Pop Kult

Via Castalia house, an excellent post on how pop culture is more accurately, as Brian Neimeier puts it, Pop Kult (or "Cult").

That said, I do think he's overlooked something:

When my viewers were upset about the corporate destruction of Star Wars, calling the franchise a cultural institution, I thought it a bit hyperbolic – after all, these are just stories, and you can’t uncreate what George Lucas did. I see things better now. Star Wars is part of the religious reverence for popular franchises. When Disney makes a Star Wars movie that undoes the stories of the Lucas era, it really is like a religious reformation – or an iconoclasm.

Let me turn to the critical drinker:

The part that I disagree with is "after all, these are just stories, and you can’t uncreate what George Lucas did."

Perhaps you can't "uncreate" something that exists, but you can destroy it or pervert it's nature by adding to it in a way that changes the very nature of everything that has gone before. You can force a person to ignore the existence of a continuation of a storyline, or have the characters one loved or admired turned into monsters.

Also - without the religious overtones of pop kult that he points out, these are not just stories. These are myths. They were popular myths because, unlike many that were rooted in teh 60's and 70's, they saw a future of hope, that people could be heroes, and overcome evil. As Chesterton put it - they showed that dragons can be slain.

And we badly need those myths now, because our culture has been filled with substandard ones, and even those have been perverted away from virtue and good. Because the myth we've been fed for decades is how awful we are, and that we should meekly stand by while the civilization our forebears have built up is torn down around us.

If anything, we need the better ones like we used to have.