"Independence Day" can go from riveting to rather ridiculous once you've seen it about, oh, four times."Suspending reality" can be a very important part of appreciating a movie. Movies can be full of snags when it comes to plausibility issues.
Moviegoers are invited into a fantasy realm. The idea is to keep those plausibility issues suppressed in your mind. They must not get in the way of appreciating the story or the characters.
It can be harder today for movie viewers to deal with this. That's because of the opportunity to view a favorite movie multiple times - unlimited times in fact.
As with many aspects of our day-to-day living, this is a fairly new phenomenon. Changes in lifestyle wrought by technology are a regular theme in my writing here.
Today I'm reminding you that it wasn't that long ago, in the scheme of things, when watching a movie was pretty much a one-shot deal. You'd pay to see the movie at our local Morris (MN) Theater, appreciate it, hopefully not throw jawbreakers at the screen, and probably never see it again. It might turn up on network TV but only on rare occasions. Nothing like today, when our myriad channels would liberally replay various movies so you might actually watch it at 2 a.m.
In my youth the local television station, KCMT of Alexandria, would shut down not long after our bedtime. It would shut down with generic military footage (Air Force) and the standard "Star Spangled Banner" (John Philip Sousa style). I don't know why glorifying the military had to be part of ending our day. In my youth our military was getting entangled in the Viet Nam thicket of tragedy.
I could count on one hand the movies I saw more than three times. And hardly anyone would pay to see a movie more than once. I doubt many kids had the money to do a "Titanic" ritual and see a favorite repeatedly. But many people do see movies repeatedly today, thanks to the technology that first brought us VHS tapes, then DVDs and now "Movies on Demand."
Is this a godsend? As with anything we think we desire, when we get an abundance it might not seem as desirable anymore. It's a fundamental principle of marketing as author Harvey Mackay has pointed out so well.
As a kid I would have been disbelieving if someone had told me that someday there would be rows and rows of movies at our local Morris Public Library, movies that I could "check out" and watch at my leisure - once, twice, three times, whatever. It makes paying for a movie ticket somewhat questionable.
I have written excessive background here to what the main point of this post is: Watching a favorite movie repeatedly is not a good thing. The ability to suspend reality crumbles. Whatever emotional effect the movie originally had on you dissipates. Fundamentally, what happens (based on my experience) is that you begin to see the story as a movie in the most cynical sense, i.e. a crafted work of entertainment by professionals who are trying to manipulate you.
My first revelation about this came with the movie "The Natural." I never saw it at our Morris Theater. My first viewing may have actually been through television.
Who knows if it even played at our local big screen. Because our theater can only play one movie at a time, many get passed by. I remember waiting once for the movie "Mr. 3000," a fine baseball movie with Bernie Mac - RIP - and it never came here.
Eventually I told local Morris Theater promoter Warrenn Anderson (the attorney) about this shortcoming of our theater. This was when our old theater was being put on life support. It remains in that state today, operated as a co-op. I told Mr. Anderson that I often saw movies in Alexandria because I wanted to be assured that I could in fact see them, when there was no guarantee here.
"The Natural" was also a baseball movie. It's one of Robert Redford's better efforts. He was a wee too old to play the part at the time, and worked hard to fit a younger mold. But it wasn't as bad as Kevin Spacey playing a young Bobby Darin in "Across the Sea!"
The age issue was never a problem for me in "The Natural." But after I had seen the movie, say, four times, along with snippets on cable movie channels that I would catch incidentally (as we all do when surfing), the appeal of the movie diminished. I began just seeing a bunch of actors, movie sets and a script. And that's sad.
It was a moving experience to see "The Natural" the first time. It's been said that you judge a painting by the emotional reaction of the viewer. If that's true for movies too, "The Natural" ranks way up there. But I no longer have an emotional reaction to it. I found the same thing happening with "The Karate Kid."
And after seeing the Will Smith movie "Independence Day" several times, it went from being an interesting thriller to a joke. I mean, it was so full of implausible things. And it was so cynically crafted to pull at our patriotic heartstrings. My point is this: faults like these can be overlooked the first time you see a movie. Maybe the second.
Moviemakers know this and they work inside a "buffer zone." They probably lie awake at night worrying about whether their customers will in fact be able to suspend reality in order to like a movie.
In the early days of the HBO channel, comedian Rich Hall - where is he now? - had a feature called "sniglets," so popular a book sprouted. Sniglets are terms that aren't in the dictionary but should be.
Maybe there should be a "sniglet" for the phenomenon of de-appreciating a movie by seeing it too many times. Maybe the word is already in the dictionary: "bummer."
Seeing a movie too many times is "too much of a good thing." Seeing a particular movie too often dulls the senses. We might make an exception for "The Wizard of Oz."
-Brian Williams - Morris mn Minnesota - morris theater mn - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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