Posts Tagged nostalgia
The Golden Age of Cinema
I swear, more and more, whenever I visit the cinema something goes wrong with the projection. Bad print, wrong ratio, whatever. I don’t know if it’s getting worse, or if it just seems that way now everyone has big TVs, 5.1 sound, and crisp digital copies waiting at home.
Even ignoring the soft focus and muddy sound of well-watched VHS, I can remember when anything seen outside of a cinema was inevitably cropped. Panned and scanned for 4:3 TVs. It meant faces of less important actors on the sides of the frame were split down the middle. Climactic Leone shootouts were butchered, turning wide shots of two men in the corners of the screen into one man, standing alone, staring at nothing while ominous music played.
I was working at a video store when the first trickle of widescreen VHS copies arrived – for ‘collectors’, of course. I was constantly explaining to customers that they weren’t missing anything under those black bars now at the top and bottom of the screen. In fact, widescreen meant they’d actually be seeing extra footage on the left and right! At least half the time they couldn’t be convinced. They didn’t want to ‘waste’ any of their TV.
And in Australia, watching TV was even worse. We’d get shows months after the rest of the world. One channel stopped playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer halfway through season two, a voiceover announcing that it was the season finale. (Did I say announcing? I meant lying. Lying!) Our networks would ignore the usual TV act breaks to stuff in commercials wherever they liked. When we got shows at all, they were played completely unpredictably: I remember scrabbling for tapes to capture the last two-thirds of shows like Homicide: Life on the Street as they bounced around in ever-changing late night summer slots.
Writing in The Guardian, Peter Preston said that time-shifting has ruined the ‘water-cooler moments’ of collective TV watching. “It sounds somehow empowering as the habit grows,” he says, “but it also leaves you feeling alone…” In the UK and US? Maybe. In the rest of the world, downloading means we can finally be a part of popular culture almost as it happens, and join in the subsequent conversations online.
There are always articles pointing out cinema’s quality is rapidly declining. Mark Harris, in his celebrated GQ piece ‘The Day the Movies Died’, said: “…put simply, things have never been worse.”
Let’s say he’s right. (He’s not, I don’t think, but let’s say he is.) With correct aspect ratios, and multizone DVD players, and cheap imports of foreign films, and TV full-season box sets, and tiny, downloadable subtitles… isn’t this still the best time in history to be a movie fan?
Where The Wild Things Are: After The Rumpus
I ended my short jmag review of Spike Jonze’s long-awaited Where The Wild Things Are with the following: “Even if you’re sick of handmade, golden-glowed nostalgia, you need to see Where The Wild Things Are. It’s not more pointless whimsy. It’s something else entirely.”
I thought I’d explain what the hell I meant.
Over at The Millions, Jeff Martin admitted that the film itself left him cold, but the trailer “remains to be a revelation”. He’s right: the first trailer for Wild Things is a thing of pure awe. Its combination of imagery and music has a voodoo-like power to make grown men burst into tears.
(Other men, I mean. Other men less manly than me.)
“I’ve come to think of the full-length film the way I think of those indulgent overlong director’s cuts that always seem to show up on DVD,” says Martin. “[Spike Jonze] has created one of the best (and certainly most expensive) short films in the history of cinema. And I, for one, am thankful.”
The first third of the movie was pretty much what I was expecting from that trailer. Maybe not packing quite as much emotive power, but still gorgeous, sad, and capable of generating near-nuclear levels of nostalgia. Max flees from the conflict of his home life, finds a boat, and travels to the island of monsters where he’s declared to be their king.
It’s what happened after the Wild Rumpus that surprised me. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but this isn’t a movie for children. It’s a movie about childhood, just like Scorsese’s King Of Comedy is about humour without being funny. That’s why adults should be less concerned about the movie scaring their kids – though, yeah, it probably will – and more concerned that it’ll bore them stupid.
As the film continues, Max finds that the same fears he faced at home have infected this new world, too. His escape into a fantasy world of giant monsters becomes more complicated; our attempt to retreat into some kind of warm, wild, uncritical nostalgia with him also fails. The movie seems to stall, overwhelmed with doubts. The promised fun and freedom evaporates, and Max is left desperately struggling to understand his place in this world, just like he was in the last.
In the words of Buckaroo Banzai: no matter where you go, there you are.
The first note I scribbled after coming out of the movie was this: “SADNESS IS UNAVOIDABLE”. (Sigh.) A little later, though, I began to think about superhero stories – the ‘grim and gritty’, sex-and-violence kind, usually seen as starting with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. In his book How To Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock points out that “comic books were now expected to tell stories for adults using the building blocks of children’s literature”.
Just like some think it’s wrong to, say, turn a goofy superpowered criminal called Doctor Light into a full-blown rapist for some ‘adult’ thrills, I see how turning a classic of childrens’ literature into a slow, difficult film about unavoidable sadness might be missing the point.
Did we need to see Maurice Sendak’s untamed monsters bursting into a flood of self-loathing tears? I don’t know. I just know I won’t ever forget it, and that’s enough for me.