I have this fear that years from now when I’m on my deathbed, and surrounded by family or whoever I paid to be there, that I’ll make a reference to a film or show as my final proclamation, and no one will get it. I’ll groggily turn to my son and say something like, “I told you I was never going back.” He’ll stare confused, and ask what I mean. “It’s from Heat, it’s the last thing Robert DeNiro says. Oh you’re too young to have seen…” and then just flatline.
What an undignified way to go. The art of making references feels different when there are oil spill-levels of content available, and we all spend way too long committing to franchises (“Season 3 and 4 are bad but it gets better afterwards,” people often ridiculously say). And so I’m worried that I’ve seen so many movies and shows and read so many books that this is how it will go down, instead of me having an original thought. Social media and the real world is rife with people whose first reaction to an event is “This reminds me of,” and that’s no damn way to live.
But because I’ve stuck my face in front of the exhaust pipe that is modern culture, numerous death scenes will flash before my mind instead of imparting some original life wisdom like an old man should. Perhaps I’ll echo the blond woman in The Matrix and say, “Not like this, not like this.” Or put orange slices in my mouth like Marlon Brando in The Godfather and chase my hypothetical adult son through a vineyard or the hospital parking lot before collapsing. Maybe I yell “FREEDOM!” like William Wallace in Braveheart. Or do I go with the Blade Runner “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” speech, or stare at my son and say, “For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”? He’ll probably get offended at that one, because he’ll never read Moby Dick.
Please Don’t Let My Dying Words Be “My Wife”
Whatever unoriginal thought posing as a reference spills out of my needy, wrinkled mouth, it will surely be greeted by absolute silence. As it should be, since a deathbed is not the place for references. But more and more I’m becoming convinced that nowhere else should be as well. We’re all making way too many of them.
Whether it’s binge-watching a show or over-romanticizing the quiet evening reading, the emphasis on distracting ourselves from reality is clearly higher than at any point in history, even as we’re living more comfortably than all previous generations. Is there a dystopian hellscape right outside our front doors? Is blood-red acid rain falling from the sky? It doesn’t appear so, and yet many of us are plugging into streaming and social media like we’re characters in a bad 80s movie about virtual reality, trying to escape the barren, unlivable ruins that surround us.
One gets a sense that people don’t know how to digest or understand the context of an event unless they can filter it through some mass pop culture thing. As if it’s not real to us unless it resembles fiction. If you’ve spent 30 seconds on social media you’ve probably noticed the hordes who relate every other event to The Office, Borat, Lord of the Rings, Seinfeld, South Park, Anchorman, The Simpsons, Game of Thrones, Community, and, of course, Harry Potter, who upon referencing it are often met with a comment saying, “Read another book!”
Unfortunately, We All Know a Peter Griffin in Real Life
Granted, I enjoy most of the above, but why can’t any of us reference something from our own lives? You know, the ones that are real and not scripted and actually lived and experienced. God forbid we have an original reaction to something. What people fail to understand is that when you make a reference, it’s a failure of the imagination. That’s someone else’s joke, someone else’s story, another person’s line, and being able to recall it doesn’t make you an interesting or creative person. I unfortunately know too many people whose entire personality is referencing Family Guy and bad ‘90s movies. Is that what your parents intended with their education? Unlikely.
Challenging ourselves with interesting art and media is necessary to an evolving mind, but only to a point, and then we’re just flooding our synapses with distractions, which renders us unable to process an experience undiluted. We never process things purely, obviously, but modern overproduction of content and the pressure to witness it all worsens this. It’s why I’m worried that on my death bed my dumb brain will spit out a reference to Pootietang instead of saying something sage and wise. Would it kill me to at least reference The Year of Magical Thinking?
Perhaps we should go back to the really old days when seeing a movie or watching a show was more of an event, and not something always on in the background to drive out thoughts of the void. If not, we’ll all probably spend our last moments just as I plan to: making my kids watch the source of every reference they didn’t get.
I Am Genuinely Afraid Every Time an Actor Sits Down for an Interview
Sometimes, the work should speak for itself.