It’s become commonplace these days to stream movies directly to your phone. So when you’re watching Gloria Swanson when fading movie star Norma Desmond declares from the palm of your hand, “I’m big, it’s pictures that get small,” it’s packed with layers of irony that writer/director Billy Wilder could never have imagined. Of course, someone streaming something to their phone is most likely watching something even shorter and faster on TikTok, certainly not anything in the form of black and white with a runtime of 110 minutes.
Every generation can pick and choose what they want from their predecessors with the same arrogance and egotism that previous generations had when they picked up the bones of their predecessors. Pete Townshend was born in 1945, placing him at the beginning of the baby boomer generation, born shortly after the end of World War II. Pete’s father generation and the rest are known as the Greatest Generation – not a self-congratulatory term at all.
It might help if you take a moment and define the terms a bit. What exactly is a generation? Currently, the popular definition is the period during which the statistically largest portion of the population born within a thirty-year period was under socialist control. We’ve recently entered a new phase where anyone turning 22 as of 2019 is a member of Generation Z. While everyone jokes about millennials, that group has now become a part of Generation Z. old news, out of date like all the people before it – baby boomer generation, Generation X, Fragile Generation, Middlemen, Neutrals, Trusted, Unsustainable and Clean Slate.
Marlon Brando, like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the first wave of rockers, fell somewhere between the greatest generation ever and the new boomers; too young to fight the Nazis, too old to go to Woodstock. However, when Brando replied, “Whaddya has?” when a local girl asked him what he was up against in the movie The Wild One, it set the stage for the sixties and the uprising against picture-perfect prefab communities. which the boys returned home after the war to build.
Like many other artists, Pete seems to have an important role to play in this song. But he’s not completely confident, he’s somewhat back on his heel. There is a certain defense. He knows people knock him down just because he hangs around. Maybe he feels like he’ll never measure up or he knows they resent the new abundance of idle time of his generation. He wished they would disappear, fade away. He hopes to die before he gets old and be replaced just like they are. Pete can’t even point a finger himself, he relies on his mouth as Roger to throw a response. That fear is perhaps the most genuine thing about the song. We are all from the previous generation but somehow know that it is only a matter of time until we become them ourselves.
Pete will probably be the first to tell you. He has a front row seat to the history of his generation. He could read the signs against hatred and war. Well, that definitely ended that, thank you for the service. Each generation seems to have the arrogance of ignorance, choosing to throw away what has gone before instead of building on the past. And they are of no use to someone like Pete providing wisdom about his experience, telling them what he has learned along the same paths he has taken. And if he has the courage to do so, there’s every chance that person will look up at Pete and tell him he can’t see him, he can’t hear him.
And that gave Pete another idea.
Excerpted from Bob Dylan’s PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG. © 2022 Bob Dylan All rights reserved. Audio excerpts provided by Simon & Schuster Audio, read by Bob Dylan, Oscar Isaac, John Goodman, Alfre Woodward, Jeffrey Wright, et al. (P) 2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
