Jean Cocteau does something very smart in the opening of his 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Before we have seen frame one of the film proper, Cocteau unspools a title crawl in which he implores the audience to engage with the film in the same manner with which children engage with fairy tales. The preamble reads:
Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.
I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood’s “Open Sesame”:
Once upon a time…
Now, at the time, Cocteau might have been simply trying to figure for adult audiences’ built-in cynicism to the dream logic and stylized reality contained within his film. There’s no grand, overarching mythology to explain the why and how of the magic which occurs throughout the film, no explanation for why statues live and doors swing open of their own free will. Magic simply is, and the characters deal with it as best they can. Usually poorly because that’s how story happens.
But regardless of the original intent, Cocteau’s plea to the audience serves a dual purpose to modern eyes: Along with the original function of reminding us that we are entering a narrative of deliberate unreality, it also gives the old film an out for any and all ‘dated’ aspects of the production.
Because we are asked to engage with Beauty and the Beast as a matter of faith, the audience becomes a complicit partner in making sure that the illusion is never spoiled. The film’s age actually becomes something of a virtue, as modern viewers might regard the special effects the way they would an impressive live stage show. You’re not ‘fooled’ by anything that you see, but you can still be wrapped up and entranced by the imagery. Sure, high definition viewing leaves many of Cocteau’s magic tricks exposed, but accepting that is part and parcel with accepting the fairy tale logic. Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast works as a peerless work of the fantastic whether it was a brand new or decades aged.
Seeing Beauty and the Beast again made me wonder about the entire conversation surrounding older films. The term ‘dated’ gets tossed around fairly constantly, usually as some kind of damning phrase. Don’t like that movie made before you were born? “Well, it was really dated.”
But some films and genres seem immune to that sort of modernist cultural vivisection. Look at Wizard of Oz: There’s not an effect in that film that isn’t laughable by today’s standards, but no matter how lovingly the computers render flying monkey fur billowing in the breeze, nothing will ever replace short dudes in fluffy suits dangling from wires in the hearts and minds of movie-watching people. Digital vistas from only a scant few decades ago are hideously ugly, but the broadly false backdrops of Oz continue to thrive.
Or just look at any musical from the Golden Age. Nothing earns the scorn of youthful audiences like the BIG performances which were so pervasive from pre-Method actors. If you want to see a room full of high school kids howl with derision, show them an Orson Welles performance. And yet, with musical films, where emotions are cranked up so far past eleven that even Nigel Tufnel’s ears seem about to start bleeding, audiences have no problem taking the ride. The ‘dated’ aspects are lumped in with the tenor and tone of the entire production and everyone just goes along with it.
So if we accept that every single movie made before this exact moment in time is going to be dated in some way, the question becomes what makes a movie age ‘poorly’? At its best, cinema is a time machine that allows us to look through a window into a world gone by. Even if the value of a movie is simply as an anthropological look into the past, that’s still a not insignificant value. For me as a film fan, I can roll with pretty much every historical speed bump for the sake of appreciating a film’s qualities on its own terms. As goofy or strange as a film may become as time passes, that doesn’t negate its good qualities or its place of interest in the evolution of the art form.
But that’s easy for me to say. As a white, heterosexual guy, it’s easy for me to shrug off abhorrent social views as the price of doing business. I can acknowledge that, say, Stagecoach’s characterization of Native Americans is aggressively not OK while still enjoying the film as a pulse-pounding thriller. Same with the treatment of characters of other genders, sexualities and ethnicities. I’m privileged to be able to say, “I don’t approve of that” and move on with the film. But for others, these realities are something they can’t avoid in their daily life and seeing them reflected, projected and hailed as landmark art probably isn’t something they want to deal with. Nor should they. If someone wanted to decry an older film because of the approach to then-social norms, there’s really no argument against that.
For myself, the only time I get really pulled out of a movie because of its age is when the film itself seems hyper-interested on projecting an image of contemporariness. That is, when a film is clearly working so hard to appeal to what the filmmakers perceive to be popular in the world instead of serving as an honest reflection of how people live. These films tend to be the ones which skew young, as out-of-touch producers and directors wallow in whatever toy-commercial propagated notion of ‘cool’ seems most in. When I watch a film and feel like what I’m seeing isn’t an honest attempt to portray how human beings look and interact, that’s when I get yanked out of the reality of what I’m watching.
But that’s me. And I’m aware that every person reading this has a different threshold for what does and does not pull them out of a movie. So let’s hear it. Is it when a film is in black and white? Or glacially edited as much pre-70s cinema is? Is it fashions or hair? Or is it matters of race and gender and the ugly history printed on celluloid that leaves you disengaged and unhappy? Sound off in the comments or on Twitter, as I’m really curious what your perspective is on this.