When I was in my teens and twenties, with the advent of cable and VHS, I watched about two or three movies a day, usually at night after work or school, depending on where I was in life. One after another, over and over and over. That’s a lot of movie watching. Even if you lowball that figure to ten movies a week, that’s still over five hundred in a year and over five thousand a decade. So, like I said, I watched a lot of movies. It was important as I was getting to know the language of cinema, getting a feel for the history, gaining a recognition of the actors’ faces, the directors’ styles, the editors’ techniques, and everything else one associates with self-teaching the cinema. But inevitably, I slowed down. A few movies a week, maybe three or four, then two, and then, maybe one. Sometimes now, I don’t even watch a single movie in a week anymore (I’m excluding the movies I watch for TCM and its articles so there’s a bit of cheating with this but I mean movies I watch just for myself and not for assignments). I never thought that would happen. And when it did happen, I thought it was just me getting older, burning out but I was wrong. It was by design and the discovery came when I finally realized that I liked viewing movies better when they had more space between them.
Here’s something I’ve said more than a few times in my adult life: “Yeah, I saw that movie years ago but I don’t remember it now.” I thought maybe that was old age, at first, the creeping menace of “senior moments” invading and flushing out my cherished memories of the movies. But it wasn’t. It was the fact that, in my early movie viewing years, I had given myself mere minutes to think about the movie I had just watched, maybe a couple of hours, tops, before moving on to the next. By the time you’re ten movies removed from the one you watched just two days ago, you’re not spending a lot of time rolling that movie around in your head, you’re making room for new ones.
The problem was confirmed once I got myself down to one or two movies a week and reflected on them for the whole week, sometimes into the next if I didn’t watch anything else. I found myself slowly coming around to a movie, in my memory. My first impression may have been one of disappointment or boredom or frustration but once I thought about it enough, I came to love it. Another movie might seem entertaining and thrilling only to leave me empty every time I returned to it in my mind. When I was watching two or three movies a day, those first impressions were the only impressions for decades. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has revisited a movie I thought was good the first time around, thirty years ago, only to see it again and think, “Wow, this stinks.” Once you start saturating yourself, it’s harder to tell the good from the bad. Imagine sitting down at a table filled with processed foods, fast foods, freshly prepared foods, packaged snacks, gourmet foods, etc. Literally something from every level of quality on the daily menu and then, start eating. Eat everything, and don’t take any breaks. Take a bite of steak, followed by a potato chip, followed by a spoonful of ice cream, followed by a handful of peanuts, followed by a taste of creamed spinach, followed by a hard boiled egg, followed by… you get the point. Just keep going and, eventually, it all just kind of blends together and everything becomes a big vat of whatever the hell Mr. Creosote was eating in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. After taking 114 bites, someone asks you how was the poached salmon (it was the 63rd bite). How should you know, you had a malt ball just before it and a spoonful of broccoli in cheddar sauce after it. How was it? Well, you didn’t really stop to savor it, or even really give it a chance to be tasted on its own.
It may sound crazy, but I’m now convinced the best way to appreciate the art and entertainment of the movies is to not watch so damn many of them. When I see someone online proudly write that they’ve seen over 500 movies this year, I wonder if they’re really enjoying the memory of them at all. Sure, they’re enjoying (or hating) them in the moment, I don’t doubt that, but it’s the memory of the movie that so often makes it or breaks it for me. Two recent examples are Enemy, a movie that my fellow Morlock Kimberly listed among the year’s best, and I fully agree with her, and Live, Die, Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow. I enjoyed both while I was watching them (although “enjoy” seems like an odd word for Enemy but there it is) and each was the only movie I watched for several days before of after. The more time passed after watching Enemy, the better it became. I returned to it mentally again and again and, after a few days, returned to it literally and watched it again. As for the Tom Cruise sci-fi/action movie, I watched it and enjoyed it. I thought it did a good job with its premise (a violent sci-fi companion piece to Groundhog Day if ever there was one) but the more time passed, the less it meant to me. When I did think back on it, I started thinking how weak and dull and generic the attacking forces were, how uninvolved I was at the impending end of civilization, how the relationship between Cruise and Emily Blunt was so meaningless outside of the mechanics of the mission. Soon enough, I didn’t revisit it at all in my mind. I was done with it. But had I watched it and Enemy back to back with multiple other movies in front of and behind them, I might think back on both of them as equally successful enterprises. And they’re not. They’re absolutely not.
The best recent example for me is Upstream Color. When I watched it, I was so taken by it that I didn’t want to watch another movie for at least a couple of days, including my TCM assignments. I wanted that to be the only movie on my mind and, sure enough, I ended up rewatching it two more times before finally moving on to another movie. It grew for me as a movie because I allowed myself to savor it. Of course, I have the luxury of doing this because I’m not a paid film critic of current releases so I can watch at a more leisurely pace (and I swear, this explains why I am so often baffled at what so many critics think is good cinema, because they’re seeing hundreds of movies a year and it’s all becoming Mr. Creosote’s food vat to them). I don’t really trust my opinion of movies from my teens and twenties anymore. I was racing through directors’ entire catalogs in mere days, shooting past entire cinematic movements in a week, or trying to absorb the entire silent period in a month. It just didn’t work and in many ways, I wish I hadn’t done it now. I think I could have gotten more for less. I’d rather have one movie on repeat in my memory for a week than ten movies fly past my eyes in the same time frame. In Lust for Life, when Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) remarks that Vincent Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) paints too fast, Van Gogh quickly responds, “You look too fast!” Preach on, Vincent. Preach on.