When Media was Preposterous
2021-08-15
I miss when media was crazy, you know?
Dead Rising
Look back when i was 16 there was this game called Dead Rising - the whole premise was ridiculous and awesome. You’re a photojournalist who sneaks into a shopping mall that’s inexplicably filled with zombies. You don’t really get guns, the big conceit of the game is that you can pick up and throw/swing just about anything you’d find in a shopping mall. CD’s become deadly limb-slicing projectiles, a plank of wood becomes a club, teddy bears, frying pans - everything can be used to bash zombies. Early on you go into a park area in the center of the mall, and these convicts show up;
So let me say this again, you’re a photojournalist investigating a zombie outbreak in a shopping mall, beating zombies with anything you have on-hand, you run up into these escaped convicts driving an army jeep killing everything they can, and by the way this bizarre hip hop song about drinking tea, climbing mountains, and meditating in ashrams starts to play.
Is that not fucking ridiculous and awesome?
Lest we forget, this is around the same time that games like Need For Speed Most Wanted were out, which asked us to pretend that there’s a city with a street racing organization with like 20 leaders who have a code of honor, such that racing against them meant you had to gamble your own car, and they theirs. That the police are so corrupt they’re just letting it happen, and by the way Josie Marin is both a complete hottie, but also a street racer, and an undercover cop come to blow the whole operation. This is within like a year of her being in Van Helsing as a vampiress creating evil mutant vampire babies to take over the world.
Movies
Look on that note, here’s a list of movies that are batshit insane and fun, and they all came out within a few years of each other;
- The Mummy
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
- Van Helsing
- Underworld
They’re filled with ham, schlock, and fun. Weird creatures, ridiculous setups, betrayals! Yeah some of them tried to be more serious than others, but none of them succeeded - they were all completely preposterous. Nobody could take these seriously, but they were easy to love. To this day people (including myself) watch The Mummy because it’s easily the most classic "turn of the 20th century adventurism" sort of movie out there. Lawrence of Arabia is too dry for you? Yeah i agree, let’s watch Benny be on the wrong side of the river!
The Nostalgia
This is all nostalgia, I know. I’m basically just sitting here telling you about the kind of media i liked when i was 10-18 years old. I know at the same time, bad shit in the world was happening. Bush was immolating our credibility abroad, we were about to have the financial crisis, Sep. 11 killed people, anthrax, fundamentalist christianity, the beginning of the end of honest journalism - look i know the 2000s were not this golden age. But when it came to how i grew up, i loved them.
I feel bad for kids who grow up with such serious media, where everything is some kind of revolution or whatever. Kids in the 2010s had to live through Hunger Games, Twilight, that sort of shit. I know that a lot of people grew up with the MCU, and god bless, that is a great thing to grow up with. I grew up with Harry Potter books, and while they weren’t as fun, they had a lot of the same elements, especially that they sorta grew with you.
But there’s something missing, you know? The sense that you could just ask people to pretend that something ridiculous is going on, and join the fun. It doesn’t have to be explained, it doesn’t need a tragic backstory or a government cover-up - it can just be a guy going into a mall full of zombies because how cool would it be to pick up literally anything and use it as a weapon? That a bunch of Victorian-era heroes would team up to globetrot around and defeat a villains plan to start WW1?
Media goes through stages, phases. Popular things come and go, themes and motifs dominate for a few years before everyone gets tired of them. I’m a grown man now, i don’t think i’ll ever enjoy them as much as i did as a kid. And I know kids growing up today have stuff they find just as meaningful.
But I look around at how many sad, depressed, anxiety-ridden kids there are, how fucked up things have become, what people do to themselves to desperately try to feel normal - we’ve lost something you know? When I was growing up we’d go to the local library, trudging through snow and throwing sticks around, in order to walk-in and reserve their little meeting room to play D&D with our own ridiculous rules. And then we’d go see one of these movies, and maybe play one of these games. We didn’t worry about cutting ourselves or mutilating our own genitals to maybe feel like we’re ourselves. Sure there were some drugs or alcohol sometimes, but nobody ever did it because it made them feel human again, it was just fun.
I’m an old man, maybe i only see the bad things. I’m pessimistic and negative by nature, maybe things aren’t so bad. But media reflects the world around it.
And I miss how fun unapologetically fun it used to be.
