What To Do About Pop Culture
It’s just that all you really want to talk about is how you binge-watched Love on Netflix, and how you didn’t really realize until that one episode of GIRLS that putting your garbage in someone else’s trash bin is frowned upon.
It’s just that you can’t always trust a 1.5 star movie rating, because Eyes Wide Shut was very racy for it’s time, even though about 65 minutes of closeups on Tom Cruise’s face could have been trimmed out. Stanley Kubrick has a unique style, and you guess maybe you should finally see 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the rapey themes of A Clockwork Orange left you pretty upset.
Maybe it’s just a little hard to admit that you actually think Kylie Jenner’s look is pretty badass and feminine? You think about matte lipstick and green hair extensions, and consider that vanity might just be a very personal form of art.
But why didn’t anyone tell you that HBO made a mini-series last year of JK Rowling’s not-so-popular The Casual Vacancy? It’s just that maybe you’re a little jealous that your co-worker gets to read Harry Potter to her daughter for the first time.
You Google “songs from Transparent” because you want to add some new tracks to your Apple Music app, and you can’t remember the song at the end of that episode. The one where they go to Idyllwild. The one where you might have cried or fallen asleep by the time the credits rolled.
It’s just that the Pope Francis is on Instagram now. And there’s that episode of Broad City where Abby and Ilana get to meet Hillary Clinton, but they don’t endorse her directly in the show, because something about that’s not really the point.
You hear people say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the media. We shouldn’t keep up with the Kardashians, or the American Crime Story chronicling the infancy of their fame. You hear people say that we have better things to worry about.
But maybe it’s okay to have something light and gossipy and unimportant to talk about. Maybe you need a break from the scary and the urgent and the sad. There’s all this pop culture flying at you and you can’t really look away.
