Timelessness in media

[SS-18 ICBM]

What causes the appearance of being dated? What elements do the opposite, enabling media to resonate even with those who consume it much later? What pieces of media do you consider to be timeless or dated?

 

[Narz]

Media includes books?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

I thought so. Maybe there's a better word for what I mean.

 

[Narz]

I find Walt Whitman timeless even though the language is clearly not modern.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

What is it about his works that speaks to you through the centuries?

 

[Narz]

His pleasure in everyday life, work, play, love, his fellow human beings. I feel that way about Siddhartha (by Hesse) also.

 

[BvBPL]

Link to video.

Even though the above is a period piece, you will be able to tell about when it was made. This is because of the quality of the film and because of the costume and hair design. Anthony Perkin's collar is so broad you can tell it was influenced by the style of the day, same w/ Michael York's hair.

 

[Phrossack]

Things that date media include references to then-current events. For example, Monty Python's Flying Circus has a lot of references to contemporary things like Reginald Maudling, Graham Hill, the Kray twins, and a whole lot of music, pop culture figures, and politics of Britain in the late 1960's that fly over the heads of people now. The show also used shock value like full frontal nudity, swearing, breaking the fourth wall, and other things that are old hat today. However, MP's surreal absurdity is timeless. It will never get old.

I like timelessness. Media works will exist for a long time--people still read the Iliad, for example-- so the majority of their readers/viewers/listeners might exist long after the work was made. In my opinion, you shouldn't alienate them with dated references hardly any could understand. And shock value is like tape, becoming less effective with each use until eventually it wears out altogether. Nudity and gore used to be taboo in movies, some deliberately included a lot of them to shock the audience and stir up controversy, social mores were challenged and replaced, and now nudity and gore have barely any effect on audiences; we're familiar with them, and they can't surprise us anymore. As for being original, I think it's basically impossible. There is nothing new under the sun, anything you do has some kind of precedent, and people will always have seen it before.

So I don't think people should bother with originality and shock value, they're lost causes. They should try to focus on other factors, whatever they are, that make a work timeless and relatable to people for a very long time.

 

[downtown]

I'd say 90% of what I write expires in like, 3 days. It's probably one of the biggest bummers of this sort of work.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Things that date media include references to then-current events. For example, Monty Python's Flying Circus has a lot of references to contemporary things like Reginald Maudling, Graham Hill, the Kray twins, and a whole lot of music, pop culture figures, and politics of Britain in the late 1960's that fly over the heads of people now. The show also used shock value like full frontal nudity, swearing, breaking the fourth wall, and other things that are old hat today. However, MP's surreal absurdity is timeless. It will never get old.

References are a sure-fire way to date something. But how much does there need to be to affect a section or the whole thing? Is a single off-hand reference enough or can it be overlooked?

You also raise a good point about changes in societal values that cause subjects themselves to become dated.

I'd say 90% of what I write expires in like, 3 days. It's probably one of the biggest bummers of this sort of work.

Tell me about the 10%.

Anyway, for certain forms of media, the technology it uses can also date the media created with them. Personally, I expect more than 8-bit and 2D graphics these days, though some people would disagree.

 

[Phrossack]

References are a sure-fire way to date something. But how much does there need to be to affect a section or the whole thing? Is a single off-hand reference enough or can it be overlooked?

You also raise a good point about changes in societal values that cause subjects themselves to become dated.

References themselves don't irredeemably date the whole piece. It's building the work around current events references that does. For example, things like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and SNL's Weekend Update are based around current events. They offer their takes on them, usually with some humorous reference to some piece of contemporary pop culture, which is all well and good, but who's going to watch them forty years later? Much, if not most of the humor and references will be lost on viewers then. Airplane!, in contrast, has a lot of dated references that flew over my head, no pun intended (honest!), including the fact that it's a spoof of 70's disaster movies, but it's not entirely based on them and still has a gold mine of jokes and gags that have stayed fresh.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

References themselves don't irredeemably date the whole piece. It's building the work around current events references that does. For example, things like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and SNL's Weekend Update are based around current events. They offer their takes on them, usually with some humorous reference to some piece of contemporary pop culture, which is all well and good, but who's going to watch them forty years later?

Well, they're not meant to be watched 40 years later just like the evening news. I don't think they aim for timelessness in any way.

 

[cybrxkhan]

I think there's still room for things that reference - it's a way for the contemporary generation to sort out things relevant to them, even if it may not be relevant in the future. References become dated, sure, but if the intent was to make something relevant for the current situation I don't think that's necessarily any better or worse.

But yes I do think that keeping things locked in a certain context will not make them timeless. That said, sometimes this is not necessarily the creator's fault per se. Shakespeare, for instance, I think can be timeless to an extent but some folks ruin the fun, so to speak. I would've been a lot more interested in Shakespeare if someone told me earlier that he had a lot of sex jokes and other silliness in his plays, which we nowadays like to see as elegant, respectable works of art. Yes, it might sound shallow that a bunch of penis jokes would make me more interested in something, but hey, it's something both I and Shakespeare's audiences can understand despite the several centuries separating us, and, in a way, it's comforting to know that people have been making dick jokes since forever. Actually, that does remind me I've read a few articles on jokes from the past, and it does appear that the ones that are still funny are the ones that don't rely too much on contemporary context.

Anyhow, to continue on Shakespeare, I saw a video a while back where a theatre group attempted to reconstruct and perform Shakespeare in what they a called "original pronounciation", that is, what likely would've been English as spoken around Shakespeare's time (they did so with help from academics, of course). At first they thought that audiences wouldn't react so well to a performance done in an accent other than RP, but they found out that the audiences loved it - interestingly, it appeared that speaking Shakespeare in the "original" accent flowed better, and in doing so, helped audiences pick up on some of the dirty jokes, puns, and other silliness that's often missed out on when performed in RP. My point here is that Shakespeare became more enjoyable not really because it was performed more "accurately", but because it was performed in a way that allowed audiences to pick up on things that resonated with them more.


Also, for what it's worth, the "original pronounciation" of Shakespeare sounds kind of like an Irish or Scottish accent.