🤖 “The patter of little feet ... robot feet.”
This week: The future of the past, Charlie Chaplin, and Groundhog Day.
Hey everyone — the second episode of my podcast, Follow Friday, is out now! The guest is Ryan Broderick, who writes an outstanding internet culture newsletter called Garbage Day. We talk about how email became cool again, ska music (more on that below), and why it’s a bad idea to assume people are always lying online.
Thank you to everyone who checked out the first episode of the podcast last week, and a special thanks to Lauren Passell, Jon Christensen, and Michael Yessis, who mentioned Follow Friday in Podcast The Newsletter, Timber’s newsletter, and This Week in Podcasts.
“By the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour workweek”
Once a month or so, the YouTube algorithm brings me something I wasn’t looking for, but really like. That happened this week with a 1960s TV special called “At Home, 2001,” hosted by Walter Cronkite of CBS News and featuring a tour of a speculative house of the future, complete with 3-D TV, a teletype machine where the kids do their math homework, and inflatable furniture.
It’s fun and easy to laugh at the things that the special got wrong (I did! And I recommend it!). But honestly, the futurists that were consulted got more right than I would have expected: Remote work, digital-first news consumption, ubiquitous microwave ovens, and more.
Of course, “At Home, 2001” falls right into the same trap as a lot of attempts at predicting the future, which is a paralyzing inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to imagine a different social order than that of the present. By Cronkite’s time, the percentage of women in the workforce was rapidly increasing, yet the only women seen here are an exoticized Japanese gardener and a housewife working in the “automated” kitchen.
I also had mixed reactions to a long video essay I saw this week, “Walt Disney’s City of the Future, EPCOT,” made by the theme park history channel Defunctland. It’s the capstone to a longer series on the channel about how different world expos, fairs, and amusement parks over the decades tried to imagine the future, and this episode delves into the utopian dreams of a dying Walt Disney.
Some of Disney’s ideas for EPCOT — the city where people would actually live, not the park it eventually became — are still attractive today, like public transit-first urban planning. But as the video reveals, most of them were terrible, and some were downright dictatorial, envisaging Walt as the sole arbiter of residents’ personal freedoms. A scary reminder that having a big ego and a history of successes can be a corrupting influence.
Other stuff I’ve watched recently
Groundhog Day ★★★★½ - I love this movie and try to watch it every year. It’s not perfect — most of the soundtrack is objectively bad, and the central romance isn’t totally convincing. But it pulls off a very difficult balance between humor and spirituality, using the language of film to make Bill Murray’s character (and the audience) re-appreciate the details of everyday life. On DVD, Blu-Ray, and various digital platforms.
The Kid ★★★★ - One of the best Charlie Chaplin films I’ve seen to date: At times hilarious, at other times sad and heartfelt, and at other other times surprisingly avant-garde, but always sweet. I can’t believe it’s more than a century old — the restored version I saw on HBO Max looks incredible. Do not watch the free version on Amazon Prime, which is a poor-quality old film scan. On HBO Max and Kanopy.
Ska Tune Network ★★★★ - As mentioned above, Ryan Broderick praised this channel on the latest episode of Follow Friday, and I have to admit that it is really fun. The creator does ska covers of non-ska songs, and even though my proper-ska knowledge is limited to one song by Reel Big Fish and two songs by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, I had a great time listening to their playlist of video game covers. On YouTube:
Some Like It Hot ★★★★ - Thank you to everyone who told me that I should watch this after reading the Marilyn Monroe edition — there were a lot of you! I really liked it, and as diehard fan of The Apartment I am always here for a Billy Wilder movie starring Jack Lemmon. This aged a lot better than I would have expected for a movie about men in the 1950s dressing as women. But I liked Gentlemen Prefer Blondes better. On Hoopla.
Promising Young Woman ★★★½ - Thematically meaningful thriller about rape culture with some incredible scenes and a darkly funny undercurrent, but ultimately frustrating in some key ways. I admire the ending’s audacity and Carey Mulligan’s performance, but it felt like the script ran out of things to say. Available to buy on various digital platforms (I watched a screener).
P.S.
You can follow me on Twitter and Letterboxd. The latter is where you’ll also find my (ongoing) list of every movie I’ve seen in 2021, ranked.
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Leave your reactions, questions, recommendations, and favorite ska covers in the comments below.