Did the movie change, or did I? Thoughts on films I used to love

It’s a no-brainer, of course. The movie DOESN’T change, because it can't, but everything around it does. When I watch something out of the 1920s or ‘30s or ‘40s, the surrounding culture is so unfamiliar it’s like the Twilight Zone. But what about movies made in my own living memory, that I remember seeing in the theatres or maybe on a VHS tape?

I’m talking about the ‘80s. I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff about the ‘80s lately, and people wax so nostalgic about the decade that it makes me wonder if I lived on the same planet. Of course there were sweet times, going to the Blockbuster to rent a movie, then sitting around the TV with the family, eating popcorn, laughing and crying together – when these days, most families don’t even sit down to dinner together. Everyone cobbles together a semblance of a meal, and eats it alone in their bedroom while watching something streaming on their phone. Even DVDs are considered outdated dinosaurs that no one buys.

It WAS different. There was no internet, and high-tech meant having a VCR and maybe more than one TV in the house. Computers were the villains in science fiction movies, just warm-ups for the ultimate evil computer, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

They were foreign and mechanical and not to be trusted. They weren’t human, so to put them in charge of things was foolhardy at best. Now, you can’t get away from them. Your refrigerator talks to you, even if your mother doesn’t. But this isn’t about that. It’s about three movies  from the ‘80s that I just watched over the past 3 nights.

 

The first one was a Sherlock Holmes movie called The Seven Per Cent Solution. Right off the top, the casting immediately made me miss Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. THIS Holmes was a drug addict going through agonizing cocaine withdrawal, supervised by no less a figure than Sigmund Freud. Really, it was a completely absurd premise that didn’t quite come off (though Alan Arkin made an interesting, if highly improbable Freud. I’ll watch anything with Alan Arkin in it, he had such a knowing look and the sexiest eyes of any man born).

I guess we just kind of suspended our disbelief in these things, as the plot got more and more absurd. Back then it was seen as a sophisticated thriller. But Nicol Williamson sweating and thrashing and raving seemed almost comical, way over the top, and Robert Duvall as Watson – wait, ROBERT DUVALL as Watson?? It was ridiculous casting, and Duvall could scarcely disguise his Texan accent as he strained to look and sound like an English gentleman.

But back in the ‘80s, cocaine abuse was just coming out of the closet as a really evil thing, rather than the harmless fun it seemed to be in the ‘70s. Drug addiction in a classic literary figure was seen as something really novel and original, even daring. We were more willing to buy this far-fetched stuff due to a kind of – what, innocence? It seems like it, in retrospect. Maybe just ignorance. But even more formally-presented dramas are now kind of hard to swallow, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend.

With great anticipation, I watched  A Room with a View, a movie I absolutely adored when it first came out, loving it just as much when I saw it several more times on VHS tape. This time, well – I WAS charmed by the first half-hour or so, maybe just due to nostalgia. But the best moment in it – dashing George Emerson sweeping up prim Miss Lucy Honeychurch and giving her a ferocious kiss in a field of barley – came in the first twenty minutes or so. It was all downhill from there. Maggie Smith as Lucy’s chaperone made me want to SCREAM, her character was so over-the-top and gratingly annoying. Judi Dench as the “lady novelist” was even worse, just ridiculously overstated, a stereotype I was willing to buy before, but this time - .

And it was LONG. That was the biggest difference of all. When I first watched it an astonishing forty years ago, I didn’t want it to end. This time I kept looking at my watch. It just sort of lumbered along, and it felt stuffy, like the atmosphere in all those ornate parlours it took place in. Denholm Elliot was almost worse than the prissy, twittering ladies we were supposed to find funny. His “yes, and yes, and YES” line embarrassed me. Of course we knew the whole thing was careening towards a highly-unlikely happy ending, but this time I was kind of grateful for that last scene of George and Lucy making out  like bandits in their magical pensione in Florence.

All in all, the best part by far was Kiri te Kanawa singing a glorious aria by Puccini while the lovers kissed in the field of barley.  But even at that, Renee Fleming did it better. 

But the third one. Oh, God, the third one. It was called Lovesick, and I do remember seeing it on TV, feeling it was amusing at least. It had the then-wildly-popular Dudley Moore in it (playing a psychiatrist who was, of course, far more disturbed than his patients), and like a lot of women I found him appealing in a bringing-out-the-maternal-urge way. Speaking of Sigmund Freud, this time he was played by Alec Guinness, and he was just awful, stiff, boring, contrived, spewing horribly dated psychoanalytic cliches.

Like Humphrey Bogart materializing to Woody Allan in Play it Again, Sam, Siggy kept appearing to the Dudley Moore character, who was of course called an “analyst” (and whatever happened to analysts? Now they’re called therapists, I guess). This ersatz Freud spouted intellectual theories about why Dr. Dudley had sexually engulfed a vulnerable young patient, treating it more as an amusing mid-life crisis than something that should rightly be against the law.

 And all this was supposed to be funny.

It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. Why didn’t it occur to me before how disgusting and even disturbing his behaviour was, skulking around behind the scenes at the theatre where she worked, following her home, breaking into her apartment when she was out so he could read her diary, and generally acting like a disgusting creep. And, of course, she fell for him. Hard.

The first time I saw it, I remember loving Elizabeth McGovern for some reason. I found her sweet and appealing and had a little girl crush on her, thinking she was adorable. This time I could not even imagine how I ever reacted that way. She just wasn’t any good. Her gawkiness fell flat, and her innocent routine didn’t hold up at all. She had strange eyes that looked almost feral. When the two of them were walking together, McGovern TOWERED over Dudley in a way that was disturbingly like watching a mother and child.

The thing just did not play. Is it because we’re far less tolerant of creepiness in men, in trying to find comedy in a situation like hiding in the woman’s shower while she made out with another man in the next room? (Ewwwwwwww!)

Then, of course, she turns on the shower, and he turns it off, and she turns it on. . . then she discovers him crouching like a criminal in her bathtub, and goes all smiles and gooey affection. Then, of course, they immediately have sex. I barely got through this one, nearly shut it off several times, but had the thought that this was the third ‘80s film I had watched in 3 nights, and that this might Mean Something. Not sure what, except that what was charming and romantic then was just kind of offensive, weak, even dull. 

The eighties just don’t play well for so many reasons. Maybe acting has changed. I don’t know, because acting doesn’t exist any more – it’s all superhero garbage, Lord of the Rings 9 and stuff like that. In the 1990s, I actually went to the movies once a week, and most of them were watchable, enough, if not always worth the price. I have to confess I can’t think of too many examples. It was just something I did, usually alone, part of my weekly routine. Sometimes the popcorn was the best part.

So the options are: the films changed; the culture changed; I changed. The latter two are pretty obvious. I’m no longer entertained by caricatures and people woodenly trying to bring historic figures to life. Alan Arkin was cute and appealing, as always, but bore no resemblance whatsoever to Sigmund Freud. Nicol Williamson shouldn’t have bothered, and Robert Duvall. . . But it seems that movies in the’80s were trying to sell us something, something that now seems so unpalatable that I can’t even imagine why I loved them to begin with. What was it? Caricature over character? Cliché over reality? Contrivance that we can’t get past?

 I just wasn’t buying it. All three of them were disappointing, and oddly confusing. Was I watching the same movie?  It’s funny, because I can watch something from literally 100 years ago (Harold Lloyd, anyone?) and love it every bit as much as the first time. But I didn’t live through those times.

Simpler times, or just more blinkered times? Why did people think an emotionally screwed-up psychiatrist having steamy sex with a vulnerable young patient was charming and fun? I’m beginning to think of the ‘80s as a cultural Dark Ages rather than the warm and cozy time people keep talking about. We seem to be missing something we never had in the first place.