You Know You've Been Researching Too Long When...

You 1) can't find any secondary articles and criticism on the text you're evaluating, and 2) find secondary reading entitled 'American Heroes: On Frivolity and Horror in 2008's Summer Superhero Movies: "The Dark Knight, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man"'. The abstract reads

An analysis of 2008 Hollywood superhero blockbusters. Iron Mon and The Incredible Hulk are humorous and often light-hearted; but the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, which reinvents The Joker in Heath Ledger's performance, is much more grim and morally complex—a dark entertainment for pessimistic times.

I'm torn when I see an article entitled thus. It means that popular culture is coming under scrutiny, which is good - but as I sit typing here it's only two years after these films came out. The article was published in the Spring of 2009. I think there needs to be a bit more time before we start examining our current culture. If we immediately start dissecting cultural indicators like films, then it takes away some of the creative potential for further movement and posits one reading of the meaning of said film. It's like Justin Bieber writing a memoir of his life when he's sixteen years old, or tweens updating their Twitter every half hour, or - heaven forbid - a twentysomething woman who just happens to blog about life abroad.

I am aware that finding alternative meanings is the work for subsequent critics, and that merely because all three of these films were major blockbusters they do not lack valid artistic and political statements and reflections of contemporary society. Indeed, 'The Dark Knight' was pretty incredible, and one o' my dear brothers said it was 'almost a perfect film.' But these movies still seem so fresh on the cultural stage. I remember watching 'The Dark Knight' and 'Iron Man' in theaters (I never saw 'The Incredible Hulk'), and perhaps my reaction against the article comes because I feel co-opted into criticism that tries to analyse and impose a reading on me, as a participant in the blockbustering films of that summer.

We all remember these films, don't we?

On further reflection, with the rate that movies are churned out of Hollywood, 'The Dark Knight' does feel like it has come out long ago. When I compare it to other films, though, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 'The Dark Knight' seems to follow right on its heels. (I have to keep reminding myself that Lord of the Rings came out in 2001, 2002, and 2003). Maybe in cultural history, there is only 'the past,' which can be subdivided into 'the recent past' which includes things that happened in one's lifetime and then 'the distant past' which happened before one was born or memory formed. That is overly simplistic, and a cultural historian would probably go at me with one of Gimli's war axes.

Mormon Blogs

I was taking a look at some other blogs earlier today to get a better sense of what some other people are saying. So that no equivocations may be made, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (popularly known in the media as "Mormons"). Mormon blogs have piqued my interest recently, and I became familiar with Brother Matsby's "My Religious Blog." It led me down the rabbit hole into a compendium of LDS blogs about children, marriage, and life at BYU (generally).

No comprehensive evaluation of the blog quality and content has been taken, but after one blog about how cute someone's kids are, I started to get bored. My dissociative personality order has arisen again: my nascent editor-self wanted to critique many of these blogs for craft and content. A few points about these people stood out to me, which I repeat below.

Someone thought everyone else appreciated her quality of "telling it like it is and appreciating [her] for it." Another person said she was a good driver, yet she had been in multiple accidents. A slightly more interesting blog critiques the U.S. government and says that his blog is the place where reason, rationality, and politics meet, but it makes swathing assumptions about people that would not be acceptable at a Californian liberal arts college and distorts the terms "common sense" and "reason."

This motions to the discrepancies between self-perception and how the self is perceived by others. Various ideas in my head are resounding about the spotlight effect and the individual's aggrandized view of self-importance, but I cannot critique more. I do the same thing myself. I want to resent these blogs because they're Mormons writing about themselves. Whether I don't like it because they're normal people trying to write about themselves, that they're not talking about religion, or that their writing gives Mormons a "bad intellectual name," I don't know. I want to distinguish myself from them; although Mormons have been officially encouraged to gain education by our Church leaders, an intellectual tradition still seems far from being realized. I feel that education is a means to an end for many Mormons - that end being a job. Sometimes, I feel that tug, too, to give up my intellectual pursuits and get a job because intellectual work is exhausting, and it's difficult to see sometimes what I am creating and producing.

However, I cannot remain in my caustic little bubble for long. I am touched by the endearing "list of things I will do" this year or throughout the course of my life; that reminds me of what my brother does, and what I have done as well. The irascible double-standard is encoded in my thought processes just as much as it is in anyone else's. I castigate the girl who's gotten into three car accidents while claiming still to be a good driver, but I accept the dreamer who wants to do a hundred improbable things before he dies. Perhaps because dreams are outside of the realm of the rational and go to the core of the individual's psyche. How can I judge the core of an individual? And despite our politics and intellects, dreams are something we all have in common.