A Defense of the Sophisticated Arts Patron

There are a lot of questions that I hate being asked on dates, but toward the top of the list is "what movies have you been watching recently?"  As you may know if you've read this blog for a while, there is always an answer to this question (and as a result movies always do come up on a date), and while it usually involves at least 1-2 theater movies (I'm hitting two movies in theaters today, in fact, in a double feature), the reality is that the most recent film I've watched is probably going to be an old movie.  The actual most recent movie I've seen as of this writing is Pride and Prejudice, the 1940 version with Laurence Olivier & Greer Garson.  But I rarely bring that out as it makes me feel unapproachable.  I actually cling to the hope that I will have seen a populist movie that will make me appear normal, something in theaters that "everyone has heard of" and won't come across too weird under the harsh lamp of first date judgment.

Cinematic taste is something that comes up a lot on my social media, and frequently there's two sides to the snobbery, batted back-and-forth so often you'd think it was a tennis match and not talking about movies, truly the most accessible of pastimes.  People feel the need to defend "bad" movies as high-art, while chastising the works of Fellini and Scorsese; every film needs to be celebrated, every film needs to be scorned.  The popular "Top 4" Letterboxd interview question, where the social media site asks actors and filmmakers on the red carpet their four favorite films, is criticized in TikTok videos for highlighting esoteric and complicated films that most of the public simply has not seen.  The implication here being that no one can enjoy these movies, that to say you do is to be pretentious and snobby, and that this is "mocking" your average film fan rather than challenging them to actually go watch & see for themselves.

Except, of course, that I enjoy these films.  I like Fellini (not all of him, but a good chunk).  I love Bergman and Truffaut and Welles.  I enjoy sitting down with a difficult movie, one where your phone needs to be on the other side of the world and your laptop shut, and you just watch what is happening in front of you.  To complain about the treatment of these filmmakers and the people who love them has always felt a bit eye roll-worthy to me (if you can understand and appreciate Nights of Cabiria and Wild Strawberries, you should be mature enough to not care about outside criticism), and indeed, I don't actually care about this in relation to me.  I came to terms a long time ago that this would be something I would enjoy by myself, and while I have a respite for it on this blog (which I'm now closing, so it'll be back to it being mostly a solitary endeavor save for texts to my brother about the movies), it does feel a bit sad that this has become championed on the internet.  That even in spaces as safe as Letterboxd (where loving movies is the whole point), it's still frowned upon to enjoy a specific type of film.

This is true outside of the movies, of course.  Literature is another space where this happens.  Every few months you see a trending story about an English professor who is shocked to find out how little young people know about classic novels, having read almost none of them.  In 2024, it's hard to tell how many of these are just clickbait and how many of them are actually true (quite frankly, this is why I need a reprieve from social media for a while, as I'll be taking a sabbatical from Twitter/Instagram/TikTok after the election has been called), but there's a sense of truth in it, and certainly the conversation it spurs is filled with opinions that people hold dear.  Posters will defend it, saying that there's no need to read The Scarlet Letter or Moby-Dick, and that "books are expensive!" is somehow a valid excuse as to why young people do not read as much anymore.

But I'm going to be real here-classics are important.  Reading foundational literature gives you an appreciation for most books that came after it.  Look at something like David Copperfield or Pride and Prejudice...do you know how many books came out of their shadows?  This isn't to say that we shouldn't revisit questions about what is and isn't included in the canon (Harold Bloom, I don't care if you're dead, you're still not invited to join this conversation), and whether or not certain classics are worth the trouble, but they are something you should explore if you're serious about learning about books.  Before I went to college my favorite book was Wuthering Heights (to some degree, it still is), and I had read Shakespeare, Dickens, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Austen, Dickinson, & Hemingway.  I owned some of these books, but I also got them from my public or school library (which everyone in America has access to, and as a result, any American claiming "books are expensive" as a reason not to read is a lazy debater that should spend five minutes with a helpful librarian).

This also doesn't end with adulthood.  The stat that 42% of Americans don't read a book after college is bandied around so much it's hard to tell if it's true, but enough other surveys put the number in that ballpark it's likely not far from the truth.  But how sad, and how sad if your classics education ended the second you threw your graduation cap in the air.  Just like how I will find myself seeing new Fellini & Bergman & Truffaut, I also find myself getting through books as an adult that feel pulled from reading lists in every college in America.  As an adult I've for-the-first time read Dostoevsky & Joyce, Thomas Hardy & Virginia Woolf.  I also read pulpy little mystery novels that you can finish on a plane, and young adult books that a twelve-year-old would breeze through.  But I don't abandon great novels, and want to continue to read the best and the most celebrated books, in the same way I want to continue to invite new ideas through my cinematic education.  People oftentimes will say some version of "I don't read to think" but if you don't read to think, nor do you watch movies to think or watch TV to think or travel to think...eventually you'll just stop thinking critically about the world, and as is evidenced by the number of people who fall for conspiracy theories and AI scams online, that's a skill that you can't always recover.