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Where have all the icons gone?
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November 05, 2009 | 12:43 PM
Why does "Star Wars" mean so much to my 6-year-old son? Why do he and his friends run around our house with light sabers, dropping their high-pitched voices as low as they can and breathing into an imaginary respirator, warning each other to "beware of the dark side of the force?"
"Star Wars" was an enormous hit years ago, and the revival of the franchise with its considerably-less-exciting prequel trilogy refreshed an interest in an icon that seemed to own the American imagination the way "M.A.S.H.," "Dallas" or "The Brady Bunch" did for long periods of time.
My son and his merry band aren't quoting the recent films. They are often acting out the ones that premiered close to 20 years before they were born.
That speaks to the power of a franchise that easily made the jump to light speed from one generation to the next. But it also speaks to a remarkable lack of a defining moment in American iconography over the last two decades.
Consider sports, an arena where I spend an embarrassing amount of time. If you go to a hockey, basketball or baseball game and the home team is losing, the images that pop on the video jumbotrons are all of movies that came out 15 or more years ago.
There's a wide-eyed Adrian (Talia Shire) in "Rocky II" on her hospital bed, when she wakes from a coma.
"There's one thing I want you to do for me," she asks, looking into the eyes of an exhausted Rocky (Sylvester Stallone).
"Win."
Inspired by his wife's recovery — and some memorable music that has no doubt helped countless Americans run off love handles that stick to their middles like Velcro — Rocky trains harder than he ever had. That scene alone is enough to make crowds of people born long after Stallone's last movie was relegated to the bottom shelves of video stores stand up and cheer.
Then there's Dan Devine (Chelcie Ross), the tough coach of the Notre Dame football team in "Rudy." Surrounded by his players, he proclaims: "Nobody comes into our house and pushes us around."
But "Rocky II" came out in 1979 and "Rudy" in 1993. Where are the powerful sports moments from inspirational sports movies between 1993 and today? One of my favorite recent sports movies is "Remember the Titans." And yet, I've never seen Denzel Washington on a jumbotron at a sports event, standing in front of a foggy Gettysburg, encouraging his racially mixed team to come together so that the sacrifices the Union and Confederate armies made all those years before mean something.
Maybe sports and popular movies need enough time to marinate before they become part of the American lexicon. Maybe, for images to resonate, they need to stand the test of time before they're instantly recognizable with a few short words: "May the force be with you." "It's a Wonderful Life" got mixed reviews when it first came out and yet, who today doesn't remember how an angel gets his wings?
Maybe we can blame the lack of a defining image from the last 15 years or so on the choices before us. These classics — "We're going to need a bigger boat," "I'll be back," "Do you feel lucky, punk?" — come from eras when people didn't have TV channels with 900 stations and movie stations didn't offer 12 films all day long.
Choices are a good thing, most of the time. But what that means is that it's harder to find a single rallying quote with the same power as a good sports movie or even an "I have a dream" speech that will resonate with a large crowd of people whose range of tastes and interests might be as broad as the 3,000 miles of the continental United States.
Using choices to explain the lack of a new "Star Wars" is preferable to imagining that the hyperdive generator on the American icon-making machine is malfunctioning.
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