A O Scott
What did you learn at the movies today? This is surely one of the least frequently asked questions in the world, especially in summertime, when hot weather and idle hours drive young scholars into the multiplexes. It is a frequently unexamined article of faith? among both entertainment-hungry ticket buyers and the scolds and scoffers who belittle their pleasures?that popular commercial movies are, or should be, intellectually undemanding, easily digestible, requiring no special knowledge and offering none in return.
But that assumption is not quite right. To go to a movie can feel, at times, like sitting for a test, as the images and stories unfold in a welter of information that lies just out of reach. Even spectacles that advertise their all-ages, universal accessibility ? child-friendly animation sequels, say? traffic in winking allusions to various canons of cultural arcana. Did you get all those automotive references in Cars 2? Or the evocations of Chinese martial-arts cinema in Kung Fu Panda 2? If so, you will be sure to explain it all to your kid. If not, your kid will no doubt explain it all to you. And after you see Super 8, you can provide a fully annotated guide to 1979, a year you might otherwise have been inclined to forget.
Every moviegoer is a movie geek in the making. That is the Utopian promise, and perhaps also the commercial agenda, of 21st-century Hollywood. One of the underacknowledged delights of watching is the fun of knowing stuff, or of discovering new stuff that you might want to know. The fun does not depend on the nature of the stuff in question, which tends to seem more precious the further it lies from the pressing issues of the actual world.
At any given mall or schoolyard in America you have a good chance of meeting a young person who can explain, in rigorous detail, the political history of the Galactic Empire and the Jedi rebellions chronicled in the Star Wars cycle. Or the multiple origins and iterations of the Marvel superhero universe. Or the factionalism of the Hogwarts faculty. Why aren?t more of them equally conversant in history or literature or the other subjects they?re supposed to be learning in school? The question answers itself.
Particular movies, tethered to books, comics and other movies, offer initiation into realms of esoteric lore that lie beyond the realm of the useful, and also outside the boundaries of the screen itself. Superhero sequels gesture back to origin stories, which pop-culture archaeologists can trace back to inky numbers encased in plastic sleeves. Did Thor or Green Lantern or X-Men: First Class get their stories right? Did they live up to the spirit and details of the original? Your opinion of the movies will carry more weight if it can tackle this question with some authority, ideally with reference to specific issues and series.
And even if you don?t have those at your fingertips, you can still play the game with reference to other movies. X-Men: First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn, is a prequel to the three X-Men movies of the past decad ? and the second such prequel, after X-Men Origins: Wolverine. .
The two Star Wars trilogies practised this kind of looping on a grand scale and also helped bring geeky intensity from out of the comic-book and fantasy-novel shadows into the big-time pop-cultural mainstream. George Lucas may be the godfather of the obsessive-compulsive, encyclopedic approach to movie consumption, but the current object of obsession is his friend and colleague Steven Spielberg.
The long-gone literary and artistic celebrities who populate Woody Allen?s Midnight in Paris are unmistakably part of that film?s appeal. It is one of the biggest hits of Allen?s career, and I suspect that the film owes some of its popularity to the presence of F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and a host of others, ably impersonated by a gaggle of game not-quite-look-alike actors.
All these films make use of the past, and the extent of your enjoyment of either movie is likely to be determined by how readily you succumb to their nostalgic enchantments. In the case of Super 8 the past era it invokes is part of the living memory of Americans of Abrams?s generation, who can now tell their children what a cool, innocent time the late 1970s were. We can feel the same way about the Lost Generation Paris that Owen Wilson?s character stumbles into Midnight in Paris, and also about the early decades of the cold war as travestied in X Men: First Class, which turns its heroic mutants into Forrest Gumps, startlingly present at some of the big moments in midcentury global history.
That movie, when I saw it in a theatre with my children, elicited a fumbling, impromptu lesson on the Cuban missile crisis and the Holocaust, full of redundant reminders that the history as presented in the movie was not real. Which is, of course, the first thing anyone learns at the movies.