I’ve recently begun tracking and rating my movies on Letterboxd.com at the advice of a coworker. I realize I watch a few a week – we rarely watch TV shows, and this is the best thing to throw on when I exercise (and try to forget the pain). Sometimes, however, the wife and I just sit down to enjoy a film – and last night it was Encino Man.
The thing that struck me this morning was the fact that the caveman (played by Brendan Fraser) is mostly silent throughout the movie. When he does speak, it’s only to mimic the teens who thawed him out (Sean Astin and Pauly Shore), who inevitably teach him pop culture references and surfer lingo. At no point during the movie to the teens try to get him to communicate to them or ask the caveman a question. To be fair, the movie criticizes their egocentric view, as later on Astin and Shore fight over the fact that one of them fully intended to use the caveman to improve their social standing with no thought for his neolithic well-being.
The same is largely true of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where two California teens bring historical figures to the modern world and introduce them to the wonders of shopping at the San Dimas mall. Most of these historical figures don’t speak English, and even those that do are largely passive recipients of modernity and parrot it on cue (Abe Lincoln’s “Be excellent to everyone, and party on dudes!”). The incongruity between the antique outfits and the contemporaneous speech is done for laughs, and of course it works.
Still, though, there’s a sense here that the past has nothing of value to say to us. None of these teens seems remotely interested in asking the people of the past what they think of all of it – the brightness and cacophony of it all. I’d be far more interested in hearing what the people of the past could tell us than in getting them to repeat back to us our own shallow fascinations. It’s hard not to see these as the hallmark of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” – perhaps less sneering than Mark Twain was in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but there nonetheless.
Disappointing. The past is a different country, and it’s one to which we may never return, but it’s the easiest one to hear from – especially given the prevalence of translations for those of us who speak English. The further back one goes, the more strange and different those people thought – certainly they weren’t perfect, but their different values and perspectives can teach us. Many of our collective ancestors went to great lengths to make sure that their best wisdom was recorded so that we could build on it…how often do we dive in? Of course, given that I’m watching movies like these rather than reading the works of the ancients…guess I’m not one to talk.