The Myth of Modernity’s Progress
This Labor Day weekend I drove home to spend the weekend with my family and got a chance to watch Forest Gump at a Drive-In theater with them. Unlike my generation Z brother, my millennial nostalgia was looking forward watching my a Drive-In movie after 20 years of them going extinct! I could not wait to watch this classic film in such a classic venue.
However, something was off… several things were just off…
While I enjoyed watching the movie, unlike the early 90’s when we could pull up next to a pole with the speaker to place on the window, we had to tune the radio to listen our car audio. The Drive-In movie instructions told cars to turn their cars on and off during the movie to charge your battery. So every 20 minutes we switch the car on and off. My mom’s “smart” car even distracted us with emails when her car battery was low. Then there were the other cars around us who didn’t know how or couldn’t turn their lights off. Security walked back and forth to place blankets and jackets over the front lights. At times, the wind blew those blankets off. It was just bizarre to think that about 100 car engines were going on and off during the movie. My engineering brain couldn’t help but calculate the amount of wasted energy and gas spent on this film compared to a normal movie or a real Drive-In theater. My environmental heart, couldn’t but thinking about all the unnecessary exhaust fuming out into the air.
To top it off, we watched the fil on the top of a rectangular parking structure at the Irvine Spectrum Mall. Unlike real Drive-In’s in a field where cars are distributed in amphitheater fashion so that all parties can have a larger than life view of the screen, we watched the film on the narrow end of the rectangular rooftop. Even arriving an hour early, the screen was about the size of our rearview mirror, maybe five by seven inches at most. Needless to say, not larger than life. My nostalgia for the “good ol’ days” was still yearning for the Drive-In theater experience. The movie was nice, but I was left confused by what exactly I experienced. Also I missed the cheap carnival style snacks at the old Drive-In’s. Needless to say, I didn’t purchase the 25$ lemonade and popcorn, even with the $5 coupon…
Like Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, the copy just doesn’t beat the real thing.
But there is something more profound about this reemergence of pseudo mutated modern drive-in theaters. Do you all remember what killed Drive-In theaters? It wasn’t necessarily rising real estate costs. But rather the emergence of super malls, like the Irvine Spectrum Mall that we were at. The vision of “progress” demanded a shift in entertainment from these family or date night centered Drive-In theaters, which so captured the peak of American culture, to consumer-based theater malls where money would be exchanged much more fluidly.
The mall killed the Drive-In.
And here we were on the largest parking structure roof of a mall that killed the Orange County Drive-Ins, watching a lackluster greenhouse gas polluting Modern counterfeit Drive-In experience.
I do think on a philosophical, transcendental and even spiritual level, the fact that Drive-In’s used to be in dirt fields, while this one was on the 7th floor of a concrete jungle also ellucidates more of the contrast.
While Forest Gump will always be a classic, no matter what venue it is played at, the reemergence of these super mall Drive-In’s is a perfect illustration of Modernity’s failure, absurdity and also false vision of progress.
I am arguing this contrast to drive an even deeper point: That the narrative of modernity’s progress is a myth. While “progress” may have demanded Drive-Ins close down and their lots be changed to super malls, this is a lie. It was the economic elite and the city planners that willingly chose to shift society’s values (yes your values and the values of your family and community, whether you realized it or not) to one that valued the super mall over Drive-Ins. Almost everyone I knew loved Drive-In’s and mourned their disappearance. Yet the disenfranchised civillians were not in control of our destiny, the elites were and bought our complicity with selling us the promise of “progress” and “better things to come”.
Yet during this COVID crisis, during extreme social isolation, with specific social distancing rules, our hearts and desires for the Drive-Ins of yesterday demanded we bring them back.
While modernity may not progress forward, and as nuclear energy “progress” forward to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Nuclear bombs that annihilated over 200,000 people in Hiroshima alone, demonstrates Modernity’s progress can actually move us backwards, history only moves forwards. Therefore, while some may be fooled to think they got their Drive-In’s back, history says no. History says, you still have this mess you modern “smart” people made, you will have to find new ways to recreate the meaningful experiences you once had but forsook for “shinier” temptations.
My millenial generation, as we fully take the reigns of leadership of the baby boomers over the next decade, are left with the absurd task of fixing Modernity’s myth of progress and its lies and consequences with real honest, soul searching, progress after searching the depths of our souls for what it means to be human.
Welcome to the Post-2020 COVID era
