The Internet has spawned an explosion of opinion and independent thought. Movies I once thought were untouchable I now find have their own critics. While the Web has also coined new terms and brought about an entirely new culture, I have some major complaints, namely the use of the word “overrated.”
When I was in elementary school, there were certain movies that I absolutely idolized. I had a queue of films that I would watch on sick days. It was a long list, but it included all three of the Star Wars films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Rocketeer, and a TNT version of Treasure Island that starred Charlton Heston and a young Christian Bale. Not only did I love these movies, I would actually re-enact them. This was usually a sign to my parents that I wasn’t sick anymore and it was time to send me back to school.
Hang on; I’m going to make the rest of the Popdosers look old. My high school experience went side by side with the transformation of the Internet into what it is today. These were the days of dial up modems that squealed like a pig to the slaughter. It was the Also sprach Zarathustra of my entry into the negativity that the Internet has cornered the market on.
Around the same time, I had found a new friend at my high school. His name was Duncan, and he was far different from the friends I had grown up with. By sophomore year I had turned into an all too-serious adult. Duncan had transferred to my school and displayed a different sensibility from my old friends, so I gravitated toward him. Being young, I mistook his arrogance for maturity. Duncan was a smart kid, but all too often intellectualism can cause a man to act cruelly toward others (and how smart is that?). Duncan introduced me to criticism and cynicism, and being impressionable, I imitated him.
The Internet is filled with Duncans; people who know their intellect but display little understanding that emotional intelligence is far more important than mere knowledge. With the Internet has come an extremely critical culture, one in which a single negative voice can speak louder than one hundred positive ones. It would be silly to say that this problem didn’t exist prior to Al Gore’s invention of the World Wide Web, but it is hard to deny that it has become an almost suffocating force in our culture.
One day, in a conversation with Duncan, I mentioned my love of The Rocketeer. He sneered at my bond with that movie, taking an almost mocking tone. How could someone, in one swift stroke, destroy me for loving a movie that I cherished from my childhood? My unfortunate reaction was to give in. I wanted to look cool and all too often looking cool means to betray one’s own self. It was around this time that I first became aware of the word “overrated.” (more…)
Forgive me if I decline to mourn last weekend’s passing of Charlton Heston. He was an occasionally decent, often ridiculous and altogether overrated actor. He marched with Dr. King and he headed the Screen Actors Guild, but then he wound up a despicable figure after marching the NRA into Denver for a national convention not a month after the Columbine shootings. Still, as I pondered this column’s publication date, which arrives about midway between the moment he shuffled off this moral coil and a certain upcoming, unhappy anniversary, I couldn’t help but mentally morph Heston’s chiseled visage into the face of this guy:
I’ll have much more to say next week about Seung-Hui Cho’s visitation of evil upon my hometown of Blacksburg, Va., last April 16. For now, I’ll say one thing about him: Without the Walther P-22 semiautomatic he bought over the Internet in February 2007; without the Glock 19 semiautomatic he casually picked up at a Roanoke gun dealer a month later (so much for the efficacy of Virginia’s one-a-month law); and without those 17 magazines of bullets (many of them hollow-point to allow for extra carnage)…