Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I enjoy recent Hollywood movies less and less. Movies I watch because they are in genres or franchises I love--like The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus or Skyfall--continue to impress, but other movies usually leave me uninterested. Meanwhile, I’ve been increasingly drawn to classic movies. I eventually realized that this was because the experience of older movies is multilayered in a way that new movies can’t provide.

The most obvious level of experiencing an old movie is the immediate experience based on its content, the way you would experience any movie. You follow the story, identify with characters, marvel at special effects, get swept up in the score, admire the performances, and so on.

One old movie that captivated me recently was Gaslight (1944). The fragile Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a devilishly tall-dark-and-handsome smoothy and the two move into her childhood home. However, she soon begins--so it would seem--to misplace items, forget appointments, and notice strange phenomena that no one else does, such as the lights dimming. Her husband, increasingly exasperated with her hysteria, suggests she is going crazy. But is she? Isn’t there something suspicious about her husband’s behavior? Isn’t it almost as if he is orchestrating her episodes for some purpose we cannot yet guess?

The movie provides plenty of excitement simply through its content. You are drawn deeper and deeper into Paula’s emotional unraveling, you are engrossed by Bergman’s performance (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), you come to loathe the villain for his villainy, you wonder if the young detective will figure it all out in time, and you are on the edge of your seat until the denouement. At this level of experience, this old movie provides nothing more than and just as much as a good thriller from recent years.

But we experience the classics on another level that we cannot experience recent movies: From our standpoint today, we experience them as representatives of the past.

One need go no further back than the 1980s--say The Breakfast Club (1985) or Pretty in Pink (1986)--to begin feeling out-of-time, but then to watch Saturday Night Fever (1977) or The Hustler (1961) or The Seven Year Itch (1955) is to feel increasingly as if you are in a foreign land. By the time you reach the 1940s and 30s, you are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only in reverse, moving from Technicolor to a bizarre and magical world of black and white. Watching silent films is like peering at another planet through the grainy and flickering lens of some queer, lighted telescope. Can these people up there on the screen really be members of the same human race I am used to? They look and behave so differently!

Every time I watch The Wizard of Oz, I wonder why no one talks like Judy Garland anymore. Women with that particular accent are common in older movies, but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that in my lifetime. To take another example, I always find it odd in the MGM Marx Brothers’ movies how they’re a weird mish-mash of genres--like vaudeville--with slapstick next to musical numbers next to drama and so on, as if film was viewed as an omniverse of previously existing art forms. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the prosecution raises as an example of Laura’s moral laxity how she moves when she plays pinball. Anatomy of a Murder is a gritty movie even today, but how quaint that pinball and how one plays it could be seen as dangerous and sinful! These are all examples of how a movie can stand out for characteristics that have passed into the past.

Seen across the gulf of time, the classics are very strange.

The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.

A good example is Morocco (1930), which I watched just a couple days ago for the first time. In an early scene, Marlene Dietrich performs in a nightclub. She’s dressed in a men’s tuxedo. The quiet that descends over her audience immediately casts over you the viewer a sense for the gender roles being toyed with. When she flirts with a lady in the audience and even plants one on her lips, its thrilling and shocking today just as it would have been back in 1930 when the movie first screened. It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen James Franco and Sean Penn kiss in Milk (2008) or Scarlett Johansonn and Penelope Cruz kiss in Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008). By then, the old dominant ideas of gender and sexuality, while still not entirely gone today, had long been played with in the public arena, sometimes to the point of boredom. The scene in Morocco is exciting now because it was exciting then.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood movies today are somehow inferior, only that because they are recent they lack levels of experience that movies acquire after having aged for a while. Next on my list is Notorious (1946). More Ingrid Berman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I expect it will be engaging on all three levels of experience.