Comic Source: xkcd via Maria Popova.
XKCD just did a cartoon on when we will forget events from the 1970s to the present. But 2036 for 9/11 - really? Direct experience is not the only determinant of how events stay alive in popular consciousness and become part of history. It is a good thing that collective memory is built on more than personal memory. Some of the things on this list will still be current and relevant in 2047. Their enduring legacies will reflect the priorities of the present as meshed with events of the future.
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Memories are more like sound waves than electromagnetic waves. Given enough medium, they may keep traveling and those that begin with greater impetus may continue farther than others, but the more they travel through time the more they will deteriorate and their integrity will degrade. We will still recognize voices from the past as sounds but will we be able to make out the words?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment pblfsda. That's an unusual way to describe the quantification of memory. But certainly, measuring memory (by assessing a historian's version or criticizing a memoir) almost always involves recognizing that the way we remember things gives different weight to events and people, and can change the meaning of those events and people.
ReplyDeleteConsider 'Citizen Kane,' the movie which ensured that William Randolph Hearst would be remembered for decades in popular memory. Hearst despised that film, but without it, he would at best be a historical footnote.
The biopic 'Walk the Line' about Johnny Cash and June Carter is considered a very good film, with great performances by the leads, which captured the mood of these performers in the 1950s and 1960s. But Wiki reveals how it went over with people who were there: "Rosanne Cash, was quite critical of the film. She saw a rough edit and described the experience like 'having a root canal without anaesthetic.' Her brother was instrumental in having the filmmakers remove two scenes that were not flattering to her mother. Furthermore, she said, 'The movie was painful. The three of them [in the film] were not recognizable to me as my parents in any way. But the scenes were recognizable, and the storyline, so the whole thing was fraught with sadness because they all had just died, and I had this resistance to seeing the screen version of my childhood.'" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_the_Line
Memory doesn't fade exactly, but when something or someone is generally acknowledged as being important enough to be remembered, the *way* we remember usually reflects priorities of the present. Anachronism is one of the most serious errors a historian can commit - but scholarly histories are filled with the 'latest new idea.' The new official memory of something or someone often bears little resemblance to the original source material or personal memories of the same events or people.
I noticed that about recent movies set in the 1980s - they just don't seem right. My father has said similar about movies set in the 1950s. Thus, any one of the items on the list in the post above may be remembered by some brilliant, book, novel, official history, song, or film - even a video game or painting. I promise you, if we see a biopic of Michael Jackson in 20 odd years (which is nearly guaranteed to happen) the portrayal will brilliantly capture Motown, but it will be Motown as 2040 remembers that world, not Motown as it was.
You don't have to wait. You can go see the remake of "Sparkle" currently in theaters. Although it takes place about five years before the Jackson 5's "discovery" by Diana Ross (she didn't discover them), there's some familiar overt romanticizing of Motown history going on.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago I wrote a post for my blog on the Doom Patrol that gave a specific example about how the period (1977) of a published story arc I had been picking apart was commonly misremembered. It involved the difference between pop music as it was experienced at the time and as it is now thought to have been. The same is true of the fifties and sixties. Most people, even baby boomers who were alive at the time, refuse to believe that Jimi Hendrix only had one U.S. Top 20 hit during his lifetime, and that was probably only because it was a Bob Dylan cover. He deserved more, and was consistently in the top ten in his adopted U.K. but not in his native land. Yet, he is a staple of boomer-targeted 'oldies' radio, where you will never hear the sixties' best-selling album (the "Sound of Music" soundtrack) or many of that decade's number one singles (like "The Ballad of The Green Berets"-- five weeks at the top in 1966 by the way... eeew...or "In The Year 2525"-- six weeks in 1969!) but they'll play the same songs over and over. Increasingly, such stations are gravitating towards the eighties and confronting a new challenge. With the dichotomy of radio playlists and MTV playlists you have songs like ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man", which peaked at #56 and charted about two months total but played on MTV twice an hour all day for most of the year. The theme music to "Chariots Of Fire" by Vangelis got to #1 and charted for more than six months the previous year. Off the top of my head, I couldn't hazard a guess if it even had a promotional video. Yet, I think we both know what we'll be told was the hit single.
[Cue Ren Höek singing "Memories" wistfully...]
Aww, you get props for the Ren Höek reference! :)
ReplyDeleteI think the bigger issue is the way mass media falsely construct memories and erase others. This is one of the running themes in my generations posts; generations are marketing categories and are defined and redefined by marketing priorities over time. This is pretty disturbing when you consider that one's own personal experiences do not line up at all with the official memories, experiences and fun times constructed by mass media packaging.
My youngest niece was 8 on 9/11. I ask her all the time about her experiences that day to reinforce them in her mind. Anyone younger than her really didn't understand what was happening. Someday she will be among the only people who have personal memories of that time.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Anon. For those of us who were already adolescents or adults when it happened, it's hard to recall that of course children below a certain age won't remember it, because 2001 was not that long ago for us. It's never been more important to cultivate in younger people a stronger sense of history, because technology is helping to erode a historic feeling for time, and jumbling past, present and future together. Your niece owes you that sensibility for a terrible event.
DeleteMost people under 25 already don't remember most of those things. Sad but true. I'm 40, so I remember all of them.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, although as mentioned in the post, direct experience should not and is not our only pathway to understanding past realities.
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