Tonight, in prime time, TCM airs the 1977 Steven Spielberg classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a movie I excitedly saw on opening weekend in 1977 and still remember how much I liked it. In fact, I remember liking the whole experience. For instance, I have vivid memories of standing in line, for a long while, and looking at one of the promotional standees in the lobby describing the three kinds that are alluded to in the title (read all about it here, if you so choose). Years later, watching it on cable and VHS and then DVD, I still loved it. Then I merely liked it. I’m still in that place and I still struggle over whether it went from love to like because of over-viewing or a growing familiarity with the filmmaker that clouded previous movies in his canon. And does that happen with others? And why do some movies fall out of favor while others elevate to levels not even imagined upon first viewing? I don’t know but I’m going to talk about it anyway because it’s a problem I’ve had for years and I suspect I’m not the only one who has it.
Back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movie itself is, to me, still one of the finest examples of science fiction of the seventies. Like I said, for a long time I loved it but over the years, as I grew more accustomed to, and more irritated by, Steven Spielberg’s cinematic shorthand, I began to carry that irritation over to the movies by him that I once loved. Spielberg is a director I generally have a lot of respect for and though I’m not a big fan of a lot of his movies, I think he’s got one hell of a feel for action and adventure and when I watch something like Raiders of the Lost Ark again or Jurassic Park, I don’t think another director could have done them better. But his shorthand – the zoom in on a character as the music swells before showing the reveal, for instance, or the reiteration and/or underlining of an emotional moment – is something I grow weary of. It doesn’t kill the movie for me but it does make it feel smaller. So when I see the trademarked zoom on Richard Dreyfuss as the music swells before the reveal of Devil’s Mountain, I feel an immediate sense that I’m watching the same old, same old. Granted, most of Spielberg’s shorthand was developed in this time period so it’s not like I blame him for the early stuff, just that as a result of seeing it so much over the course of his career, it diminishes even the earlier work for me because now I see it in a new light, knowing what it became. And that’s all on me, obviously, not him. It’s like finding out something bad about someone you previously liked or thought was a good person and now every past encounter is tainted with a new way of seeing it.
This happens to me with a lot of directors who hang on to a visual style for a long time. Martin Scorsese quickly tracking the camera down a hall or room or bar until he arrives at his subject, done in both Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, seemed fresh and innovative in 1973 and 1974 but by the time we got to Goodfellas and he was still doing it, even though I love that movie, it started to feel stale and, as a result, his earlier work started to have that same feeling. It’s not that Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg did anything wrong here, of course, it’s that I started to inject my own fatigue with their styles into their earlier works where those styles were developed. And, of course, that changed the way I saw them. So far, I’m just talking about directorial style fatigue. What about when the movie itself just doesn’t seem like the same movie you saw 10 or 20 years ago and it has nothing to do with the director and everything to do with the direction you’ve grown in?
When I saw A Clockwork Orange way back in the late seventies, a few years after its initial release, I thought it was great. I liked other Stanley Kubrick movies but for a young, cynical youth, A Clockwork Orange felt edgy and radical. Later on, watching it again, I found it seriously lacking in substance and found that the final chapter of the book, the missing chapter, as it’s known, left out of many editions, where Alex speaks as a more mature adult, looking back on his wild youth with embarrassment and regret, added a dimension the movie was missing. Also, watched again just a few years ago, the movie seemed curiously sloppy for a Kubrick movie. The mood and pacing shifts awkwardly throughout the movie, giving us comical cartoonish scenes, as when Alex beds two girls he picks up at the mall shown double time to the William Tell Overture, followed by straightforward brutal action, as when Alex is himself water tortured by his former friends. And the ending now seems shallowly flippant. At this point, I’d have to rank it as my least favorite Kubrick of all. Thirty years ago I would have ranked it near the top.
Finally, age is always a big factor with these things (and partly to blame with my shift on A Clockwork Orange) but here I mean that what is important to us as youths may shift dramatically as adults. So when I watched a movie like The Breakfast Club way back in the eighties, much younger than I am now, I thought those kids had the right idea in dealing with their problems and that principal was such a jerk. Now, oh boy has that changed! Seriously, I now see five extremely whiny kids and a principal who can’t believe this is his job and his life. He’s also the only interesting character in the movie for me at this point. I’d much rather learn his backstory than listen to those five whiners for even another minute.
Beyond that, though, I rarely have a beloved movie from childhood or my teens or twenties turn into a reviled movie later. I may not love it like I once did but I can’t think of any films I loved outright that I later hated. I do, however, have dozens and dozens of films that have changed for me over the years. Movies that started out one way and thanks to age and time, ended up another. Of course, the movies are the same, unchanged and committed for life to one set of flickering images (unless you’re a Star Wars movie, of course). But we change and so our perceptions change. We should all be forced to review every movie we love thirty years later to understand how we’ve grown or if we’ve grown at all. Without changing a frame, the same movie we once loved but now only like, or have grown tired of, can tell us a lot about ourselves.