This weekend, I went away to a friend’s lake house in Virginia. It was a real pop culture weekend.
There’s a dock down by the water. Stepping onto it all I could think of were movies: Indian Summer, Friday the 13th, The Deep End. I’ve been on docks before, but there was something about the setting that was exactly like a dozen different movies.
Fittingly enough, I watched The Lake House. My environment exposed one flaw of the movie: it’s not about the lake house at all. There is a house, cutting-edge architecture, on a lake in the middle of nowhere. But you barely get any sense of what it’s like for either character to live in it. Really, The Lake House is a fairly hardcore science fiction film, masquerading as a romance. In comparison, Somewhere in Time is a time travel romance, as is Kate & Leopold. Even though there is no science explaining the phenomenon in The Lake House — and the fact that it’s the letters that are time traveling and not the star-crossed lovers — you still have to keep up with who is living in which time period when, and you have to grapple with the paradoxes of time travel.
I read two entire books this weekend, a fine pursuit when doing absolutely nothing at a house on a lake in the woods. The two books also connected, though not by intention. The Long Tail is Chris Anderson’s exploration of how hits don’t matter as much today and how powerful niche markets can be. Anderson’s original article in WIRED already did a good job of explaining this, but the book is still interesting in fleshing out how we got here. For all the businesses who have given up on massive hits, there’s still Hollywood, which doesn’t seem how to move beyond its broken system. Peter Bart’s book The Gross: The Hits, The Flops – The Summer That Ate Hollywood takes a detailed look at the summer of 1998. You may recall that this was the season that Godzilla and Armageddon went head to head for supremacy; in retrospect, it seems obvious that the most-profitable and memorable movie of that summer is There’s Something About Mary. I had forgotten that Out of Sight and The Truman Show came out that same summer, but now I understand how Out of Sight got dumped on the market.
Saving Private Ryan was the other really memorable movie of that summer. It turns out that the National D-Day Memorial was nearby in Bedford, VA. Why Bedford, you may ask? It’s because the town proportionally lost more men that day than any other (19 out of a population of 3200). When you visit the memorial, you see a symbolic representation of the landing, which including a carrier at the shore, with men in the water and bullets flying. Seriously — there’s water and spray shoots up, as if from flying shrapnel. You have to see it to appreciate it, but it’s somewhere between the simplicity of a statue and the garishness of a Disneyland recreation.
All of which goes to prove that pop is everywhere. At least, it’s everywhere that I go.