Do you know who Errol Flynn is? No right or wrong answers. I’m just taking the cultural temperature of the room.
If you’re somewhere around my age (be kind), there’s a decent chance you do. Flynn was already dead by the time I was born, and his heyday as Hollywood’s resident swashbuckler was three decades behind him. No one ever introduced me to Errol Flynn. I just somehow knew who he was.
I started thinking about how strange it was that I knew who Errol Flynn was recently at the gym, when an acquaintance made an offhand reference to him. It landed immediately, without explanation, which got me wondering: Why the hell did a kid growing up in Queens in the 1970s know who a movie star from the 1930s was?
The answer, I think, is television. More specifically, television before choice. Television as it existed when you watched what was on because what was on was all there was.
For those who didn’t experience it, there once existed a terrifying technological limitation called “nothing’s on.” You turned on the television and discovered that none of the six or seven channels available to you were showing anything you particularly wanted to see. You then did something nearly unimaginable today: You watched one of them anyway.
Come to think of it, perhaps nothing has changed. I have spent untold portions of my diminishing lifespan scrolling through Netflix’s apparently limitless offerings before announcing, to ever-patient Lee Anne, “There’s nothing on.” Infinite choice may simply be a false dawn in the long dark night of nothing’s on. The difference is that when there were six channels, eventually you gave up and watched Errol Flynn.
I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood, Humphrey Bogart movies, and Marx Brothers movies, “The Honeymooners” and “The Twilight Zone.” Abbott and Costello met various monsters with surprising regularity. James Cagney was a gangster, Bela Lugosi was Dracula. Lillian Gish, Ethel Merman, Red Buttons—they were simply people one knew, people who might turn up as guest stars on “The Love Boat” long after their cultural moment had supposedly passed. None of this represented any particular precocity on my part. My family owned a TV.
I was undergoing what I’ve come to think of as an involuntary cultural apprenticeship. Nobody asked what I was interested in; the culture simply assigned the reading.
The strange thing about being a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s was how much of the earlier part of the 20th century was still lying around like old magazines. The past hadn’t yet been shuffled off to the Smithsonian. It was still in circulation.
Turn on the radio and you might hear Johnny Mathis followed by Buddy Holly followed by the Police. Johnny Carson would interview someone whose career had begun in vaudeville. Mel Blanc was still voicing Bugs Bunny, a character invented before Pearl Harbor.
This wasn’t cultural education in any intentional sense. Nobody assembled a curriculum. It was an accident of economics. TV stations had hours to fill, and old movies and syndicated television were inexpensive and battle-tested. Popular culture cannibalized its own history constantly because that history was sitting right there.
The result was that several generations inhabited the same cultural room. You could see it on the pop charts. In May 1972, Sammy Davis Jr.—a former child vaudevillian and Rat Packer who had been performing since the Depression—sat at Number 5 on the Billboard chart with “The Candy Man,” two spots ahead of the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice.” A couple weeks later, Davis went all the way to Number 1. The old fogey and the dangerous young rock band weren’t programming choices on separate SiriusXM channels. They were competing for the same ears.
And then, somewhere along the way, the room broke apart. Much has been written about the death of the monoculture, usually with the observation that we’ll never again have 100 million Americans watching the same television finale. This is generally treated as either tragedy or liberation depending on how nostalgic you’re feeling and whether you remember “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” being on four nights a week.
But something subtler disappeared with it: the mechanism by which the past kept intruding on the present.
The great paradox of our current cultural moment is that virtually everything is available and almost nothing is unavoidable (Taylor Swift, the president, and GLP-1s notwithstanding). A 20-year-old today can become an infinitely more knowledgeable Errol Flynn obsessive than I ever was. They can watch his movies, listen to podcasts about him, argue with strangers about whether Captain Blood is superior to The Sea Hawk, and presumably locate an Errol Flynn subreddit populated by 14 extremely committed people.
But they have to decide to do it. That’s the difference. I didn’t choose Errol Flynn. Errol Flynn happened to me.
The same goes for a thousand other bits of cultural information rattling around in my head. Some are useful: Orwell taught me to be suspicious of euphemism, Catch-22 gave me a name for a particular kind of institutional insanity, and Bugs Bunny provided a surprisingly durable introduction to classical music. Most decidedly are not. I could probably identify Don Rickles from his silhouette. This has so far produced no measurable benefit, economic or otherwise.
But collectively, all that useless knowledge amounted to a kind of cultural inheritance. The past remained visible because there wasn’t enough present to crowd it out. Now there is.
The internet eliminated scarcity. The algorithm eliminated much of the accidental encounter. We gained access to essentially the entire archive of human culture and simultaneously lost the necessity of bumping into any particular part of it.
And this isn’t a complaint about Millennials or Gen Z, who didn’t design the system any more than I designed UHF television or programmed “Donahue” in the middle of the afternoon. Nor am I convinced they’re less culturally literate. A 23-year-old may know astonishing amounts about Japanese animation, 1970s Nigerian funk, Soviet architecture, or some musical genre invented last Thursday whose name I would mistake for a pharmaceutical.
What has changed is the shape of that knowledge. Culture increasingly travels sideways through communities of interest instead of downward through generations. The archive is enormous. The canon is weak.
Maybe that’s good. The old monoculture reflected the tastes and prejudices of a relatively small number of gatekeepers, and plenty of voices couldn’t get into the room at all. Blowing up those gates allowed an extraordinary profusion of culture through.
But something was lost, too: not the gatekeepers, whom I don’t particularly miss, but the hallway everyone had to pass through.
I wonder what that means over time. Shared cultural memory requires more than preservation. It requires circulation. A thing can exist forever on a server somewhere and still effectively disappear. Infinite availability may be one of the most efficient ways ever devised to make things disappear. Nothing becomes obscure quite like being one of 50 million choices.
Which brings me back to Errol Flynn. Nobody killed him. He managed that largely on his own, dying of a heart attack at 50 after several decades of drinking, smoking, and generally conducting himself as though actuarial science were a personal affront. By the time Flynn died in 1959, his body was reportedly so battered that the autopsy revealed a host of ailments more commonly associated with a man considerably older.
But culturally, Flynn lived on. He’s right there today, available on demand. That’s precisely the problem with my title. Errol Flynn isn’t gone. You just don’t have to know who he is anymore. And someday, sooner than I care to contemplate, the same will be true of all the people I think everybody knows.
