Back in August of 2014, my friend Kevin shared through Pocket a NY Times column by film critic Dan Kois entitled “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables”. You should read the entire piece, but the gist of it is summarized in this excerpt:
“As I get older, I find I’m suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables, no matter how good they may be for me… Part of me mourns the sophisticated cineaste I might never become; part of me is grateful for all the time I’ll save now that I am a bit more choosy about the aspirational viewing in which I engage.”As a film critic, Kois was mainly referring to the bourgeois ‘vegetables’ of his chosen vocation – the often slow-paced, cerebral, sinuous movies that professional critics absolutely adore but which hold little appeal to the average Joe. In this regard, Kois’s column is a continuation of the broader, unsolvable societal debate over the value of highbrow vs. lowbrow art – a debate that pops into the cultural consciousness whenever, say, Beck is awarded a Grammy over Beyonce. As the latest chapter of this debate, Kois’s column is excellent, but it’s primarily targeted towards an audience of fellow film critics, cinephiles, and the High Culture-inclined (‘snobs’).
It did get me thinking about ‘cultural vegetables’ though, and inspired me to make my own grocery cart of cinematic Movies for the Masses. If the vegetables of the Hollywood food pyramid are flicks like Citizen Kane and La Dolce Vita, then Star Wars and Die Hard are the proteins, Schindler’s List the carbs, Mean Girls the sweets, and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (rather appropriately) the Dollar Menu cheeseburgers after a weekend bender. Eat them all in balance, and you’ve got a well-educated, diabetes-inducing, quintessentially American cultural diet. Think of this exercise as my attempt to codify the movies that ought to be in E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, except I’m approaching it from a purely memetic and observational viewpoint rather than a normative or prescriptive one.
Methodology:
The first and foremost criteria for selection is, “What movies which, if I told you I hadn’t seen them before, would your response be, ‘Dude, I can’t believe you haven’t seen [movie]! We have to rectify that situation right now!!!’” In other words, these movies are cultural expectations because of some mixture of cultural ubiquity, memorable quotes, cinematic notoriety, that contemporary ‘you-gotta-watch-this-in-theaters’, unforgettable scenes, or meme-generating potential (probably the most important factor nowadays).
Criteria that definitely boost a movie’s ranking: IMDB Top 100; IMDB Audience Top 100; Sight and Sound Poll Top 100; Rotten Tomatoes Top 100; being listed in one of AFI’s 100 Years… Categories; being selected for preservation by the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”; being a popular cult film; winning several Oscars; ending the year as a highest-grossing film; being included in a Grantland ‘Greatest of’ list; being a movie that I find myself re-watching every few months because its scenes are THAT good. Note that this list isn’t always synonymous with the highest-grossing films of the year unless those films also had an enduring cultural impact. I don’t think anyone will be dropping Shrek 2 1 references in 2025.
To compile these movies, I manually scanned each year’s page (e.g. “2007 in film”) on Wikipedia. Anything that caught my eye went into a Word file. This process took several hours. I try to stick to five movies per year, because that’s a nice, round number, and the relevance of movies after that number start to dwindle rapidly. But consider this more of a set of guidelines than a rule when there’s a worthy sixth- or seventh-place finisher.
I haven’t personally watched all of these films myself. In fact, that’s partially the purpose of this post—I searched for a list of movies that are essential to understanding American culture 2. Finding none, I decided to create my own based on my own life’s experiences and observations. So I may be missing some movies, but in general I like to think I have a pretty good knowledge of the sources of our pop-cultural tropes even if I haven’t seen the films from which they originated.
Make no mistake: this list is targeted towards, and largely sourced from, the views of the Millennial generation. That’s why movies like Mean Girls are highly-ranked. It certainly won’t stand the test of time 3, but as a vehicle of culture in the here-and-now and the next few decades, it’s ubiquitous.
In keeping with the dietary theme, I classified these movies by the food pyramid.
- Carbs = dramas or ‘airplane movies’
- Proteins = action/adventure
- Vegetables = highbrow movies
- Fruits = scifi/horror/fantasy
- Sweets = romance/comedy
- Fats = lowbrow movies
- Mac and Cheese = children’s movies
Next up, the list itself.