Well y'all keep talking! Fascintation stuff I was generally unaware of…!!
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
Quackcast 245! Did hapless main characters create the friendzone myth?
Bravo- from all I've looked into reality verses the idealised reality (media depiction), fact never matches fiction. Reality has the seed, fiction creates the image, then reality is influenced by it.
Dressing to the 9s is very different depending on the year. That ideal changed a lot with location and time… Subtleties that are meaningless to us now we're a big deal. One of the biggest problems with having an overview of history is that you miss the intricacies that were important at the time, you develop a compressed view.
As a modeler, you will know that even though the Tiger is the classic German tank of WW2, in all the movies and artwork even though in reality the Panzer IV was the more iconic tank… And even then that had many different versions depending on time and place.
But film budgets are limited and the tigers look more exciting.
I have a LOT of reference material, not just gigs of downloaded images of all different types, but also a big library of books on all aspects of the early 20th century.
I don't say that to try and convince you that my facts are superior, just to tell you that I HAVE honestly tried to research this.
I don't just look for photos and descriptions of outits, I look for surviving examples too and what's possible to buy…
Because of that I know the glam of the motorbikers almost certainly did not exist in the way people see in film and artwork. The same with flyers. The reality was different in a lot of ways. These people were awkward enthusiasts, often gangly, not full developed youths. Their outfits were bulky and illfitting with none of the cavalry charm of the imagery. Modern US motorbike cops are more dashing than the riders of the old days on those muddy unfinished roads… Flying was a bitterly cold, dirty afair, no one looked dashing like mr Biggles… The only time they approached the look was in the officer's mess and that was more formal.
Even the famous flappers of the 1920s… You can see them in film but to dig up actual examples seems impossible. Sure these women existed but not quite as the media would have us believe- dresses were never as short for example. That might not seem like a big deal to us now but it was a huge thing then. To a massive extent the media created the image of the "Roaring '20s"
For a start, it's often mainly centred around a small subset of people in a few US cities at the time- mainly New York, Chicago and LA. On the rest of the planet the culture was slightly different… But even in the US it was way more conservative than the popular image suggests now.
On, the TL;DR version:
Reality is complex, dirty, boring, unstylish, with bad angles and lighting, it makes a million different versions or everything and can't decide which one is right, so the media comes along and makes the perfect composite out of the very best of all versions, boiling them down to the perfect hybridised ideal and THAT is what people follow.
usedbooks wrote:
If anyone ever had a secret crush on me, they kept a very good secret. But I never took to asking until I was about thirty.
Until then, I just went on assuming most of the guys who I got along so well with or crushed on weren't interested. While assuming I had not one attractive cell on my person, I attempted to play sleuth, slyly look for wedding rings, or, in one case, remain completely oblivious to the "out and proud" badges and t-shirts. XD I could probably be the hapless female protagonist society doesn't need. (Or I could have been in my 20s. I swore off the nonsense.)
It's really unfair to say heterosexual opposite sexes cannot be friends. While it is true I have crushed hard on a good 30% of my male friends (I don't have that many friends, so that's been about six), there are more that I had absolutely no chemistry or attraction to, no matter how much we bonded or got along. There is science behind attraction, after all. We have our "types." There's chemistry that makes us attracted to people with dissimilar immune genes, a neat mechanism to create a stronger next generation and usually prevents people from being attacted to close relatives. Of course, there is the phenomenon of how talking about science completely negates any potential attraction.
WTF? Who isn't being yer friend? Yer awesome! I'LL KILL EM!!!
Being usually ostracized ethnic the fashion ethics of gangsters was often old fashioned. But the bootlegger ideal was based on media accounts as you have indicated so the two fed into another to create an archetype precisEly how you're saying. Advertising added to the flyer into motorcyclist race driver mystique. The dashing knight of the skies fighter ace was already attested to in 1916 even 1915 with the French pilot with the deflecting blades on his prop. You only needed one example to create an entire iconography is what I'm saying. The flapper like the Gibson girl probably never existed but are composites from numerous models. And media ran with it and people tried to emulate what they saw and read.
So there is no disagreement from me. I thoughtI had made that clear with the hapless hero archetype drawn together from many sources into Bob Hope movies persona. Which so many have copied. It never really existed in one person in real life. But that has not stopped anyone from trying to live that life which is a fictional construction. And now it's a tangled mess and I am never sure what routine I'm drawing from anymore because at points in your life I did borrow from media to get by because I had no other examples of behavior to draw upon.
For the flapper there is the opening sequence in Thoroughly Modern Millie where the character draws together a modern 1920 'style by looking in shop windows and magazines . That movie brings together a bunch of fictional types and plays with them even showing how ridiculous they were. Blake Edwards also did that in some other cilms.
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Funny how you mention Biggles when my notion of a World War One flier is David Niven or Errol Flynn from the starkly realistic for its day Dawn Patrol or the pictures of Boelke , Immelmann or Gumeyar. To me Biggles is an idealized hero of youth fiction like Buffalo Bill or Nancy Drew or Dick Tracy. Not Eddie Rickenbacker who had a myth created around him but who remained real and mud splattered. The archetype had been created by then and he decided to live it thereby giving it a real face.
We're in agreement Bravo! :D
Going by what Kim said though it prompted me to look for more angles.
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The best trianglation I have for the flapper phenomenon is a book of collected French magazine illustration cartoons from the early to mid 1920s. They were done by contemporary illustrators to comment on the fashions, styles and attitudes of the day. There are a LOT of unique depictions of fashion styles in there that you only see hinted at in photos:
The juicy thing is that these pics were not drawn to illustrate outfits like a model photo or fashion illustration; they were done to show interactions by the normal people of the day using the current sterotypes that existed then.
- So there ARE some flapper-like young ladies in the pics with comments their "wanton, willfull" behaviour. Which means that for whatever reason it WAS a sterotype that existed in some way during the time and it WAS international, not just the USA.
Whether it was more than a sterotype I can't say.
One movie of the time portrays a close precursor of a flapper as a loose girl who hung around Parisian night clubs entertaining the officers. A war memoir paints that picture as well with the flapper dress, bobbed hair and slinky dress laughing it up with red tab staff officers back in Paris while serving officers toughed it out in the trenches.
It's ticky though. The flapper was a young, liberated hedonistic woman in a postwar world, while that version sounds like a prostitute in the previous war torn decade… There could be a relationship in forming the sterotype of the look.
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On this exact note, the character of Sophie in the Somerset Maugham book The Razer's Edge (published in 1944), is a woman who follows this pattern somewhat and it doesn't end well for her- Losing her young husband and child she throws herself Nihilistically into a life of hedonistic excess- promiscuous sex, dancing, parties, and opium adiction. She sinks down in the level of society she moves in and is eventually murdered by an aquanance.
I think a big part of the flapper sterotype in pop-culture wasn't just an equivelent of a 1970s "disco floozie", "loose woman", or "gangster moll", it was a moralistic cautionary tale. In some respects they were seen as "bad women".
-not surprising since society hated a liberated female.
I'm sure the antics of the "lost generation " across Europe helped. Hedonistic young women fresh from servicing officers might have gone right on partying in the 1920s. In that day and age very little if anything was thought to separate a liberated woman from a prostitute. And then there was the Berlin cabaret scene and the Harlem Renaissance so plenty of opportunities for young women to hit the clubs and be hedonistic and live and add to the stereotypes.
I'm still a little doubtful that the flapper image was entirely driven by prostitutes. :D
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Speaking of another media image/reality disconect:
The Nerd.
That image has evolved a LOT over the years, but the media version of the nerd has always been a lot more glamorous than the real thing. And funilly enough when people deliberitly go for a "nerdy look" now (it's become almost a fashion thing), what they do is just an immitation of the fictional nerd sterotype. All those self described "nerdy girls" and "nerd boys" are directly influenced by a fictional image and not reality.
Of course the old style geek, nerd, dork kids never went away or suddenly became glamerous, but they HAVE had their identity somewhat appropriated by these people, which irks them a little.
I remember wtaching American Splendor about the awkward Harvey Pekar and his friends. There's a scene whre one of his firneds is excited about the film Revenge of the Nerds because he feels his subculture is finally getting some recognition, but Harvey is cynical, feeling that the image is just being appropriated and nerds will still be socially ostasised as usual.
Then there's the most modern version of this phenonina which was The Big Bang theory.
When I first watched an episode of that it was about Sheldon going back to his mum's hous in Texas and his firneds coming to get him.
I didn't know the characters or what was going on. All I saw were people dressed in extremely fashionale and very well fitting hipster clothes. They seemed articulate and broadly funny, mostly gregarious but one was shy. They all seemed dedicated to getting their gay firend to come back and live with them- he'd run away for some reaon. They were all obviously straight so I thought they'd been homophobic possibily and I was interested that a broad sitcom would tackle that.The gay man's mother seemed like an ex-prostitute or stripper who was extremely interested in the hipsters…
After whatching the episodes in order I realise that wasn't what was happening at all. But the thing is that you can only beleive that they are unfashionable geeky nerds and that Sheldon is straight if you're inducted into that fantasy gradually, because it IS so false.
The pilot episode provides a clearer, more realistic view of the show's premise:
Leonard and Sheldon really do act and look like real nerds in that; badly dressed in out of fashion, ill fitting cheap clothes, only worn for their utility. They're both shy, innexpereinced and yet very pervy. The Penny character is worldy and has all the bravery and forwardness they lack (more like Sheldon's mum in the later episodes). Clearly she will pull them out of their shells and "make men" of them as the series progresses…
Of course the show was rejigged after that.
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