{"id":68551,"date":"2024-09-20T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2024-09-20T05:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=68551"},"modified":"2024-09-19T08:49:11","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T12:49:11","slug":"qotd-the-matrix-harry-potter-and-the-one-pop-culture-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/09\/20\/qotd-the-matrix-harry-potter-and-the-one-pop-culture-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Matrix<\/em>, Harry Potter<\/em> and “The One Pop Culture Thing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Part of the appeal of Harry Potter<\/em> must be that can somehow be intellectualized, though \u2014 at least, if the number of people incorporating it, in all apparent seriousness, into college classes can be believed. Here again, I’m not talking the English Department, which might have a legitimate reason \u2014 to study the narrative technique or whatever (for certain stretched-farther-than-Trigglypuff’s-sweatpants values of “legitimate”, anyway). I mean classes like “PHIL 101: Harry Potter<\/em> and Philosophy”, which started showing up first in goofy California colleges, then all over the damn place, somewhere around 2002.<\/p>\n

That certainly seems to be the appeal of The Matrix<\/em>, and indeed The Matrix<\/em> stopped being The One Pop Culture Thing very quickly, I hypothesize, because it made “intellectualizing” it too easy. The Matrix<\/em> is pretty much just Jean Baudrillard: The Movie<\/em>, and while that’s fun and even useful \u2014 Baudrillard did have a point, despite it all \u2014 it’s just too clever … by which I mean, The Matrix<\/em> did too much of the heavy lifting, so that you don’t get too many Very Clever Persyn points for noting that we’re all, just, like, simulations in other people’s minds, dude. Descartes can go fuck himself; Keanu Reeves has solved the mind-body problem with kung fu.<\/p>\n

Also, Baudrillard-lite is everywhere now. We’re all Postmodernists, in the same way we’re all Marxists, so even the kids who slept through most of their one required Humanities course has at least vaguely heard of this stuff. A show like True Detective<\/em>, on the other hand, hearkens back to much older philosophy \u2014 as tiresome as the wannabe-Foucaults were back in the late 1980s, as a culture we’ve pretty much forgotten about them, so the brooding wannabe existentialist douchebag seems new<\/em> now. I just googled up “best true detective quotes”. Here’s a small sampling:<\/p>\n