Word: junks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...industry that feeds teenagers three helpings of Porky's and six of Friday the 13th now complains about the corruption of tastes. But more than mere hypocrisy is at work here. There is a logic problem. For decades Hollywood has flooded the market with every conceivable variety of junk and then defended itself against the charge of degrading public tastes with a "Who, us? We just give them what they want." Tastes shape the market...
Except, it now seems, for colorization. Moreover, whenever bluenoses demand restraint against the porn and violence that are the staple of popular culture, they are met with "Who appointed you guardians of the public taste? Let the people decide. If they want junk, that's their prerogative. What did we fight two world wars for if not the right to buy Penthouse at the 7- Eleven?" But not, you see, for the right to rent a colored Casablanca...
...course, the premise of the anticolorizing purists is correct. Even if you don't watch junk, the sheer weight of mass-produced junk, in the end, flattens and debases the culture and leaves you poorer. The market does shape demand. In a mass culture of such power, the very presence of junk corrupts, like secondhand smoke...
...great black-and-white crusaders stand up and boycott and protect us from other debased and debasing junk in our culture. Otherwise, we have a right to conclude that they are not serious, just a bunch of effetes moved by nostalgia, snobbery and fear. A Puritan, goes the old joke, is a person who lives in mortal fear that someone somewhere is having fun. A Hollywood Puritan is a person who lives in mortal fear that someone somewhere is watching Ingrid Bergman blush red in Rick's Cafe...
...city in the U.S., and determined to make itself felt. It teems with new money thirsting for status through art. In Los Angeles, city of therapies, one sees the great American illusion that art is socially therapeutic brought to its apex. Medicean longings inflate the breast of the lowliest junk-bond zillionaire. Whole busloads of fledgling collectors shuttle on regular tours, shepherded by docents, art-investment consultants and "educators" of every stamp, among the private collections of Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Malibu. What other commodity offers such a blend of transcendence and fiscal display? Buying is a spectator sport...