I find it fascinating how knowledge and context can slip away and vanish from cultural knowledge. This has been demonstrated with YouTube reactors and 1973’s The Exorcist.

In the film Father Lankester Merrin and elderly priest and archeologist played by a 40 something Max Von Sydow repeatedly with shaky hands takes tiny white tablets that he carries with him everywhere.

No audience member in the 70s need a word of exposition to understand the meaning those actions. Merrin suffers from severe heart disease and takes nitroglycerin tablets to treat his heart.

And I can’t think of a single YouTube reactor that intuitively understood what the filmmakers communicated when Merrin took his pills or what was being established for the film’s climatic final act.

Times change, culture moves one, and what was common knowledge to one generation is a mystery to another. It makes me wonder what I am missing from stories, movies, and books from previous generations. What did they take as universally understood that passed me by without any impact? What are we creating today so certain of our intention and meaning that future generations will misunderstand or fail to notice at all?