When people call something “a product of its time,” it’s usually not a compliment. Typically it means the book, film, comic book or whatever has attitudes about women, gays or people of color that haven’t aged well. Tom Deitz’ Windmaster’s Bane, for instance, came out in the early 1980s. It’s a good fantasy novel but when I reread it recently it hit me how completely white and straight the cast were. I didn’t notice that when I first read it; I doubt Deitz thought anything about it when he was writing it.
Other stuff gets labeled a product of its time because it’s rooted in a particular zeitgeist and doesn’t translate. As I wrote back in 2022, satire and parody can become outdated because whatever they’re mocking is no longer important, like Boris the Bear spoofing 1980s comics. It was funny at the time but making fun of Marvel’s New Universe no longer makes me smile. The NU is long dead and I don’t care about it.
The Fighting Sullivans (1944) is another example, a film that shook the audience when it came out (originally as The Sullivans) but left me cold when I caught it a few years back. The film is based on a true story about the five Sullivan brothers who joined the Navy together after Pearl Harbor. They got themselves assigned to the same ship, which was sunk by the enemy. All five brothers died that day.
The movie isn’t about that. Instead it’s the story of them growing up in a small, rural Midwestern community. Boyish antics, getting into trouble, learning life lessonx and one of the brothers eventually falling love and getting married. Then comes Pearl Harbor, their enlistment, their tragic death. We end with the grieving parents remembering their children, hearts breaking.
It didn’t work for me. Most of the film is a story of small-town Americana, which is not my jam. It’s competently made but not memorable; its sentimental view of small-town life is conventional.
According to Thomas Doherty’s Projections of War, however, the original 1944 audience found it gut-wrenching. The war was ongoing and millions of Americans had lost family, stood to lose family or knew someone who had. To lose five sons in one instant? They could appreciate the horror of that in a way I can’t. As Doherty says, the early scenes would have had a completely different feel for an audience that knew and shuddered from how things would turn out.
Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One is another example. A book that’s drenched in nostalgia for 1980s pop culture is unlikely to inspire the same enthusiasm 20 years from now; a teenager reading the book in 2045 would be like younger me reading a book awash with nostalgia for 1910s silent movies, pulp magazines and slang.
The setting — the Oasis multiplayer online game-world/social network where everyone in the dystopian mid-21st century spends their lives —is also a product of its time. Social networks in 2011 had a much more positive sheen, before most of us had grasped the capacity for trolling, cyber-bullying, online harassment and misinformation. Cline describes Oasis creator James Halliday as an idealist, in contrast to the schemers who want to control and monetize Oasis. The years since 2011 have made it clear the people running online platforms are not idealists at all.
As most of y’all probably know, Halliday left his fortune and control of Oasis to whoever can solve a series of puzzles built around Halliday’s nostalgia for 1980s pop culture. Protagonist Wade is one of the “gunters” out to win the prize before the corporate drones take the power for themselves.
I don’t think there’s anything shameful about Cline’s book or The Fighting Sullivans being a product of their time. Even if Ready Player One fades into obscurity it was massively popular and delighted lots of people who shared fond memories of the 1980s. That’s no small thing, even if it doesn’t create an enduring classic. Unlike The Fighting Sullivans I think my limited enthusiasm for the book was nothing to do with being a product of its time — after all I’m old enough to have plenty of nostalgia for the 1980s. It’s more that the sheer, endless stream of trivia left me numb.
Ready Player One is less like the geeking we do here at Atomic Junk Shop and more like listening to those nerds who cannot turn off their enthusiasm for their favorite shows/books/movies, even if their audience doesn’t share it (“It’s such an amazing series, I can’t believe you don’t watch! Let me describe the plot of last night’s episode …”). It doesn’t help that Cline, as he makes clear here, is writing his nostalgia about 1980s pop culture. That’s fine, but his memories don’t resonate with me.
My nostalgia has more comics, more science fiction novels, different TV touchstones and almost no videogames. Even though Cline and I are both white dudes, my nostalgia isn’t as white and male as his, which has no Michael Jackson, no Cosby Show (though given what we know about Cosby now, that’s probably just as well), nothing girl-coded. I don’t blame Cline for indulging in his own tastes — it’s not his fault i don’t share them — but like I said, it’s hard erfor me to connect with Wade’s adventures. Plus it irks me no end that Cline lists Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and TV’s early-1970s Land of the Lost as 1980s pop culture. No matter when he first saw them, they just aren’t.
Anything you’d like to cite as a product of another time? Mention it in comments.
And then you get things like Gulliver’s Travels or Lord Of The Flies, which way outlast whatever it is they’re parodying.