On Not Recognizing Famous People

It's a cliche that younger generations will not know about or recognize the technology and celebrities of the past, and we all must get used to questions like, "What's an 8-track tape?" and "Who's Pete Townsend?" It's just part of getting old -- realizing that what mattered to you will no longer matter to the generations that follow.

However, I find it interesting that the time interval for the generation gap seems to be collapsing. My students previously frustrated me by not knowing Marlon Brando and not recognizing references from Star Wars (before the movies were re-released). But more recently, my students in an American literature class seemed to barely recognize any of the 1990s-era actors from this celebrity-packed reading of the Declaration of Independence.  We're talking about actors like Mel Gibson, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Spacey, and Winona Ryder.  These were all incredibly famous film stars who are still alive and mostly still working. The video itself was made in 2003, so it isn't particularly old (although my younger students would have been 2-3). I think the only actor my students admitted knowing was Morgan Freeman, and that's only because he keeps playing the president.

Here's me with Richard Dreyfuss, an actor who used to be pretty famous. 

Similarly, in a recent review of Last Man Club, a film critic (of all people) described actor Barry Corbin as well as some other actors as "nationally unknown." That seems like a patently unfair and dismissive characterization, and it seems to also emanate from a lack of deep knowledge of film.  Corbin has never been a top-billed movie star, but he should be well known to anyone who was alive in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly for his roles in Urban Cowboy (as Uncle Bob), WarGames, and the TV series Northern Exposure. More recently, he had regular roles on TV's Blood and Oil and Anger Management.  The implication of "nationally unknown" is that Corbin is a Texas actor, which is true in as much as he's from Houston, but he's hardly "unknown" to film audiences. Whether the critic is himself young I do not know, but I suspect he means to say that Corbin would be unrecognized by Millennials, which is undoubtedly true in that those audiences generally aren't the target audience for shows starring Charlie Sheen and are generally turning away from mainstream TV.

Of course, younger people are not to "blame" for not knowing certain actors or cultural memes of the past. It isn't particularly shameful to lack knowledge of bygone popular culture.  A common theory that I tend to agree with is that Millennials in particular are overly inundated by images and media choices, an endless supply of YouTube videos and Netflix original series, so that they can hardly be expected to pay attention to old films and TV shows.  This makes sense.  When I was growing up, we were locked into a few TV networks, and shows like Roots became collective American viewing experiences.

I have had students laugh at old movies, as if they can't believe how films used to look and sound.  There's a real lack of visual literacy going on there, and a seeming gleefulness in being ignorant and dismissive of the past, both of which I think are more important than not knowing the names of dead movie stars.