[HN Gopher] Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past be...
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Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes?
Author : benbreen
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-09-26 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| My kid was complaining that while some of the cultural
| touchstones I introduced them to were interesting and enjoyable,
| I gave them a very unrealistic impression of how often they would
| find people who understood the references.
|
| I'm hoping that changes when they go to college and meet more
| alpha nerds. But I became a Monty Python fan, for instance, when
| it was in its second life, and at the time it felt inevitable
| that it would have a third. It has aged less well than I thought.
| The early 70's and early 90's are much closer together
| philosophically and chronologically than the early 90's and the
| 20's. Now you're lucky if they have seen the Holy Grail, and
| nobody gets Parrot Sketch or Lumberjack references. And even
| switching from Cheese Shop to Wallace And Grommit references is
| out of date.
| benbreen wrote:
| As I move into my second decade as an educator (started as a
| teaching assistant around 2012, now a history professor) it's
| been really interesting seeing what "sticks" and what doesn't.
| A couple years back I made a Simpsons reference that I _know_
| would 've landed with my students from circa 2015, but it was
| crickets. However I feel like certain movies and other cultural
| productions from as far back as the 70s are still on students'
| radar -- like Scorsese films, for instance.
|
| I've got a two year old daughter and as she gets older, I'm
| tempted to show her old episodes of the PBS show Nova and the
| original Cosmos so we're on the same cultural wavelength, but I
| probably shouldn't try to force it. She was born with an
| illustrated box set of the Lord of the Rings already sitting in
| her room though ;)
| bentcorner wrote:
| This is the outcome of streaming video and algorithms picking
| things for you. Since there was so little choice, shared
| culture was something you could rely on. Now that everybody
| essentially has their own version of the internet, it's much
| harder to find common ground.
|
| I think this is why image macros spread so easily. Even if
| you haven't seen the source material you can usually get the
| meaning from the image itself. If I say to a classroom "no,
| it's the children who are wrong" very few will get it. Maybe
| the ones who have seen the image macro before[1]. But if I
| put it on a slide, then everybody understands.
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Thanks to the Cape Feare episode of the Simpsons that I
| watched way back in 1993, I understood references to Scorsese
| _and_ Gilbert & Sullivan that I couldn't really explain to
| adults at the time...
|
| I think if you watch whatever the kids are watching, you'll
| find there are little references here and there to stuff the
| writers enjoy. These little moments, often _non-sequiturs_ ,
| tend to stick out, maybe because they seem a little out of
| place.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I've been collecting movies for my Plex server for a few
| years, and I went through the phase where I was getting all
| the classic movies, all the Oscar-nominated movies for
| every calendar year, etc.
|
| And I stumbled on a movie I would never have watched. But
| in reading the synopsis for it, I recognized a reference I
| had picked up as a small child from what was either the
| very late 1970s or maybe early 1980s. For less than a year
| (I'd imagine), everyone must have been making jokes about
| "Turkish prisons". The kind of thing that stand up comedias
| on Carson would have joked about, SNL, etc. And I overheard
| one of those jokes (or several), filed it away, and never
| figured it out.
|
| _Midnight Express_ (1978).
|
| It's funny to me, there have been other such instances.
| Only took me 40-some years to solve.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I always wanted to watch the movie, not because of the
| critical acclaim, not because I want to see graphic
| prison scenes, but because of the Giorgio Moroder score.
| The wrestling tag team Midnight Express, Dennis Condrey
| and Beautiful Bobby Eaton, managed by Jim Cornette used
| the main theme as their entrance music, and Art Bell used
| it to introduce his radio program. I figured if these
| guys, who I was a fan of, were so into it (whether they
| were actually into the movie, only wanted to piggyback
| off its success, or just liked the song, I don't actually
| know), I should check it out. The last straw that made me
| actually watch it was when my gf happened to live around
| the corner from an all night diner that we went to a lot
| named "Midnight Express".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD4Ks_EMQBY
| jstarfish wrote:
| The Midnight Express theme song is pinned on my
| "strutting" playlist.
|
| It's a great story but if Moroder is your only interest
| in it, you're probably going to be disappointed (I like
| crime/thriller/escape movies myself). The song itself
| plays in an early scene and the rest of the movie is
| pretty bleak.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I only knew the reference from Airplane! A few years
| after.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Oh, maybe that's where I heard it. I remember what age I
| first heard it, but couldn't place the reference.
| v64 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this! I also knew the Airplane
| reference, but assumed it was some kind of non-sequitur
| or a joke about a Turkish stereotype I was unfamiliar
| with.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Every year, fewer and fewer co-workers get all my little
| jokes and references from 90s (and 2000s) movies. Really
| nails home how old you're getting. I made a silly Pulp
| Fiction reference in front of a group of developers, and
| nobody got it. I explained it and one of them said, "Man,
| that movie came out years before most of us were even born."
| Wow, arrow to the chest.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah well so did many other great movies for me: Jaws,
| Godfather, Star Wars, Alien, Its A Wonderful Life, numerous
| Disney animated features, etc etc but there's many of those
| that are timeless. But I do imagine as the quantity of
| content increases it becomes harder for timeless features
| to break through. Probably doesn't help that the streaming
| services tend to split the cultural catalog in a way that
| video stores never had to suffer from.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Kids today are growing up in an age where people do not have
| shared experiences when it comes to media. When I was a kid
| everybody sat and watched TV every evening, and the next day
| we would discuss it at school. This no longer happens
| anymore: everybody is watching on-demand content (or TikTok)
| and there's so many different services and so much content
| that it's rare that anything breaks through and achieves a
| critical mass of viewers that allows it to enter the cultural
| consciousness - Squid Game is a good example of that
| happening.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| This is a very good point. On the literature side, Harry
| Potter seems to have attained this critical mass, too. One
| of my daughter's school friends was shocked that she hasn't
| read it, and lent her the first book. She read it, and when
| I asked her about it, she said "well, it's kind of ok". Of
| course, one of the reasons of HP's popularity is that it's
| not _difficult_ to read - the language is relatively
| simple, the books are not overly long, etc. OTOH, having
| recently read LotR, Ursula le Guin 's Earthsea and some
| Sanderson it's no wonder that she found JKR a bit...
| boring.
| zarzavat wrote:
| As a child of that time the real magic of Harry Potter
| was that he grew up with you. The books got gradually
| more mature throughout the sequence, Rowling was writing
| for her fans as they grew up.
|
| Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was the first
| full novel that I read. The first books are tame and
| suitable for young children. By the time the last books
| came out I was an adolescent and I appreciated the more
| mature themes.
|
| Then a second slightly later generation had the same
| experience but with the movies instead of the books.
| hinkley wrote:
| I hope they figure out in their twenties what they've
| missed and try to fix it. Could see a renaissance in hobby
| clubs.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| While I'm no big fan - mostly the nostalgia effect - I used to
| work with someone who _never watched Star Wars_. I found it
| hard to imagine.
|
| A few weeks ago I watched "A new hope" with my 13yo daughter,
| we both loved it. Of course the effects didn't age well, but
| the story and acting is as strong as it used to be. I'm going
| to watch "The empire strikes back" with her soon and have to be
| careful not to spoil the "I am your father" reveal. Though I
| admit she's not very typical - we're both Whovians ("number one
| fans", so to speak;-)), so she's accustomed to story, writing
| and acting being way more important than SFX (which is IMHO the
| correct attitude, at least most of the time).
|
| I really hope that she'll find some fellow geeks soon.
|
| Also, in my current team at work I used to be the only one who
| watched (and read) "The Princess Bride". Now one coworker also
| watched it, and one day we're going to watch it together with
| the whole team. I think many people nowadays know it only from
| memes, which is sad - it's a great movie.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Lucky you! My ten year old has zero interest in watching the
| movies I grew up with in the 80s with me. When I had a kid, I
| started building up this fantasy that one day we'd sit down
| and go through the movie vault and watch all the classics
| together, but we tried and she's just not into it. It's a
| combination of the (to her) immense runtime of a typical
| movie and the slower pacing of media from decades ago. She
| got through about 15 minutes of Star Wars and was obviously
| bored.
|
| I don't force her. She knows the offer is always on the
| table. "Kids these days!"
| hinkley wrote:
| I started them on Ghibli at a young age and so they
| generally trust my recommendations. I've had a couple of
| bad misses lately though. Old movies I remember fondly that
| don't hold up. I'm trying to remember to watch them once by
| myself first before I suggest watching it together, lest I
| break the spell.
| graywh wrote:
| one of my best friends going back to college (we're over 40),
| has never seen any Star Wars movies and it makes my wonder
| why we're even friends
|
| years ago, I had a coworker from Pakistan; he liked to watch
| movies, but it took several Office Space references before he
| got around to it
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars. I
| found it hard to imagine.
|
| I've never watched Star Wars and I'm mid 30's. The movies
| just doesn't interest me; as doesn't the Lord of the Rings.
|
| It's not that I'm dismissing them as great movies they just
| don't hook. I've seen clips and eh'. But I am from Europe,
| not the US so maybe that's why.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Lord of the Rings has its roots in Norse mythology.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Well, the whole point is, they are so prevalent in pop
| culture that it's difficult to understand some
| things/references not knowing these works, at least
| superficially. It's very much like the list of compulsory
| books at school - they give the whole generation (even more
| generations) a common language.
| bombcar wrote:
| I find that something being prevalent in pop culture
| means I don't _have_ to watch it; I already know the
| basics without ever having seen it. Citizen Kane, for
| example.
| detourdog wrote:
| That is a great Citizen Kane joke since its greatness is
| that each shot was carefully planned and storyboarded.
| The films brilliance is the visuals.
| dkarl wrote:
| I never gravitated towards the Lord of the Rings books but
| resolved to read them in college because they were a
| reference point for so many of my friends. They really
| rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to force myself through
| them. A decade later, I greatly enjoyed the movies while
| watching them with friends but found that they bored me
| when I watched them alone.
|
| I'm a sucker for Star Wars, though. I'm sad to say I've
| paid to see some of the newer ones even when I knew better.
| croisillon wrote:
| Over 40 and never seen star wars or lord of the rings or
| probably any marvel movie
| cruano wrote:
| > have to be careful not to spoil the "I am your father"
| reveal
|
| I'd never thought about it before, but the prevalence of star
| wars in pop culture made it so basically my whole generation
| had that reveal spoiled in cartoons and different parodies
| way before any of us actually watched the movie.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Well, she doesn't, and I hope it stays that way until we
| watch TESB...
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I've experienced something similar with my kids where
| they're at a deep cut level of familiarity with all the
| StarWars, Indiana Jones trilogy, Marvel, DC, Jurassic Park,
| etc. from having played the Lego games of all of them.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| In my first job, one guy called me the brute squad cause "I
| was big like Andre the Giant". I was a huge wrestling fan and
| never knew about the movie. I rented it that weekend. I'm
| glad I watched it, ha.
| hibikir wrote:
| What we see is another layer of cleanup of older media, where
| large amounts are culled from the next generation's minds, but
| some will still remain. The culling first gets rid of chaff,
| and eventually just leaves the very best examples of old art.
| You can watch black and white movies on streaming services
| today, and the average quality is going to be extremely high,
| as all but the very best has been washed away.
|
| My teenage son and his friends don't just look at current
| media, but old one too. Kids born in 2010 that just realize
| there was some great music in the 70s too, and that today
| decide that some old videogames are still worth playing, while
| many have aged way too poorly. Some will get remade, maybe
| badly, and other parts abandoned.
|
| Monty Python's sketches are still funny to them, but the media
| is relatively low quality, and that style of humor has already
| been absorbed into the comedy corpus. Something as absurd as
| the parrot sketch wasn't just funny, but also felt new to many
| audiences. Today you find absurdity even in something like Rick
| and Morty, just in faster packages, relying less on repetition
| to try to elevate the bit. Trying to hammer at the core joke 8
| times in a row is out of fashion. Now the repetition comes with
| longer spacing, or from different directions: See how meme
| images work.
| irrational wrote:
| I recently met a couple in their early 50s who have never seen
| the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies. These aren't people
| who eschew popular movies or don't like scifi/fantasy. They
| just... never watched them. If they have never seen them, I
| can't imagine how many younger people haven't seen them.
| mjhay wrote:
| The Mittani were pretty fascinating in general. The extant
| writing (including Kikkuli) have many Indo-Aryan loanwords almost
| identical to the more-or-less contemporaneous Sanskrit [0]. They
| also seemed to have worshiped many of the same deities. It's
| possible that they were part of the same original group as the
| Vedic Sanskrit speakers, migrating out of central Asia in
| different directions, after significant interaction with the non
| Indo-European Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex civilization
| [1].
|
| There were the Hittites and other Indo-European speakers in the
| area as well, but those were different subfamilies, associated
| with migrations at different times from different areas.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
| Aryan_superstrate_in_Mita...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archa...
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The current hypothesis is that the Mitanni rulers were speakers
| of Indo-Aryan languages, with the populace being Hurrian.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I know I'm not the only one who does this. You see some weird
| reference on reddit to an obscure idea. And you see it again on
| another social media platform just a few hours or days later. And
| then, you notice it pop up again and again in the coming months.
| And you get that impression, that the person referencing it
| subsequently, like yourself, saw the earlier reference.
|
| But it doesn't stop there. A few weeks later a completely
| independent factoid pops up. Independent though it is, it's
| related somehow to the other. And you wait and you wait, and
| someone slaps them together like the world's worst "you got your
| chocolate in my peanut butter" Reese's Cup commercial.
|
| Crudely and imperfectly, you're tracing these memes as they leap
| from brain to brain. Like an epidemiologist. You can see the
| outlines of the chains from person to person, even though almost
| certainly a link here or there is invisible to you.
|
| Just the idea of tracing the memes gives hints at why some live
| and some die. Certainly ancient Hurrians, whoever in the hell
| they were, weren't able (for the most part) to craft memes that
| could survive... little of their ideas were written, and some
| disaster or conquest ended their civilization. Ours are likely no
| less ephemeral... the Carrington Event that wipes out my comment
| history might already be on its way. But some ideas and stories
| just happen to land on barren soil. The listener finds them
| boring. Or has many other more important stories they prefer. Or,
| with our disjointed way of communicating now days, the message in
| a bottle just winds up on a desolate shore.
|
| What the link's author talks about is somewhat different, I
| think. He wonders why the crows that collect shiny baubles
| prefers one shiny rock over another. It's a fashion thing. This
| story or that idea seems "cooler", it coheres well with the
| listener's personality, or makes them stand out when they're
| trying to woo the opposite sex.
| eindiran wrote:
| > You see some weird reference on reddit to an obscure idea.
| And you see it again on another social media platform just a
| few hours or days later. And then, you notice it pop up again
| and again in the coming months. And you get that impression,
| that the person referencing it subsequently, like yourself, saw
| the earlier reference.
|
| Though I agree that sometimes we can trace the spread of memes
| in this way, a lot of this feeling is attributable to the
| frequency illusion, aka the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Skepticism is of course healthy... but the frequency illusion
| thing may not be applicable here.
|
| For the "frequency illusion" to be a valid here, someone
| somewhere is independently rediscovering the meme, and
| posting it for friends/strangers/whatever, right?
|
| Where are they coming up with it though? It's not from
| primary/original researcher. They are seeing or hearing other
| references to it in their social lives. Even if that happens
| offline (which I certainly hope still happens), then the
| person they received the meme from almost certainly got it
| from one of the sources you yourself noticed earlier.
|
| Now, because of the way the transmission worked, you missed
| several links in the chain. But you're still seeing the
| outline of the chain, even if you're missing alot of detail.
|
| Superstitious people think that seeing something everywhere
| means it popped up because of some supernatural forces or
| whatever. But I think it pops up because these memes are
| flowing back and forth between brains, and if you're located
| in one part of the social graph, you'll continue to see it
| flowering in proximity to you for hours, weeks, or months.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Yes, I have a very old 4chan archive, starting from 2005. Just
| taking things as they struck me. Watching various memes
| surface, evolve, mate, and so on has been interesting.
| politelemon wrote:
| FWIW if somewhat tangentially related, there is a subreddit that
| takes old artwork and memefies them.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/trippinthroughtime/top/?sort=top&t=...
| NBJack wrote:
| I'd argue that almost every historical figure becomes a meme at
| some point, even through the lens of many robust historical
| accounts. We don't usually care about the details of their lives,
| and that detail is often lost when informally shared...except for
| the parts that exemplify a few key traits of the individual. As
| such, over time, that individual begins to embody such traits,
| even to the point that we use it as a guide for our own efforts
| and aspirations. And so, as the knowledge of that person is
| further condensed (and frequently rewritten), they slowly become
| a meme shadow of the original. Still remembered, but imperfectly,
| and serving more as an inspiration than someone we directly learn
| from. US presidents, British royalty, notable inventors, the list
| goes on.
|
| The funny thing is, we are often shocked a bit when we find out
| the real person wasn't the literal embodiment of what we thought
| they were, flaws and all.
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