Crowded House and the Twilight Zone

So there I was, dutifully working away while Crowded House played in the background, feeling for all the world like I was part of some John Hughes montage.

I didn't choose to play "Don't Dream It's Over", but my mp3 player gets left on random quite often...and that's just one of the many songs that I have stored away in that vast compendium of nearly-forgotten tunes. I remember liking it quite a bit when it came out, and it got sucked in the vortex of one of my older downloading frenzies. How long ago? Years, no doubt...it's not a song I that would have decided to grab recently. I think I can safely delete it...I'll most likely hear it at the dentist, or while on hold, or in the background of a car commercial, long before I get the urge to play it from my PC again.

There's a lot of stuff like that on my hard drive. I'm sure that's a metaphor for something...a lot of things that I loved in the past, tried to hang on to, and now are more or less just clutter. Do I really care if I ever hear any Billy Bragg again, or Front 242, or General Public? Wouldn't I be just as happy if I didn't have Edie Brickell's "Circle of Friends" in my collection? The latter is even slightly embarrassing now, a weepy alterna-teen chick song from the old days when it was semi-alterna-cool to be a neo-hippie wannabe. Hyphen hyphen hyphen.

This about growing up, growing out of things, and growing old.

When you've lost your way, start at the beginning. When there are too many options, go back to the basics. These are good pieces of advice.

Unfortunately, it's rather easy to confuse the things you truly care about with the things that you merely once loved. That previous sentence is itself confusing enough. What I'm talking about is the fact that I (as, I assume, most people) have gone through so many phases by this point in my life that a certain longing for the past is easily clouded by the external details of that past. And the longing itself is composed of a combination of elements, some not so useful or helpful.

Nostalgia is what it is. Sometimes it's fun to revisit pieces of your past, for no other reason than to stimulate the memory of past emotions. If you're anything like me, many of your past emotions seem like they were a hell of a lot stronger than much of what you've managed to feel lately. If you're not like me, then good for you...but I suspect that nearly everyone forms those emotional callouses of age and experience. Many people end up completely shutting off their emotional receptivity, sooner or later, and that's very sad (for them, and for the people that they subsequently come into contact with). Some of us struggle to maintain it, and that in itself can be a fairly painful and consistent struggle.

Undoubtedly, there's a danger that the past will overcome the future. Remember the Twilight Zone episode where the old actress disappeared into her films? That's a metaphor, kids. The Zone was full of such observations...it wasn't just a show about weird stuff that happened to black and white people who smoked too much. One of the running themes was the dangers of becoming too wrapped up in the past that you lose touch with the present. There was the one about the actor who lamented his younger days on the stage (look for Burt Reynolds in a cameo, playing a very Marlon Brando sort of character), the one about the toy designer, the one about stopping at Willoughby...the list goes on.

The basic O Henry twist that Mr. Serling used: no matter how tempting the past could seem, it usually turned out not to be quite so wonderful when you got back into it. Every once in a while, he did almost the opposite, using the Christmas Carol device of showing someone their past to remind them of how far they'd strayed from their roots or values (or whatever). These things are staples of hack fiction, especially hack science fiction, but the Twilight Zone often rose above due to an extra level of depth of insight and characterization.

Such as the one with the actress...her rejection of the outer world, her disdain of reality in favor of the idealized world of her memory of youth and glamour; one cannot really say that she was punished at the end, no matter how eerie and perhaps sad it was. She returned to what she loved, and while we may objectively mourn her fate, it seem like both the present and the actress got what they wanted out of the deal: neither had to concern itself with the other any longer...

In contrast, the one with the stage actor is resolved in a more realistic and diplomatic way. The actor, realizing the drawbacks of the past, comes down off his high horse...and the offensive director mellows a bit, showing a little more respect and courtesy. The supernatural is a vehicle for the mediation, rather than an escapist twist at the end.

I might object by pointing out that Mr. Serling, while by no means overly optimistic about the future, seemed to have a relatively positive assumption that human beings could prosper and be happy by becoming realistic about their circumstances. Despite the offensive and callous people surrounding the protagonists of many of his stories, he tended to conclude that it was better to face the future than get lost in the past. One might say that he was perched precariously on that edge...he saw the darker side of human nature as well as anyone, I think, and personally held on to hope that things like compassion and understanding could ultimately win out, or at least compensate. I can wonder whether he would have still thought that way, in the unlikely event that he lived to the present day (he'd have been in his 80's, and probably still smoking).

Anyone who gets old enough is tempted by the desire to regard the old days as better ones. That's just human nature. I'm raising the argument that, just sometimes, it's actually pretty well justified. I challenge anyone to prove to me that we live in a significantly better world than our parents and grandparents had.

Aside from the vague compulsion to revisit my own childhood, perhaps as a reaction against the demands of responsibility, I don't feel too motivated by nostalgia in my perception of (relatively recent) history. We simply cannot return to what has passed; one can safely daydream, but not dwell. As much as I enjoy escapism, I'm at least pragmatic enough to realize that time moves consistently in one direction...and I don't think it's a function of nostalgia alone to observe that this direction has gone downhill, so to speak, for a few decades now.

Okay, so there aren't any bands like Crowded House anymore...I can easily live with that (though, come to think of it, there's almost nothing but bands like Crowded House...for all their virtues, they were just a pleasant pop band, maybe a little smarter than many, but nothing really special). So they don't make shows like The Twilight Zone anymore. These aren't the things that I'm really mourning, after all...entertainment, with all of its indicators of society and civilization, is not the most important thing in the world. If all I had to consider was the fact that the entertainment business is pumping out more vacuous, disposable crap than ever, I guess I could live with it. It's not like bubblegum pop and Hollywood pablum is all that new...my objection is that it's now very difficult to find anything else, and people with 'respectable' taste spend a little too much time distinguishing between the levels of crap, rather than extolling that which is not crap at all. Make sense?

The unavoidable reality is that we are worse people than we were, say, fifty years ago. It's not that anyone is trying to make us worse...it's that we are already less intelligent and kind, and are spending our work and leisure time actively contributing to a further loss. Perhaps, in Twilight Zone language, we have traded humanity's strengths to fix humanity's weaknesses?