Later, two stoned out hairy philosophers in a coffeeshop question whether media sources such as Scooby Doo and The Smurfs are actually being used as a tool for installing cultural programming. .
Most recently, Richard Linklater has introduced us to his latest film Boyhood, a story spread over 12 years of a young boy's life. Throughout the film, references are made to a number of pop culture films in an effort to provide chronological contextualization, including Dragon-Ball Z, Star Wars, and High School Musical. At one moment, in the film we see the one of the characters watching The Landlord. Today, online viral videos have been a global sensation, with more people watching viral videos than feature films. Later in the film, the main character confides in his father that the girl that he had liked had fallen short due to her lack of interest in Mason's favorite summer movies, Tropic Thunder, The Dark Knight, and Pineapple Express. As most cinephiles can express, cinematic compatibility is relatively critical, especially for those like myself, who hold cinema taste as a helpful rubric for guessing how closely I connect to most people. Later in the scene, father and son discuss the possibility of a Star Wars reboot. The scene was shot in 2008, yet here we are in 2015 preparing ourselves for a J.J. Abrams directed Star Wars project. .
Probably one of the most explicit deconstructions of the experience of watching motion pictures is during a scene in Slacker during a conversation between two gentlemen in a room full of television sets, VCRs, and VHS tapes. This was also one of the only scenes in the film that had a "set design" to it. One of the men even has an operating television set strapped to a backpack on his back. BackpackTV proceeds to pontificate on the "psychic power" and "utility" of the moving picture vs. real life, citing as an example, a time that he saw a man get stabbed, yet was frustrated he was unable to adjust hue or rewind or pause the event.
