It's the Pictures that Got Small

I can't think of a single way my kids would know who Carol Burnett is, but that's probably fine. She's a genius and an entertainment legend, one of the best and most consistent this country has ever produced, that's true. And objectively, their lives would be better for having been exposed to her work, or at least I imagine it would be just because mine was. But honestly, would the comedy even translate? Would they get the famous "Went With the Wind" sketch at all? They'd have to know not only the direct source material they were parodying (I can't think of when they'd have seen Gone with the Wind) but maybe something of the context, like: what's a comedy/variety show? Why are these people doing this? Who is Harvey Korman and why won't he stop laughing in the middle of the thing?

There's no way to not accept the fact that everyone can't know everyone or everything else. All knowledge has limits, which is the obvious-est of obvious things to say, but that means everything we know is curated, mostly accidentally by experience and exposure. As a parent you have a certain amount of control over this, but I did a phase of trying to make sure my kids were exposed to some "classics" but there's nothing like watching a 13 year old get mad at having to sit through The Maltese Falcon that will humble you. You can find yourself in the flop-sweat position of trying to over-sell it when you see their attention flag, like earnestly saying out loud "Boy, this Humphrey Bogart guy, huh, he sure seems dope" just to see them roll their eyes so hard it makes a klong! like a cathedral bell.

To be fair, Carol Burnett was kind of old news when I was a kid. Her old show stopped production when I was 4 or 5 and she definitely kept working in high-profile projects, but her star was brightest really before I was born and I'm old as shit now. But this is how these time windows of popular culture work, open onto a landscape that seems fixed but if you focus, seems to be sliding slowly past, which is ideally not what you really want from landscape. In the end, though, metaphor or not, the result's the same: everybody ends up dead eventually, only in popular culture's case, it's usually by a futilely struggled-against deterioration and not asphyxiation under many tons of soil you once trusted as reliable earth. The main difference is in the latter, you don't get the occasional nostalgia guest spot on a sitcom or someone who grew up with you writing you a little something you can handle in your dotage. I've certainly never seen a landslide do that.

In a lot of ways, trying to make your kids understand a bygone moment is not only a waste of energy, but exactly backward. The whole point of having kids is having access to the closest thing a human can come to immortality. And I don't mean genetically, like the DNA will live on. That sounds great on paper, but you'll be dead when the DNA is "living on" down the generations and meanwhile you have to pay to put the immediate DNA through college. No, I mean like it's possible to stay anchored to the culture, to keep looking out the window as the landscape shifts, with help from your built-in little interpreters of what is happening now. My youngest, who turns 22 in a few days, has been saying it best since he was a pre-teen, whenever I would mention something that happened "before you were born," he would always reply "you mean when I was dead?" And yes, basically, yes. It doesn't matter at all. It's all prologue and who the fuck bothers to read the prologue? Everyone knows the introduction is the part of the book you can skip.

I dunno, I just started thinking about this stuff because they're remaking The Four Seasons (1981 film starring Carol Burnett and Alan Alda) as The Four Seasons (a Netflix miniseries starring Tina Fey and Colman Domingo). I know I'm supposed to get mad at remakes or reboots or whatever, but it's all in the execution, and if it's executed properly, anything is valuable in its own right and doesn't need the reference to the preceding at all. Like "make America great again," if you say so, but which era are you even harkening back to? Not only does this sociopolitical pastiche suck ass, you don't even have the option of trying to save it by putting Tim Conway in it anymore.