where am i? where are we?
It may sound odd to say my first entry back into the world of jamiesbrain.com came full circle while watching the 2007 MTV Movie Awards. In full swing of the quarter life crisis, this little TV show was the icing on the cake.
In 1993, I taped the MTV Movie Awards. Like on a VHS tape. I watched it probably 10 times in total, throughout the year, until the next one. I didn’t tape it because I was out- I couldn’t program the VCR, it was like rocket science, remember? I watched it live, and rewatched it, commercials and all, because it epitomized cool to me. The clothes, the jokes, the music…the people. It was all real (as real as it could be) and aspirational. It didn’t try hard. The actors and singers were new and fresh. And everyone talked about it the next day.
I just finished watching the 2007 MTV Movie Awards. It could have been Fraggle Rock with all of the puppet action going on there. They’ve given up. 1950’s sponsorship blabber invaded the show like aliens trying to brainwash us. The air of ‘we are going to show we are cool by pushing consumer-generated content’ was enough to stifle the crowd. And an award for a movie that’s not even out yet? That’s just pathetic. Now the actors are either too young to fawn over, or old enough to make me sad (Jack Nicholson could barely talk? The Fresh Prince’s kid won an award?). The only real moment of the night was bittersweet: Sarah Silverman’s Paris Hilton jokes with the constant panning to her sitting in the audience. It was like watching someone get picked on in high school with a bigger audience and more money.
So what does this have to do with me? It’s about representation. If the 13 year old me looked to MTV as the representation of cool, what does it represent now? It’s me trying to hold on to my youth. It’s the yearly ritual of watching this awards show, just like the music awards. If I stop, then I’m old. Like, officially. I had this weird vision of a ‘younger person’ seeing that I watched it, and saying, “why are you watching this, you’re too old”, or “why are you watching MTV, no one watches that”. Either way, I’m screwed.
Will I watch it again next year?
At 13 years old, I was, just as MTV, riding high on the wave of endless possibility. I was at the crux of the teenage experience; MTV was at their peak. At 27, like MTV, I can see the walls, the boxes we’ve created for ourselves. It’s constricting. It’s time for change.