Do movies ''age'' or not?

I see my hastily scrawled post is aging... poorly.

All I know is I can really relate to those Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland movies!

Why, hardly a weekend goes by in my neighborhood when some group of teenagers isn't putting on a show down at the old barn to save their uncle's farm! And they get that old barn cleaned up so nice that, by the last number of the show, the inside looks like an 80 thousand square foot soundstage complete with multiple moving staircases enough to hold 100 high-kicking showgirls, an orchestra, a marching band and a swimming pool!

Invariably, that last number is done in blackface.

A lot of people in this thread seem to argue that “aging well” versus not “aging well” is mostly about whether the viewer can accept a movie looking or feeling different from a contemporary one (due to changing technology, filmmaking styles, etc…), when in my experience it has more to do with… well… this: once widely accepted political, cultural, social, sexual, racial, etc… mores that were once deemed acceptable (by an audience that was largely presumed to comprise of people who were straight, white, cis-gendered and with enough disposable income to buy a ticket), in many cases, while things like slavery and the fight for women’s suffrage were still in living memory.

So when I think of a movie not “aging well,”*movies featuring Black/Brown/Yellowface, racist caricatures, Lost Cause apologia / revisionism are the very first things that I think of. This includes stuff likes Swing Time (1936), Everybody Signs (1938), Babes in Arms (1939), Babes on Broadway (1941), Holiday Inn (1942) and Ziegfield Follies (1945) for race-changing makeup / minstrelsy and things like Judge Priest (1934), Gone with the Wind (1939), Dumbo (1941) and Song of the South (1946) for nakedly racist characters and damning historical revisionism. Heck, this even includes things like The General (1926), which changed a story about Union soldiers to one about “noble” Confederate soldiers, and I say this as somebody who genuinely loves The General. See also Rambo III (1988), which is all about the United States arming the Afghanis in the Soviet-Afghan War (a particularly politicized plot point that I can’t imagine that anybody would argue has “aged well” in light of ensuing US-led military actions in the Middle East).

Yeah. At times I feel like the world is aging poorly, not the old films.

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You're going to have to do a better job of explaining how Blade Runner manages to be such a successful example of cyberpunk where Ghost in the Shell is allegedly a failure, especially if you're going to argue that the latter only became relevant because it came out in the '90s (which is when the Blade Runner director's cut was released and really got people to re-evaluate it, so can we write that off as "beating off to depression" as well?). Also going to need to know how exactly you differentiate between when a film is "not for you" and when it's genuinely bad because it would appear that Ghost in the Shell is closer to the former than the latter.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

The original 1987 Top Gun aged about six months after its release...no re-watch appeal whatsoever.

It's not just about acceptance (evaluation), but is also problem of interpretation. As time goes by our ability to understand the artwork (as the original audience did) recedes.

The question asked by the OP is whether they "age" - full stop. And this is a deeper question than just preferences, but also speaks to our understanding.
This is not really unique to cinema. Things come in fashion. Things go out of fashion. Some ages are more moralizing than others.

It appears that you want to gesture to timeless moral truths in discussing black face and "lost cause" apologias. But what is the upshot? Are we morally bankrupt if we enjoy black and white movies? Should Captain Steel repent and reform? If so, how so? On the other hand, if we refuse enter into literary connections with the past we lose our connection with the past.

More than this, old people grew up with old movies. It's a part of their past. There is personal memory wrapped up in all of this. I suspect that as time goes on I will likely be regarded as a racist or a sexist (pick a label - there's a new one everyday) for liking movies like Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction in an uncomplicated manner. These films aren't guilty pleasures for me. They're just "pleasures." And no matter how they age for everyone else, I doubt that I will comply with new sensitivities, unless of course I find my wealth, health, and happiness seriously threatened by the new moral majority, in which case I will simply lie.

If non-black people dressing in black face is racist (and I'm not saying it's not), then wouldn't non-females dressing & making themselves up as women be sexist (or at least a form of sexual appropriation)?

Some would probably argue that, but I don't think it's the same. Yes it does have its roots in sexist culture. Women weren't allowed to get into acting, which is why in plays all the female characters were played by men. But today it's much more complex and our whole idea of gender identity has changed. Most of the time it's just meant to be in good fun rather than genuine hatred towards women. The humor either relies on the jarring vocal/visual contrast, or it's simply part of a sketch where the imitation might seem funnier if someone of a different sex does it, especially if done well. It's very common now as well for vise versa to happen, especially on Saturday Night Live. Kate McKinnon has gotten praised for her dead-on impersonation of Justin Bieber.

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Where's the conflict here?

The "aging well" argument is one I've heard many times, and my response to that is always the same: Why is "aging" automatically bad?

Why can't an 80's movie feel like the 80's? Why is it a problem that a time where something oldfashioned was all the rage would get used as a natural part of the plot? It's possible to get immersed into a story while still recognizing that today things might have played out differently. Movies aren't necessarily made so someone in the future can say "Well, thank God they predicted technology would evolve to a higher level and didn't use any anything that no longer is necessary". That doesn't make any sense, and you know many movies would be worse if they somehow had a time machine just so nothing ever gets dated (Which isn't possible anyway).

Imagine if Phone Booth, one of the examples used, just had a guy walking around talking on his phone instead. Similar premise, yet it somehow doesn't sound as exciting. 88 Minutes basically did this, and the plot became contrived and overcomplicated. Phone Booth is nice and simple, just a guy stuck in the booth fearing for his life.
What about all the classic love stories from the 40's and 50's where the leads risk separating from each other forever? Right now they could just be sending each other emails asking "Hey babe whats up?"

So while movies age, it's actually good that they age. We have a large spectrum of various types of filmmaking. If you switch from one decade to another, you'll find a lot of the rules have been changed. And that's exciting. It makes analyzing film much more fun. It gives me as a movie fan much more to enjoy. There are movies that are timeless, which will touch people's hearts no matter how old they get. But even those still follow traits of their time, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. At least not necessarily.

Agreed^

I saw the remake of Poltergeist (2015) not too long ago... I was curious how the concept could be improved upon since I thought the original was epic!

It seemed like the entire premise was regurgitated so that cell phones could be worked into the mix rather than JUST a television set.

The most egregious change though...

Zelda Rubenstein was a force of nature. One of the most unique voices in cinema, and her character Tangina was so endearing. And yes I read the spoilers, you couldn't even drag me across the ground to watch the remake.

I don't think that anyone said that aging is automatically bad.

The question is whether a film "aging" can be used as a metric for criticism of a film or, in the case of how most people actually talk about movies, whether you enjoyed or would recommend a film.

I think that the answer is absolutely yes, and people have given some good examples in this thread.

Certain racist/sexist/homophobic/etc attitudes have not aged well, for example. And I think that it's important to differentiate between portrayals of content and the attitude of the film toward that content.

The film Chloe Love is Calling You features many stereotypes about Black people. And in addition to these portrayals, the film's attitude toward these characters is that they are proof about the superiority of white people. In fact, the happy ending of the film is a woman discovering, much to her relief, that she is white and not Black. What casual viewer would enjoy this film? To whom could I even TALK about this movie, much less recommend it? It has not aged well. This isn't to say it's without interest in some ways.

Now, the same year that someone made a film where the climactic moment is a white woman being rescued from a voodoo sacrifice and then immediately being "scientifically proven" to be white, Yasojiro Ozu made A Story of Floating Weeds, Frank Capra made It Happened One Night, and WS Van Dyke made The Thin Man. While these films do still contain multiple aspects that have "aged", I don't think that the gulf between the goals and attitudes of the film and modern sensibilities is so great as to distract from enjoying the story.

Aging isn't automatically bad, but depending on the film and the viewer it can be a deal breaker.

No.


Historical context of what things mean matters. Black face has a specific historical meaning. And we all know what it is.


Also, even if a woman dresses up as a man, and even if they embodied the worst male stereotypes in their impersonation, while we can make arguments that these might be glib and unfair generalizations, they do not carry the same weight as doing so with female stereotypes. Power, and who holds it, matters in these conversations.

The last metric of evil. Power. Of course, looking to take down power are grasping after it in the same moment.

Maybe. For some. But that's also a quick and easy way to discount the struggle of the average person who is simply looking to have their life mean as much as the next person.

The average person, being part of the average (holding the largest amount of area under the curve), is in the largest demographic, typically the group in power.

As for struggle, we all have a struggle. Even Hitler had a struggle. He wrote a book about his struggle and named it as such. In the words of Public Enemy, "F*** your own thing if your own thing's the wrong thing." Ditto for your struggle, I think. But that returns us to the question of Pilate. What is truth? Now that one's a head scratcher, but we're not likely to solve it by envying the person who has a dollar more in their pocket or feeling like a fraud when we encounter the person who has a dollar less. Now, as a rule of thumb, it's not a bad idea to ask who has the power and who benefits and so on, but all of these are contingencies that suggest rules of thumb which are rather useless if we don't have a firm grip of a set of moral principles. At best, we will play an endless game of vilifying any group for temporarily being in the leadand unironically asking "What did the Romans ever do for us?"

The 'movie has aged', is a way to dismiss older movies when one doesn't agree with the film's social or behavioral messages. But why would agreeing or disagreeing with a movie's message have anything to do with the movie itself 'aging'.

It's like a film only appears to have aged if it doesn't suit the viewer's modern taste and belief system. Thus to them the movie's ideas are out of date with the way things are today. But then again old movies aren't about today, they are about yesterday and so reflect yesterday's social trends.

Let's take Birth of a Nation, has it aged due to it's racist message? There's still people today who agree with that message so that would make it's message still relevant as there are those who the film still speaks to...Not to mention the movie was condemned for it's racist message at the time of it's release. So today's majority viewpoint was present back then too, but certainly Birth of a Nation couldn't be said to 'have aged' at it's movie premiere.