I am guilty of trying to avoid the popular. The cool kids in movies and TV are always the kids that did their own thing and often broke the rules. They don’t listen to the radio music, they constantly assert that they want things of “quality”- usually found in the past. We call them hipsters, cool kids, hep cats, any number of names through the years that all generally mean the same thing.
Yes, hep cats is a Cry-baby reference
I used to heavily align myself with the outside. The radio was too mainstream, I wore neon and converse even to my 8th grade dance. If anything got too popular I made sure I wouldn’t like it and if I already liked something that got popular later I made sure everyone knew it.
I have tried to stop. Being on the outside does not make you cool, it makes you lonely or annoying or both. There are some things I honestly don’t like, but when I catch myself saying I don’t like things that I have no opinion of or experience with I have to stop and ask myself why. And normally the answer is just to differentiate myself. I recently saw Magic Mike XXL (recently as in earlier today) and it was my idea to see it. I had not seen the first one, but two of my friends had and we went and it was as bad as I expected it to be, but in the best way. It was funny, it was entertaining, it was awkward storytelling but it did what it was meant to do. And I insisted throughout the movie, so that anyone near could hear, that I regretted being there, that it was an awful goddamn movie. I wanted to stand out. I wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t there like the rest of them, looking for enjoyment, I was too cool for that. I regretted it. After the movie I countered all my complaints by stating aloud that I did enjoy it but that it was still awful. Again, unnecessary especially because I really did think the movie was hilarious. Discussing the movie as we left the theater I felt the need to say that I still didn’t really find Channing Tatum attractive (Joe Manganiello though…).
There was no harm in saying so, but it was again unnecessary. Not liking Channing Tatum, thinking the screenwriting left much to be desired, none of that made me cooler or better than any of the ladies (and two gentlemen) in that theater.
I feel I improve myself when I notice these things, because when I do it repetitively it becomes habit and I would hate for it to be habitual to separate myself from the world around me because I think it makes me cool or interesting or anything else. We are all popular culture. We set trends and tones and would do better to remind ourselves and each other that everything we hate to be cool someone has made. Someone’s hands or heart has touched something for us to go and tear it to pieces. We may feel we have the right as consumers of content to be blunt but we also have the duty as fellow human beings to be respectful. Maybe I wouldn’t have written Magic Mike XXL the way it was written but I don’t write movies for a living, and that doesn’t mean people didn’t put all their effort into it, that the actors weren’t proud of their performance. Channing Tatum does not need me to think he’s attractive- he has a wife and a daughter and a career based on millions of other people thinking he’s attractive. But I will go on record saying he’s handsome anyway, not only because he is but because I am enough of a person to realize that what is not attractive to me is never ugly. What is not cool to me is not lame. And what is not mainstream is not the best.