Martin Pease

This post is book-ended by two pictures of Keanu Reeves, the actor who has presided over two major shifts in the visual language of action in film. I had the chance to watch The Matrix recently, with my teenage son. He didn't know anything about it, and I wanted to see if he had the same experience I had when I first saw it. Remember, the marketing for the movie played the story very close to its vest, and the major plot point was a complete surprise to me. Sitting in a theater with some friends, we all sort of thought it would be a computer hacking movie, similar to Reeves' earlier (forgettable) Johnny Mnemonic; but from the opening action scene to the revelation of the truth about the Matrix, my jaw was literally wide open. My son was impressed, but not overly so, which makes me question my judgment. Many things about this movie don't hold up today, some that are inherent to the film itself, and others extrinsic to it. For one, the drum and bass techno soundtrac...

Blue shirt guy, how did you find yourself here? The spiritual destitution of modern society is no more evident than in the increasingly strange enthusiasms grown adults indulge in, trying to find a "culture" and "identity" through pop culture ephemera. Mass culture today is the logical endpoint of the youth culture created by marketing in the 1950's. Prior to this era, childhood was a time for parents to instruct their children in right behavior and responsibility, so that they would enter their majority well suited to adulthood. The fantastical stories of imagination and the youthful play of early adolescence was age-appropriate acculturation that gradually gave way to deeper intellectual and emotional understanding of the real world and their place in it. But post World War II, with the advent of universal mass media, clever capitalists realized there was a huge, untapped source of revenue from children, and especially those individuals previously known ...