Insert Well-Known Cultural Reference Here

Here's something to think about: does the obliteration phenomenon apply outside of the scientific realm?  More importantly, does it apply to culture?  (Maybe someone has already come to these conclusions and discussed them at length somewhere; I don't know.)

For those who are unfamiliar, the obliteration phenomenon is a term for when a paper, theory, or other work becomes so ubiquitous that it no longer is cited.  The example commonly given here is Einstein's Theory of Relativity.  The type of people likely to discuss things related to it are already all familiar with it.  Therefore, since everybody knows it, there is no reason for it to be cited.

Basically, to see where I'm coming from/getting at, I recently got into a discussion about movies.  Specifically, the catalyst for the discussion was Silent Hill (which I haven't seen, so I can not give my opinion on it), and early reports that the plot of the film made little sense to those who weren't already knowledgeable about the plots of the similarly-named video games.  From this, I brought up my theory that a film fails as a movie if it requires too extensive a familiarity with some other narrative work — especially if that work comes from another medium.

To give two examples: as much as I like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I feel it fails as a narrative work (although it may be said to succeed as art) due to the fact that the final part of the film makes no sense to those who have yet to read Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name.  Or, for a more modern example, I recall thinking the same thing about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when I saw it.

At this point in my film theory, I should point out that I feel there are exceptions; namely, if a film is part of a heavily-connected series, then it's permitted to require extensive knowledge of the previous films for it to make sense.  One wouldn't expect something like The Return of the King to keep everyone up-to-date on what happened in the previous films, as it's generally safe to assume that anyone seeing it has already seen the others.

But getting back to obliteration.  Furthering my views on this subject was the opinion that there were some works you could safely make extensive references to, because they have become so deeply ingrained in the public conscience that everybody knows them.  Take, for example, Moby Dick.  I've never read it; I've never seen a movie based on it; I don't even have a copy sitting on my bookshelf that I will one day get around to reading.  However, make a reference to white whales, Ahab, Ishmael, and so forth, and I will still immediately know what you are talking about.

That's not to say that this is limited to solely literature or "high brow" references.  For example, consider the first Star Wars trilogy.  It's probably safe to assume that people are at least generally familiar with them, even if they haven't seen them.  (Hell, I never saw any of them until well after I was legally able to drive, and I still knew the basics by that point.)  The same could probably be said about Batman, Superman, and Hamlet^* — no one's going to scream at you about spoilers if you mention that Hamlet's uncle killed Hamlet's father, that the murder of Batman's parents spurred him to become a vigilante later in life, or that Superman is in fact the last survivor of an alien race that resided on the planet Krypton.  These are things that everybody, including those who've never read or seen the works in question, likely already know.  The original works could conceivably disappear from existence, and it's possible that we could go on for ages before they were forgotten — they've become that familiar and engrained within the public conscience.

Of course, from this the idea comes the question: just what works could be considered to have become so familiar that the originals aren't even needed?  There was a book published in the 60s called Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without.  Although it supposedly never makes this point explicitly (I don't know, I haven't been able to find a copy of it yet), some interpretations of it take it to be making just that point — that these fifty works have been referenced, parodied, and re-imagined so many times that they've become familiar to even those who've never encountered the originals.  However, given that it was published almost 40 years ago, do the works they cite still fall into this category?  And, regardless of if they do or not, what new works — as well as those in other media — could be added to this list?

It's something to think about though: imagine what would happen tomorrow if you woke up, and suddenly all the pages of every copy of (for example) Alice's Adventure in Wonderland ever published were blank.  What effect, if any, would this have on those making references and allusions to it?

* Batman, Superman, and Hamlet — I wonder if anyone's ever referred to those three in the same sentence before?