I’m not sure if this thread belongs in Cafe Society or the Pit but since involves a rather petty rant on my part, I opted for the latter.
As my birthday approaches and the number of days in which I can still call myself young can be counted on my hands, I find myself getting increasingly bothered by the ignorance displayed by people apparently younger than me about matters of recent history and pop culture. Just in the last few weeks, I came across a review of the Grammy awards in Salon in which the writer (a person who professed to know a fair amount about popular music) didn’t know who honoree Dickey Betts was. Now, I’m not an Allman Brothers fanatic or above the age of 45, but even I–someone with only a superficial knowledge about 70’s Southern rock–have some idea of who he is and why he was being honored. Even if the Salon writer was considerably younger than me, I would’ve thought this person would’ve acquired through osmosis enough knowledge about rock music to at least slightly recognize the name of Dickey Betts. You expect a certain level of knowledge about a subject matter from a professional writer (even if it’s only for an on-line magazine like Salon).
Anyway, I would’ve forgotten this were it not for another display of ignorance of pop culture by a writer of a web article for Yahoo! News. This time, the subject was movies–in particular how winning an Oscar proved detrimental to some actors’ careers. The examples cited included Luise Rainer, Louise Fletcher, and–this is what caused me to question Yahoo! News’ criteria for hiring reporters–Walter Brennan? Regarding the latter, the article states:
Now, I don’t work in movies or write about movies. I am not a film geek who’s seen every movie that’s been made over the last 100 years and knows every actor who was in them. I consider my knowledge of movies and actors, at best, only passable for someone of my age and education. However, even I know who Walter Brennan was and can recognize him in movies like Red River, Bad Day at Black Rock, and Rio Bravo (a few of the so-called obscure B-grade movies Brennan did after 1940). I also know who he was from repeats of “The Real McCoys” from the 60’s. I also think that other people who are in my age group and older can, even if they can’t place the name, at least recognize the face. (Granted, he wasn’t a leading man like James Stewart of John Wayne, but he was one of the classic “Hey! It’s That Guy!” type of character actors. Brennan often played grizzled and gimpy old men in John Ford and Howard Hawks Westerns and, in fact, was so much of an archetypical grizzled and gimpy old man that people often confuse him with other actors who played similar characters in movies like, for example, Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) Is it too much to ask that the writer at Yahoo! News have enough dim recognition of who Walter Brennan was to realize that in no way does he belong on a list of actors who disappeared into obscurity soon after winning an Academy Award? This person is supposed to be informing people about a subject that may not know much about. I expect a certain level of knowledge.
Anyway, I realize this isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. Despite the existence of the internet, tapes, DVDs. and cable networks like TCM, the people who are now starting to write about matters of popular culture seem to have little knowledge of anything made before 1985. I suppose the fact I do know about such trivia is a sign I’m quickly becoming old and irrelevent. Still, that doesn’t prevent such public displays of professional ignorance from being damn galling to me.