I have never gotten used to the sensation of walking out of a movie theater into blasting daylight.
It's more than disorienting; it seems to have a moral component, a wrongness to it. This is what my mother might call a "personal" problem; there's something in me that feels guilty about going to the movies in the daytime even when it's my job to watch movies. (I am evolved enough to be neurotic.)
But maybe there's something deeper too; maybe there's something dangerous in a too-swift transition between the immersive illusion and the hot asphalt of the parking lot. Like a deep-sea diver surfacing too quickly, the emergent moviegoer risks the bends. Maybe we need a decompression period, a little time to digest the dream we've just consumed, to acclimate to the idea of the coming ordinariness of the rest of our lives.
I watch a lot of movies in the daytime, even in the morning. Last week I started a series of screenings for members of the Lifequest of Arkansas adult education series. The movies start at 9 a.m., and we're out before noon. I have to fight through the film- and darkness-induced hangover and spend the rest of the day in the office. I type and read and go to meetings, attend to all the vaguely adult obligations that accrue from which movies are supposed to provide an escape. I'm not saying it's difficult. I'm saying it's weird.
Movies, like vampires and other phantasms, more properly belong to the night. They should be watched after sundown, after shadows have overtaken the streets and scrimmed our view. You should be released from a movie gently, into a dark-cushioned world. This is how we used to watch them, back before watching them became a professional endeavor, when I wasn't compelled to think about what I might say about them in a 700-word report. I get nostalgic for the movies watched that way, the way they were meant to be watched.
But nostalgia is a false memory, a longing for an idealized past that never really existed. What probably mattered more than the movies themselves was the circumstances in which I watched them. After you've seen 300 or 500 or 5,000 movies (I've reviewed nearly 5,000 of them) you still haven't seen them all, but you can't plead innocence or ignorance to the form's conventions. You invariably become more discriminating.
Meanwhile, Hollywood movies are looking to appeal to a wider global audience. As they get bigger and splashier, they get more overt--explosions and computer-generated images apparently cut across cultural borders. They get broader and blander. They get worse.
Recently in an interview with the British newspaper The Independent, Dustin Hoffman said he thought movies were worse now than at any time in his 50-year career. He also offered that he thought television is the best it has ever been.
I smiled when I saw that the Onion AV Club had responded to these comments by photoshopping Hoffman's head onto an image from The Simpsons, one of a newspaper photo of Grandpa Abe shaking his fist at the sky under the headline "Old man yells at cloud."
Certainly a lot of good movies are being made these days, and digital democratization has made it possible for anyone with some fairly easily obtainable skills and a thousand dollars to make movies of their own. (Most of these movies are pretty bad, but give enough monkeys enough typewriters and you'll probably get something interesting sooner or later.) And Hoffman could be supporting visionary independent projects rather than cashing paychecks for lending his talents to Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, the Focker films and Kung Fu Panda shorts.
Still, while there was plenty of junk in the cinemas when Hoffman was doing The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy, I agree with him. The movies are not what they used to be.
They have always been crassly commercial endeavors, assembled and executed mostly by people who, if they thought of art at all, saw it as a pleasant addendum to their business plan. Certainly there have always been those who meant to make them meaningful, who meant to tell stories that mattered to people in the same way that great novels and paintings and symphonies could matter, but the truth is that movies have always been steered by committees and realized by compromise. No matter what the contract says, no director has anything like complete creative control; every film is subject to luck, tethered to the limits of its least contributors. Sometimes people like me talk about "auteurs" as though these mythical creators actually exist, and are not just convenient fictions for us to credit or blame.
Still, I hold out for my romanticized era; the early 1970s, when I was first learning about the movies and when I swear they really were better at modeling credible human psychology than these dumb, overt pre-sold blockbusters that are crowding more human-scale projects out of the pipeline. For me, the Golden Era ended with Jaws and Star Wars and the '80s films that so many of my friends cherish; E.T., The Breakfast Club, The Goonies seem silly and slack, enjoyable perhaps but lacking in grit and guts. There's an earnestness to the mainstream Hollywood cinema of the '80s that feels facile compared to what I will forever think of "my movies."
Similarly, although I love a lot of movies made before I was born--when asked for a Top 10 list my brain immediately flips to The Searchers (1956), Citizen Kane (1941), The Third Man (1949), and Touch of Evil (1958), with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, released when I was a few months old--I don't genuinely love them the way I do the movies that were in theaters when I first started going to theaters.
While some of these movies--like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which was one of the first movies to which I paid any real attention--deserve affection, I admit to feeling sentimental about oddities like The Green Slime (1968), a cheap Japanese-American co-production that eventually provided fodder for the pilot episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the terrible campy Matt Helm movies that starred Dean Martin as a James Bond-like super-spy. We are especially susceptible to the pop culture we're exposed to between the ages of 10 and 13; most of us genuinely believe movies, music and TV shows were never better than when we were 12 years old.
Jaded as we are, we still chase the dragon we encountered in our youth. Some of us even keep plunging into the dark to watch colors dancing on a wall. It's not the same. The movies have changed. And so have we.
Stupid cloud.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 07/12/2015