How movies are aging with societal changes…and why that’s ok

When done right, a movie should pull an emotion, if not many, from you.

What a society will accept as ok today is not what it was 5 years ago. The same is said every 10 years, and as new generations are formed through their shared formative experiences. Just look at how we recycle fashion trends. What once was hip, became uncool, and now that drip is snatched or gucci or bussin whatever.

Movies should remain relevant for the time they were released or the time they were depicting while they were released. It shows how people and society have grown, changed, shrunk, or what was taking place at that time culturally better than any other medium of art if you know what you’re looking at and for, at least to me. They tell the story of our times a lot better than our blurred memories can recall.

Music plays a great soundtrack for that but films can tell the true climate. If you find something offensive today watching something made in the 70’s, that might just mean that you aren’t looking at it from the point of view of when it was released. What just took place or was taking place for the writers to be ok with putting that in there. You can still be offended and think something isn’t right about it, but to dismiss them means that one day we might forget how we got here.

With how fast today’s movies move in and out of theaters and into the back catalog of a streaming site, I don’t think the world looks at them the way we has cinephiles do. Movies used to be a night out for everyone. Even the video store was special. So much so that a whole family would go in, pick out their choices for the weekend, or “New Release Tuesday”, and someone might watch the same movie 2-3 times over the period that they rented them for.

I guess I just worry that one day, a film like ‘Taxi Driver’, might be looked down upon just because it depicts something that “wasn’t right” with how Jodie Foster’s Iris was depicted more than what the entire film was about. Just think in 50 more years, someone might look back and say that ‘True Romance’ has that scene that uses a slur and a studio apologizes and removes it. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Air Doll’ one day might be interpreted as misogynistic rather than the true loneliness one can feel. Even films from Ozu may one day been seen as that if we just dismiss for the sake of culture. ‘Home Alone’ for child endangerment. Etc. We should criticize, but just understand that what we criticize today may one day be the same things the future generations criticize about our favorite films that have come out in the last 5 years.

*(Also, no one cares what people watch in the same sense as no one really cares what I have to say. We still watch films because films are something that we connect with and have allowed us to see the world, different cultures, and how people handle tragedy, happiness, success and failure, all the while just sitting in a dark theater surrounded by strangers or alone on our favorite spot on the couch)