This is an observation that the Red Letter Media guys have made over the years, that contemporary filmmakers seem to believe that simply making a reference your audience understands to be a reference is somehow inherently entertaining. But why? The massively successful Spiderman: No Way Home was essentially two and a half hours of “hey, remember Spiderman? Remember that other Spiderman? Remember Dr. Octopus? Remember when Willem Dafoe said that line? Remember? Huh?” The nadir of this style of mythmaking may be Ready Player One, where beloved nerd references keep wandering onscreen for no discernible purpose. (“Hey, the Iron Giant! He’s here, for some reason!”) That movie and the book it’s based on are a firehose of stuff you remember that you liked before. But while we might feel a twinkling of emotion when we encounter those references, we do so because those movies and shows were actually good, were capable of wringing emotional resonance out of us themselves. Today’s reference media attempts to cut the line by borrowing that resonance from the past. It’s a sad statement about our power to create meaning in fiction and, if nothing else, will inevitably lead to diminishing returns.
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