The Older I Get, the Fuzzier and More Meaningless Time Becomes

For a long time “Can You Believe (Iconic Movie) Came Out (A Long Time Ago)” and “Can You Believe This is What the Cast of (A Popular Movie You Remember Warmly) Came Out TWENTY Years Ago?” were popular, ubiquitous templates for clickbait articles, particularly on Buzzfeed. 

It’s easy to see why these articles generated lots of clicks, lots of page-views and consequently lots of money. We have a natural curiosity about the stuff that was important to us when we were children or teenagers and consequently have special significance that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their quality.

For example I recently re-watched Trading Places for a column at my Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas Substack newsletter where I am writing up James Belushi’s complete filmography. 

It’s a movie I have enormous fondness for, or rather had tremendous fondness for because I associate it with my childhood, Eddie Murphy’s God-like early career and Dan Ackroyd’s heyday. I also remembered it as being one of the last good movies John Landis made before killing all those people. 

Also, to be perfectly honest, the first time I saw Trading Places it was largely for the utterly gratuitous Jamie Lee Curtis nudity. Needless to say, it was very satisfying on that front. But it also fundamentally just worked because of an ingenious premise, perfectly cast leads at the height of their powers and popularity. 

At least that was what I would have told you. I was surprised and dismayed to discover that a movie I always thought just plain worked does not work at all now, and probably never did. 

Watching Trading Places for the fifth or six time I found myself first thinking, “Huh, this isn’t as good as I remember. It probably just takes some time to get going” and then “boy, this really isn’t holding up for me but I’m sure it really kicks into high gear at some point” before finally conceding to myself that I no longer love Trading Places, or even like it, or consider it a better than average motion picture. 

It made me feel weird to hate something I expected to love. I worried that readers would think that I was panning a comedy classic to be provocative and get page-views. 

Look, I am on record as a big fan of Insane Clown Posse, the Fast and the Furious franchise and the Ernest P. Worrell movies. I am not concerned with seeming cool or provocative or having good taste. I love what I love and feel no need to pretend that I either hate things I don’t hate or love things I don’t love. 

I felt like I was simultaneously letting down the younger me, who was a big Trading Places fan and being let down by a younger me that watched Landis’ crude comedy a half dozen times without noticing that it’s kind of racist, kind of sexist, super classist and devoid of gay characters but contains multiple uses of an anti-gay slur, not that funny and so sloppily conceived that the plot hinges on a character being in a public bathroom and very conveniently overhearing a conversation containing vital information. 

It’s been forty years since Trading Places! Good lord that makes me feel old but I have discovered that the older I get, the less meaningful time becomes. 

When I was a kid and a teenager and a college student I felt like I understood the passage of time because I had experienced so little of it. Time makes sense when you’re a kid. You’ve got a track that everyone is on full of meaningful markers. 

You go to elementary school and then high school and then, possibly, college and graduate school. Time seems so much more meaningful and manageable then. 

When you get older and run out of coming of age milestones time becomes a much fuzzier and vaguer entity. 

For example I have been a professional writer I have beefor twenty-six years. 

Twenty-six years! Holy fuck that is a long time! It’s both impressive and depressing. 

I look at those twenty-six years as a vast wilderness of time. Oh sure, there are meaningful markers in my career, like the eighteen years I wrote for The A.V Club between 1997 and 2017, with two years in between when I wrote for The Dissolve. It’s been a very long, very hard decade since I quite The A.V Club in 2013. 

I’ve been putting out books for FOURTEEN YEARS. Fourteen years! Christ, that is a long time. 

It’s so long that it begins to lose meaning. I find that I have only a vague sense when movies came out. I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s Hugo for the first time. My dumb brain thought it was a couple of years old when it actually came out twelve years ago. 

I should have known because it came out towards the end of the 3-D boom and its failure could very well have helped kill the fad. How ironic that one of the very best 3-D movies ever made, and a movie that uses 3-D more artfully than just about any other could play a major role in the death of 3-D as a popular, ubiquitous format. 

The same is true of Saving Mr. Banks. When I watched it for my upcoming book The Fractured Mirror I thought it was a few years old and maybe came out in 2019 or so. It turns out to be a decade old, having come out in 2013.

Or The Weather Man. I vaguely recall that coming out a decade ago. It’s eighteen years old! 

When contemplating the weird slipperiness of time I think a lot about the fact that only eleven years separated the zeitgeist-capturing 1973 blockbuster American Graffiti from a 1962 setting that it looked back on fondly with deep, albeit sometimes ambivalent nostalgia. 

A 2023 movie with the same time difference would look back fondly at the long-ago era of 2012, which literally seems like yesterday, or a year before the release of Saving Mr. Banks.

One of the nice things about getting older is that you don’t have to pretend that you understand the world and its complexities and stupidities anymore. 

I consequently have a very bad sense of the past personally but as a film historian time makes more sense. 

For example a lot of the movies I’ve been seeing for The Fractured Mirror came out around 1932, not long after the rise of sound. Sound film was very young then, and had a tiny history. Moviemakers were fascinated by the transition from silent to sound that had just occurred and could not stop making movies about it.  

That long ago time period, ninety one years ago, makes more sense to me than the last five years or so. 

So if you also have no idea when things came out or how old anything is, don’t beat yourself up. It’s human for time to become less meaningful with age and we are all, every last one of us human, for better and for worse. 

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