3. Although this would make you very cool in Syria.
2. This is less true now, since unpopular kids are more willing to wear trench coats to school and kill everybody for no good reason.
3. In fact, M*A*S*H followed this template so consistently that these twists ultimately became completely predictable; whenever I watch M*A*S*H reruns, I immediately assume every guest star is a flawed hypocrite who fails to understand the horror of televised war. It should also be noted that there is one Saved by the Bell script that borrows this formula: When beloved pop singer Jonny Dakota comes to Bayside High to film an antidrug video, we quickly learn that he is actually a drug addict, although that realization is foreshadowed by the fact that Jonny is vaguely rude.
4. It’s been several years since I’ve seen this episode, but what I particularly remember about it is that— while intoxicated—all the kids sing a song in the car…and in my memory, the song they sing is Sweet’s “Fox on the Run.” However, that just can’t be. It was probably something like “Help Me Rhonda.”
1. I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It’s simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It’s not pejorative or complimentary; it’s factual. I’m a “Gen Xer,” okay? And I buy shit marketed to “Gen Xers.” And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.
2. Case in point: When Episode I—The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, all the adults who waited in line for seventy-two hours to buy opening-night tickets were profoundly upset at the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. “He’s annoying,” they said. Well, how annoying would R2D2 have seemed if you hadn’t been in the third fucking grade? Viewed objectively, R2D2 is like a dwarf holding a Simon.
1. As opposed to this essay, which tends to be philosophy for shallow people.
2. Unfortunately, this does create the one gaping plot hole the filmmakers chose to ignore entirely, probably out of necessity: If Leonard can’t form new memories, there is no way he could comprehend that he even has this specific kind of amnesia, since the specifics of the problem obviously wouldn’t have been explained to him until after he already acquired the condition.
3. Holland’s #1 memory-destroying vodka!
4. For those of you who’ve seen Mulholland Drive and never came to that conclusion, the key to this realization is when the blonde girl (Naomi Watts) masturbates.
1. This is similar to the way rich white kids in places like suburban Connecticut fell in love with N.W.A. records in the early nineties.
