Frankly, My Dear . . .
It is afternoon in the family room, and Generation VCR has set up camp: Video rental. (Check.) Two-day-old pajamas. (Check.) Protective wall of dirty dishes. (Check, check, check. Check.) Open notebooks with “homework” splayed out in sufficient “near-completion” so that getting up to actually cart dirty dishes to sink appears impossible. (Check.)
Just a click of the remote and the cultural broadening of the teenager and her friends will be underway. The rental, as always, is one they have seen. Like all members of their generation, they believe movies were made not just to be watched but memorized.
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What with the Oscars coming up next week, they wonder if we realize how important movies have become as a social tool. Were it not for movies, they feel, surfer dudes and Valley girls might never have won the respect they enjoy today. And think of all the 12-year-old boys who wouldn’t have been able to bond over the words “Hasta la vista, baby” in the local arcade. Were it not for the movies, they wonder, how could they talk to each other? Where would they come up with their shorthand, their cool lines?
If it were up to the teenager and her friends, the Oscars would include a special Academy Award for cool lines. (Ideally, this category would include a subcategory for cool lines that once passed through Leonardo DiCaprio’s lips, but they realize you have to take these things one step at a time.)
All are connoisseurs of cool movie lines, which is apparently what happens if you are born into Generation VCR. Older generations find common ground in prostate stories or bootleg Dylan tapes; today’s kids know themselves by their ability to intone “Luke, I am your father” and then make that kshhh sound like Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” trilogy.
There are, for instance, cool lines galore in the movie they are memorizing today--”Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” written by and starring the comedian Mike Myers. Myers, in their minds, already deserves an Oscar for the cool lines he delivered in his “Wayne’s World” movies (“Party on!”).
The Austin Powers movie is, to them, another work of comic genius, though the critics said it made “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” look like “Masterpiece Theatre.” “Ow, be-HAVE, BA-by,” the teenager has taught her kid sisters to scream in leering, mock-British accents. “She’s a MAN, man, yeaaahh!” she and her buddies reply.
If you didn’t see the movie, please feel free to skip to the next paragraph. Frankly, even if you did see the movie, these lines and the many others like them are pretty lame. But, trust me, this stuff is big in the 15-and-under demographic. Even “shag-adelic,” as Powers would say. Last week, a skinny kid in the teenager’s chemistry class brought down the house just by picking up a long glass beaker and some tubing and whining defensively, “Honest, BA-by, it’s not my bag!”
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It’s an interesting phenomenon, this crossover between real life conversation and the shorthand of movie scripts. I used to think it was purely a Southern California thing because, when I first moved to L.A., I kept running into people who would end their workdays with that Marlon Brando line from “The Missouri Breaks” about Granny being tired.
But that habit must have been contagious, because gradually people all over America began to sound like they were film school graduates. Now kids from Manhattan to the Alaskan outback run around saying things like “cut to the chase” and wondering whether it’s appropriate to jump on your bed without simultaneously yelling, “To infinity and beyond!”
Soon there will be whole subcultures of people in places like Des Moines and Washington, D.C., who will be able to recite, verbatim, entire sections of “The Godfather” and De Niro’s “You lookin’ at me?” speech. Think of it: an entire nation of midget Quentin Tarantinos. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I know a father who is trying to resist this undertow. He’s limiting movies, limiting videos, limiting TV. He’s even boycotting McDonald’s on the theory that the place is just one more piece of the pop culture conspiracy. He’s either a true idealist, or insane.
As he described his strategy the other night, I racked my brains for an appropriate reply. Unfortunately, all I could think of were the immortal sardonic words of “Ace Ventura, Pet Detective”: “All-righty, then!”
So I hit my inner mute button, and just smiled.
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Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com