Do Young People Watch Old Movies?

Today it is common to look back at the summer of 2020 and its protests as the high point of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I personally remember the turning point of those protests--the moment in which they were defeated--as being when a discourse that was getting uncomfortably radical for some (talk of reforming the police seemed to be going mainstream) suddenly changed topics to arguing over "Should Gone with the Wind be banned?"

Even by the standards of a national dialogue exceedingly susceptible to distraction by trivialities obscured by pompous bloviating about the significance of "symbolic issues" this was risible--something out of a Mel Brooks movie. After all, even symbolism is supposed to have to do with things that are visible, whereas this film, however much it may be regarded as a screen classic, isn't. "How many people under forty have even heard of this movie made eight decades earlier, before their grandparents were even born?" I wondered. Yet here they were talking about it in rather a frenzied fashion, the moment passed, the movement waned and the summer of '20 already become an object of nostalgia for those lamenting the supposed "death of wokeness."

Still, the question "How many people under forty have even heard of this movie?" has recurred to me since, and I recently tried finding out. Apparently, in spite of the brouhaha, no one knew or had bothered to find out, no poll testifying to awareness or lack of awareness of the film among the public, and certainly not its younger cohorts. In the process I found out that, for all the marketing significance the question would seem to have, there just isn't much serious examination of the extent to which films like this have really lingered in the public's memory, even as studio executives make claims about "back catalog value" in defense of their decisions to make sequels nobody asked for that seem unlikely to make a dime. That leaves us with just our speculations. This being a blog post and not an academic paper I don't see any harm in offering mine. For my part I will not say that older films seem to me to be entirely without any potential for appealing to the young. Those who have a sense of story, an ear for dialogue, a regard for drama (and it would be nice to think at least a few do), may find such films to have their pleasures--indeed, be a breath of fresh air given what passes for story, dialogue, drama in today's fare. Such films would even seem to have other attractions to go by, for example, how popular a choice the "1950s Super Panavision 70" style seems to be in generative AI-made trailers for nonexistent movies, with the muted colors and film grain of the visuals, the Mid-Century Modern "Airstream Futuropolis" aesthetic, the soft-featured beauty and old-fashioned feminine glamour of yesteryear's leading ladies, implying that some would be drawn to the look of older movies as well. All as, I would like to add, for all the right-wing mockery of the delicacy of woke youth, I doubt so very many young people would really find the less "diverse" cast or the old-fashioned portrayal of "gender roles" really so unbearable to their sensibilities as they have it.

Still, on the whole this would seem to be at best a matter of cult rather than really general audience interest, with the disadvantages of older film in competing for the public's attention seeming to me more significant where these demographics as a whole are concerned, not least because of the organization of our home entertainment options. Even when using a streaming service older people remain more used to doing what they did before streaming's availability, picking a channel and leaving it on, especially when they weren't in a mood to really sit down and take something in properly--the young to choosing particular movies or shows from the selection of "Recommendations" the service presents them, with those choices leading to subsequent offerings along the lines of what they already watched, making them less likely to "discover" things unlike what they have already seen. The result is that despite a lot of fuss about shows from the '00s, for example, finding purchase with streaming viewers, on the whole old TV is a much smaller part of people's casual viewing than it used to be, with the same going for old movies, all as the incentive of the young to seek out old movies seems to have gone in the opposite direction of their now unprecedentedly easy access to them. The day of popular, serious, interest in film as an art form is far, far behind us, as the young may be expected to not find older films very watchable at all given their habituation to certain forms of blockbuster spectacle--as well as faster pacing and "high concept" cinematography and editing that must leave the talkier, less action-packed, slower-paced, "low concept" film of yesteryear almost automatically off-putting. (Today even the Hallmark Channel's feather-light romantic comedies have the close takes and short shot lengths of an action movie, as you will notice observing how when the leads are having a conversation the film cuts from one to the other in line with whoever is speaking or reacting and on whom they accordingly want us to focus--two faces rarely visible together in a single frame.) It doesn't help that older films, especially those from before the late 1960s, may seem rather sanitized to addicts of "edgy" content. The old enthusiasm for period pieces would not seem to help with a generation that strongly prefers tales of the here and now, nor the fact that a movie made in the era of Gone with the Wind but set in the then present day is effectively a period piece to them, outside their frame of reference. (What would they make of, for example, His Girl Friday?) Indeed, it may be significant that those faux 1950s Super Panavision 70 trailers are almost invariably versions of more contemporary hits or upcoming releases (like The Fantastic Four) rather than imaginings of films that might actually have been made in the '50s.

Altogether, even for a comparative newcomer open to the pleasures of classic film it would probably take a really exceptional interest--extending to a readiness to do some cultural work--to spend much time with such movies, the more in as they have so many more alternatives of kinds to which they are accustomed being pressed upon them at all times. Indeed, considering their frame of reference I am reminded of that line in the film version of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about that "hot new director" Vincent Lepak's thinking "that cinema began with Quentin Tarantino." All these years later, so does it go with a great many younger people, many of them still unborn when Reservoir Dogs premiered, precisely because the whole older world of cinema is terra incognita to them.