hating the past

1. Knocked Up in the theaters was a much better movie than Knocked Up on DVD.  I was gratified to find that I'm not the only person who thought this.  All the added and lengthened scenes messed up the whole rhythm, the pace, the timing...and I'm not 100% sure about this, but I could swear there was different music, too—presumably because the sound cues were all fucked up by the different length—and that the entire movie went from being kind of hilarious and amazing to being cheesy and near hateful, even, at points.
2. This is because of this new trend (also true, but without much harm, of Superbad) in DVD releases of incorporating deleted scenes back into the movie—a director's cut, basically—but without providing viewers with the option of watching it the other way.  If I buy the Criterion Collection edition of Brazil, I can watch at least two, maybe even three versions of that movie, including the shitty theatrical release that I've never even heard anybody praise.  Alien was released a while back, and you're actually given the option of watching the deleted scenes stuck back in or not—like, they're on the DVD, and it's a question of what order the scenes get played.  That works!
3. Even George Lucas finally released the original Star Wars flicks as "bonus discs" on DVD...which is fine, call 'em whatever you want!  Lucas could have labeled them "The Stupid Bad Versions That No One But an Asshole Would Ever Want to Watch"—I don't care as long as they still exist, which for a few years was not at all guaranteed: the official Lucasfilm position was that the new "Special Editions" of the original movies (which are ATROCIOUSLY AWFUL, by the way, but that's not even important) are the only official versions, and reportedly Lucasfilm was like suing movie theaters to prevent them from even screening original prints of the original movies—which was appalling because that was the version that made Star Wars famous: the theatrical version is the version that we fell in love with, and now we can't watch the theatrical version?  Even if the special edition were far superior, there's something deeply fucked up about the fancy new version simply wiping out the old.  I suppose it's pure capitalism.
4. Similarly, and in a way that doesn't affect my life in any negative way but is at least as philosophically offensive, you've got companies changing not their names but the meaning of their names.  I once asked a teller at HSBC whether it was true that the initialism stood for Hong Kong–Shanghai Bank of China, and she said, "Well...it's 'Bank and Corporation,' but actually it doesn't stand for anything anymore.  Now the name is just HSBC."  (The same thing reportedly happened with KFC.*)  There's something deeply weird—almost a kind of light Nineteen Eighty-Four effect—in having an initialism not mean the same thing anymore.  It's like the wiping out of disgraced political figures in Soviet photographs.
5. The past has no reality beyond what we grant it.  And it's not just that we wipe out what we don't like: we seem bothered, as a culture, by the mere fact of the past, threatened by the claims it seems to be making upon us.  Back to capitalism—maybe we're bothered because it's essential to the market and to consumerism that the old be annihilated altogether by the new, forever updated or replaced.  The idea that something might have some importance just by virtue of its having been around for a while (not to be confused with having some value based on a reputation) is practically blasphemy.
6. Back to politics (I just can't stay away)—isn't all this business relevant to a situation in which the Republican National Convention is suddenly about change, and John McCain (in spite of representing the party that has been shitting all over America for the last eight years, and in spite of voting with George W. Bush 90% of the time**) is going on about how he's going to change Washington?  Frankfurt's book on bullshit is relevant here, too.  Who cares whether we're in charge?  Who cares whether we're the ones responsible for what we're pretending now to oppose?  If it's politically convenient for us to say we fight the power, then sure! all right! we're fighting the power, too!

* Not, I hear, because they aren't legally allowed to call their food "chicken," which is the rumor, but because they don't want the word fried in their name in this more health-conscious era.

** These are McCain's own words, note.