David Murdock Column: On near-perfect popular media

I’m not as old as I look, with my near-white beard and hair (what’s left of it).  I’m a little younger, in terms of number of years lived.  However, I usually come across as older.  That’s the occupational hazard of socializing with people who are mostly 18-22 years old.  They can make a person feel older, if that person allows it.

I’ve had that “older” feeling a lot the past few weeks.  I’ve been reminded of several things that set my generation ― commonly termed Generation X ― apart from theirs – Generation Z.  What would’ve been termed “Generation Y” is more usually called the “Millennial Generation,” by the way.  The Gen-Zers have no useful memory of the same popular media that I do.

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Take music, for example.  Last week, Gordon Lightfoot died.  Lightfoot was one of the best singer-songwriters of the 1970s, in my opinion.  I mentioned his death to a class, asking if anyone had heard of him.  Imagine my surprise when several of them had!  Of course, the only song of his they could name was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

I suggested several more of his songs — among them “If You Could Read My Mind” and (my favorite) “Sundown.”  “Sundown” is near-perfect, I think.  That term, “near-perfect,” is one I use when I cannot think of anything — right off the top of my head — that would spoil its “perfection,” but I don’t try to think of anything that would spoil it for me.  Let’s just say that whenever that song pops up in a playlist, I stop what I’m doing and listen to it.  I simply love it.

A movie most Gen-Zers aren’t really familiar with, even though many of them have heard of it, is "Casablanca."  That one is more complicated than “Sundown” in its near-perfection.  "Casablanca" regularly shows up on professional movie critics’ lists of the best movies ever made, usually landing in the top three.  Many rate it as the best movie ever made.  I don’t know about that; I just know that I love the movie.  Every time I watch it, I’m blown away by how good it is.

Last week, I watched some favorite clips from the movie.  Obviously that ending scene is memorable, but it’s not my favorite scene in the whole movie.  There are two others that vie for attention.  One is near the beginning where Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, helps a couple of young Bulgarian newlyweds ― who are down and out in Casablanca, having fled the Nazis back home ― make enough money to get out and go on to the United States.  That scene never fails to move me.

However, it’s not the best scene in the movie for me.  The city of Casablanca, at the time when the movie was set, is in French territory occupied by the Nazis.  A group of Nazi officials in Rick’s bar commandeers a piano and starts singing a Nazi propaganda song.  That’s when Victor Laszlo, a leader of the Resistance played by Paul Henreid, goes over to the house band and orders them to play “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.  With Rick’s covert approval, they do, and the bar’s patrons all join in, drowning out the Nazis.  Chokes me up every time — it’s that powerful.

Now, I obviously have no first-hand memories of seeing "Casablanca" in the theater; it was released in 1942.  However, it was so heavily referenced in movies and television shows of my youth that I saw it around that same time — it was commonly shown on late-night TV in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another recent experience is one that not only do Gen-Zers have absolutely no memory of, but most people of my generation and older don’t either.  I love hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1920s and ‘30s.  My favorite of the those writers is Dashiell Hammett.  If anyone today remembers his books, they remember "The Maltese Falcon," the 1930 novel that forms the basis of another memorable Bogart movie (both of which are also near-perfect).  People might remember "The Thin Man," the novel on which the series of movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy is based (again, near-perfect).

My favorite of Hammett’s books is 1929’s "Red Harvest, which is highly ranked by critics but not well-known today.  How much do I love that book?  I read it every few years or so.  A week ago, it occurred to me that I hadn’t read it in a while, so I hauled it out.  A little over three hours later, I’d read it again … in its entirety.

"Red Harvest" is simply astounding.  It still stuns me every time I read it, and I cannot think of too many books that I’ll read all the way through in one sitting and feel energized by the end of it.  I know what’s going to happen, yet I still read on … impressed by the way it’s written.  It’s just … near-perfect.

One of the hallmarks of Generation X is that we were, for some reason, drawn to “retro” music, movies, and books.  Gordon Lightfoot was not retro — I remember hearing his songs on the radio when I was a kid — but "Casablanca" and "Red Harvest" were.  I won’t even mention what Generation Z calls retro – it might make me feel old.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock looks at examples of near-perfect popular media