Cinematic Canon, Save Me
Before my only ambition in life was to talk shit movies, I was heavily immersed in the literary canon. I grew up in a house where as a toddler, my Mom would say stuff to me like, “Everybody says that Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time, but they were wrong, it was Jane Austen.” As time went on, I delved into my own relationship with the canon. While I didn’t fall in love with Austen, the Brontës, and others, I found solace in debating what exactly is the next step of the canon, specifically modern literary canon. This has been on my mind for a while, and slowly, it has started to become something I’m interested in. When I meet fellow readers, I ask them what they consider modern canon, and if it’s an answer based in pop culture or if it’s something that is truly a fantastic read. I’m always delighted to hear everybody’s answers and books are great and all, but since mlog is clearly a movie blog, I realized something: there is set cinematic canon.
Last week, for the first time in my twenty-three years of life, I sat down and watched The Blues Brothers. I don’t know how I avoided it for that long, but once I finished the film, everything fucking clicked. Stupid jokes made in old episodes of Spongebob finally made sense, the Runaway Five cutscenes in Earthbound suddenly became so much more endearing to me; how much hidden Blues Brothers content have I been missing? It occurred to me that Blues Brothers is a necessary thing to see in order to understand so much more in television and film.
Universal Pictures
If you Google “cinematic canon” or “movie canon,” you’re going to have to sift through a lot of camera bullshit. After all of that, you’re left with a handful of Wikipedia articles about the best movies of all time. I’m glad the world has decided to narrow down everything to only fifty movies, but what I’m really in search of are movies that hold together the glue of pop culture. Nowhere on these Top 50 lists is The Blues Brothers and yet, here I am, having epiphany after epiphany, suddenly getting so many more jokes. All things considered, I have not seen a lot of classics and I can only imagine how many jokes I’ve missed out on over the years. There is also a lack of television canon, surprisingly. How many Red Room Twin Peaks jokes have I missed before I forced myself to watch the series? Blues Brothers is making me have a downright crisis over all of this and I feel like I need a list to watch.
What’s even more frustrating is that necessarily the best movies aren’t always considered a part of canon. For instance, it’s obvious that Star Wars is movie canon. It’s cultural importance is astronomical, and any chump can see a light saber and know that suddenly they’re seeing a Star Wars reference. If we were to pick something like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which has an extremely large following among cinephiles and is considered one of the greatest movies on several lists, it’s jack shit in modern pop culture! Breathless is nodded to in series such as Brooklyn 99 and IDW’s Transformers comic, but at the end of the day, Breathless, for a casual viewer is a film that’s here nor there and isn’t necessary for casual understanding of pop culture referencing. These mentions are a nod at best, but not a whole entire gag.
Of course one could argue that literature has been around for way longer than film thus deeming the literary canon necessary, however, both literature and film are equally accessible and I think at this point, with how frequently pop culture changes, the hard and fast standards should probably be listed and seen by just about everybody.
