents, 67% of them, interpreted the spirit of the times in political terms. Not too surprising for one of the bluest corners of the nation's most populous blue state, though what was surprising was how boldly this viewpoint crossed genre lines. "Fear and cynicism," answered one respondent renting The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. "Cynical and depressing," echoed another (The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Junebug). The sentiment was repeated over and over again: "Fear" (Pirates of the Caribbean), "We didn't listen!" (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), "Nightmarish" (The Constant Gardener), "Doubt, skepticism" (The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Me and You and Everyone We Know).Some displayed outright disgust: "The reign of the amateur, the rule of the know-nothing" (Shoot the Piano Player). Others lamented the political climate but did their best to remain positive: "Either deeply overwhelmingly depressing, or oddly hopeful, because when it's so bad, it tends to spark creativity and revolution" (Broken Flowers), "Darkly humorous" (The Naked City and L.A. Confidential), and "Optimistic with stress" (The Aristocrats). In the strongest example of opinion crossing genre lines, two people, one renting the critically acclaimed drama Hustle & Flow, the other renting the critically drubbed thriller The Fog, both wrote of pervasive materialism and selfishness. Strike one against those who think escapist entertainment breeds nothing but complacency!
For all this attention paid to the political climate, though, it's worth noting that only 14% of respondents mentioned President Bush by name. What was the spirit of the times for them? "Anti-Bush, just waiting for regime change and a black party to stick it to the man" (Bubble). "Too much Bush" (Red Eye, Crash, East of Eden and Giant). "Politics settled down in the past 6 months. At least Bush hatred. Gay cowboy flicks are in and Kanye West's non 'bling' approach to hip hop is winning" (The Constant Gardener). Here we see someone renting Steven Soderbergh's experimental drama with a non-actor cast, Bubble, having his opinion echoed almost exactly by someone renting über-Hollywood thriller Red Eye, while the person renting the highly praised and politically charged drama The Constant Gardener seems to have a more relaxed take on today's political climate. Further proof that any connection between taste and awareness is a myth.
Speaking of gay cowboy flicks and Kanye West, only 19% of respondents interpreted the spirit of the times in cultural terms (with the final 14% giving jokey, disqualifying answers, also across genre lines). "I wonder what the kids are learning looking at us," pondered someone renting Kurosawa's classic Red Beard. "To read comics and play video games, perhaps." A customer renting My Summer of Love and Freaks advised, "Right now, live like there is no tomorrow in the world of Paris Hiltons—hoping that we are not rotting away despite what it seems." Another customer, one who didn't name any movie titles but did cop to renting "Mostly foreign films, I suppose," defined the spirit of the times as "Cynical, turbulent, complacent (hence the ballooning of mindless escapist entertainments that resemble the marketing hooks of television)."
Wait a sec. Mindless escapist entertainments? Complacent? Haven't the results of our (admittedly unscientific) survey shown there's no connection between the two? And yet here's someone insisting there is. If people renting movies as diverse as Pirates of the Caribbean (a popcorn action movie if there ever was one), Me and You and Everyone We Know (an indie romantic comedy) and Shoot the Piano Player (a François Truffaut classic) all share the same opinion about the spirit of the times, even going so far as to raise the exact same issues, where does the preconception come from that your personal taste is inextricably linked to your cultural or political awareness?
Laughing to Keep From Crying
Call it a cousin of the Oscar Comedy Curse. The Academy's prejudice against comedy is well known and long-standing, predicated on an erroneous belief that if a movie's main goal is to make the audience laugh, it isn't important enough to be deemed worthy. (We have to go all the way back to 1977 and Annie Hall to see a comedy win Best Picture.) The same principle applies here. If a book, movie or TV show doesn't speak to some higher purpose about the human condition or the world we live in, it can be unfairly brushed off as inconsequential.
Worse, it can even be blamed for turning minds to mush. But there's an obvious disconnect in this line of reasoning. Critical thinking, that which allows us to interpret information into knowledge or opinion, isn't something we learn from the leisure-time products we consume, it's something we're taught from an early age by parents, siblings, friends and teachers. When we respond to a big-message movie, it isn't because the movie itself has opened our minds like some kind of magic talisman, it's because we've developed our critical thinking to the point where our minds are already honed enough to accept (or reject) what we're being told.
Renting Soul Plane won't take that away from you any more than renting Hotel Rwanda will automatically make you a better human being. You may feel that your time is better served with one than the other, but the only thing that's going to turn off your brain is if you choose to turn it off.
At the same time, the only thing that's going to make you a better human being is working hard toward that goal; no more, book or TV show will do the work for you. If there's anything to learn from this survey, aside from the fact that none of the respondents seems to have a positive notion of the spirit of the times, it's that plopping a DVD box and $3.25 on the counter of a video rental store is inconsequential to who you are or what you believe. The person renting Soul Plane is just as tuned in to the climate of fear and cynicism as the one renting Hotel Rwanda.
So the next time someone gives you the stink-eye at the video store checkout line, turn that Just Like Heaven DVD face out and hold it proudly. Be secure in the knowledge that you can save the whales, protect the rainforest, petition your congressional representative and kick back with some quality Reese Witherspoon time because, girlfriend, that's how you roll.The Zeitgeist Issue
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