It always bugs me when I go to my local Barnes & Noble. It’s nice and all, but they put the movies and music section upstairs. Thankfully, there’s an escalator for me to drag these tired bones over to, throw them onto, and narrowly avoid foot amputation at the top landing. As soon as I get off the rising steps of death, I hear the laughter of two girls coming right from where I was heading – the wall marked “The Criterion Collection Sale – 50% off!”
I love a movie sale. Even so, I haven’t really been into Criterion. If you’re unfamiliar, they’re a boutique physical media label with a stellar reputation. They take movies they deem important to the history of cinema and lovingly pore over them to create as pristine a copy as possible. They’re proud enough of their work to charge about forty bucks for a single movie on blu ray. Box sets often go for two or three times that. I was there for one reason: to procure a copy of Lady Snowblood. Sure, even at half-off it was still twenty dollars, but that beats paying forty. And for some reason, I just have to have it. Now. Us collectors get those kinds of itches from time to time. So I mosey on over and can’t help but hear the conversation the girls are having. They’re enjoying themselves while talking about movies. Every sentence was followed by shared laughs that fed into their next bit of dialogue.
They were mocking some of the movies in Criterion’s carefully procured collection.
I loved it.
They seem to be operating under the same misconception lots of people do; the people at Criterion only pick the greatest movies of all time for their collection. Remember, I said they pick important movies. Important movies are not always great, or even good. With that frame of mind, these young ladies spend a lot of time pointing and saying stuff like, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is Criterion? Right.” They poked similar fun at Fantastic Mr. Fox, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Tootsie, and a few others.
Instinct might lead us to immediately want to protect the honor of these movies, or others we love that someone else disparages. I’m a fan of all of those movies in the previous paragraph, for varying reasons and of varying degrees. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that these young ladies showed a knowledge and appreciation for the art of cinema often missing from most people of any age. They’re opinions may differ from mine, and honestly I don’t know that they do. What is clear is that they had seen these movies and formed opinions and, on some level, placed them within their larger understanding of movie history. They clearly invested time in movies made before they, and possibly their parents, were even born, giving their impromptu castigations more weight. Perhaps, the most important aspect of their little gab-fest is that the movies they were talking about were from a wide range of genres. Whether or not they articulated their thoughts the way you or I would, these two had clearly done their homework.
Most people never do the type of work they’ve already put in. Most identify one to three genres of film they like and get almost all of their movie experiences from them. Things they watch outside of their comfort zone are usually in deference to someone else. They’ll watch something on a date, or at someone else’s house they wouldn’t normally bother with, but when given the choice they stick with what they know they will like.
I use my own family as evidence.
I’m the oldest person in my house; the youngest of my three “children” is seventeen. She and I will watch pretty much anything, genre-wise. She loves stuff from the 1980s, but I’m still working on getting her to watch more things older than that. And forget it if it’s black and white. Still, I can put on any type of movie, from anywhere in the world, and she’s more than willing to watch it. Often, she’s seeking things out on her own that surprise me. The consensus in the house is that we watch “weird stuff.” My other two children, a boy and girl, have chosen their genres, and mostly stick with them. If I put on something that doesn’t fit their well-defined tastes, they run for the hills. My wife is the most interesting case. She has picked her genres and sticks with them when left to her own devices. Here’s where it gets odd. If I ask her to watch movies with me that don’t fit into those genres, she’ll decline and we’ll pick a different film or she’ll go do something else. However, if I am in the middle of watching one of those movies she thinks she won’t like and she wanders into the room, she’ll join me and get really into it. This is especially true of horror, which she swears she can’t stand. She claims they give her nightmares, but I’ve seen no evidence of this in twenty-two years of holy matrimony.
My point is most people like what they like and try to stick to it. In the case of the young ladies at Barnes & Noble and my youngest daughter, an opposing strategy is at work. They treat film itself as a genre and seek out new things to like within it. They know that even though the last ten movies of a certain genre disagreed with them, the next one may become one of their all-time favorites. Isn't that reason enough to watch anything you can put your eyeballs on?