219. CULTURAL COLLAPSE - What Happens When We Lose All Context?
My niece, who is nearly four years old, has become obsessed with the movie Wicked lately. She is not alone. The movie was a roaring success. Lots of my students have seen it and loved it too. I have seen it and loved it. But there is a fundamental difference between my experience and theirs. My students (and my niece) watched the movie of Wicked with no knowledge of the source material, The Wizard of Oz, except for the fact that the two movies had something to do with each other in some way.
For older folk, like myself, it seems insane to think of a world where someone doesn’t know The Wizard of Oz. I know I had seen that movie at least by the time I was my niece’s age, and, being my mother’s favourite film, saw it many many times across my childhood. But even if you didn’t have an Oz-obsessed parent, The Wizard of Oz was just so embedded in culture that references to it abounded. “There’s no place like home”, ruby slippers, lions and tigers and bears — oh my!, “I’ll get you my pretty, and you’re little dog too!”, “we’re not in Kansas anymore”… You just sort of knew it by osmosis. And the most fundamental thing you knew, even if you had only seen images of the main characters in a magazine or poster, was that the green one — the wicked witch, as she was called — was the bad guy.
Which is what made Gregory Maguire’s original novel, Wicked, so brilliant. The green witch’s wickedness was so clear to everyone that telling the same story from her perspective, and seeing what had caused her to be perceived in this way, was a fantastically subversive flipping of the official narrative we’d all grown up with. And when the novel was turned into an equally brilliant musical on the stage, I remember the joy of seeing it for the first time. The Wizard of Oz story through the witch’s eyes, filled with nods and shadows of the original movie.
There is no doubt the story stands on its own two (green) feet as a compelling adventure in its own right, and the songs are fantastic. But the idea that so many people today watch the movie of Wicked first, without all the context of The Wizard of Oz to make it make sense — to make it richer — is wild to me. Talking to my niece the other day, she has finally seen the original Wizard of Oz movie, and when I asked her what she thought about the wicked witch she told me, with a conspiratorial smile, that “Elphaba’s a good person really. She isn’t really wicked.”
While one could see that as her having the same inter-textual experience the first generations who saw Wicked had, only in reverse (The Wizard of Oz the propagandistic re-telling of the true story of Wicked), the experience lacks the force of the original subversion. Instead of the moral message not to judge a book by its cover and to ask questions about the “official” version of events when they don’t add up, we are left simply with the bleak message that you can’t trust anyone. It’s all just a matter of perspective: whose team are you on? Elphaba’s or the Wizard’s?
Lack of, or distortion of, context was also a theme as I watched the first few delightful episodes this week of the new sitcom, The Paper. A spin-off from The Office, I was struck by the sheer depth of despair The Paper exposed as a satire of what has happened to journalism these days. A man with an old-fashioned dream of re-launching a physical local newspaper finds himself up against the problem that not only do none of the staff of journalists currently working for the digital version know how to be actual journalists, but nor do the residents of the town in which the newspaper exists remember exactly the point of, or how to interact with, journalists. The idea of a reporter asking questions to fact check for some sort of official record which won’t be printed until morning is such a relic of a different time, it seems like more of a quirky affectation of personal fetish than a cornerstone fundamental to a functioning democracy. Today, most of us swipe through our “news” feeds looking for things (mainly images and headlines) to skim past while sitting on the toilet or waiting for a bus. The idea that “news” was once a word for things of importance to our actual lives is more and more becoming a distant memory of a lost civilisation. A political activist in America who I had never heard of until his assassination, but whose name was worryingly familiar to all my many young British students reminded me of the messiness of context and information in 2025. This international news was all they could talk about even though it has little bearing on their everyday lives in Britain. Meanwhile the government here is falling apart with resignation after resignation, scandal after scandal, but that is not seen as important because everybody knows that governments lie and ultimately fail to do what they promise.
I learn of both the existence of, and demise of, Charlie Kirk at the same exact time. Seconds later, the same feed tells me about the new Spinal Tap movie, and rumours that WWE will be hosting WrestleMania from Saudi Arabia in 2027. I see a video about how to slice an avocado in a time-saving way. I am told that, on broadway, Cabaret is closing early even as I am told about the exciting new cast of Cabaret now performing on London’s West End. I get a text message from a friend about their Duolingo score somewhere in the middle of all the noise. Remember I have to add something to shop coming on Friday. Check out the cinema times for that Spinal Tap sequel. Remember that the improv comedy group I like are playing nearby on Saturday and look for tickets for that too. Charlie Kirk is forgotten, until I lower my head in despair the next day reading about a far-right march scheduled for London on Saturday. Then I look at the previews for the return of the Premier League the same weekend and choose my fantasy football team for the WSL.
We are adrift and discombobulated. Deeply so. On a podcast I listen to an elderly magician notices how young people these days no longer tell jokes. Sure, they share memes and say funny things (no teacher this week was able to ask students to turn to pages 6-7 without what passes these days for “hilarity” to ensue), but the traditional structures of setup and punchline — “did you hear the one about…” — that’s gone now. Like our attention spans. Jokes like that require listening. Holding all the pieces together in your head as the context is laid out to make the punchline land. It’s too much effort and there’s way too much other stuff to take in.
Even the podcast I was listening to was merely background noise to something else. Soon it was replaced by two comedians asking another celebrity to imagine their dream menu, and I was thinking about what I might write for this philosophy blog. Originally I intended it to have a clear point and logical through line but, as I wrote it, I somehow lost the thread.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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