The Strange Dichotomy of Pop Culture Reappraisals
Are we actually reassessing movies out of their artistic merits and need for a place in the pop culture pantheon, or just for kicks?
Cringey fascination, the cycle of nostalgia, whatever you want to call it, there’s been a phenomenon in film discussion over the past several years. Why are people nostalgic for movies and pop culture iconography that we spent years vehemently proclaiming to be bad?
Reappraisals used to be genuine and even widespread renewed analysis granted to films and music that are now considered classics. Due to the internet, you will rarely ever see a genuine cultural reappraisal anymore, positive or negative, thanks to the internet’s 24-hour think-piece cycle. Jacob Lambert of the week.com article, The reappraisal economy, notes:
“This ancillary aspect of a reviewer’s job — examining a relic with fresh eyes and an open mind — has steadily been reduced to a cheap internet trope. […] It’s one thing for a bygone piece of art to gradually seem worthy of acclaim, […] but it’s another thing entirely for a writer — often realizing that, hey, five or ten years have passed since that thing came out — to declare that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was cruelly misjudged, or that Def Leppard must be taken seriously, just because they can.” […] “The problem is that it’s become impossible to distinguish between click-chasing lamp admiration and serious criticism. Maybe in the future, the trend will become so pronounced that The Room will earn our respect. Or maybe that future has already arrived.”
Darren Mooney notes in this blogosphere piece, From Phantom Menace to ASM, Why Are We Nostalgic for Things We Hate?, how The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the only solo Spider-Man movie with a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, is still considered by critics and many fans to be the worst film in the Spider-Man franchise, and Deadline described The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as “the most maligned movie ever that turned in a worldwide gross of $708.98 million.”. Yet somehow, this film and Spider-Man 3 have been graced with kind “reassessments” thanks to the nostalgia of younger fans. Ironically, many of their “reappraisal” articles — as the first article cited notes with the retrospective articles for Waterworld — somehow tend to be half-hearted or tinged with irony in their praise while readily acknowledging their flaws, even to the point that it seems like those films would have to be dramatically altered in order to be better. 1999’s Best Picture winner American Beauty might still have its fans, but over a decade’s worth of negative retrospective articles from publications like Time Magazine have permanently stained the film’s image, that means something.
You won’t find that trend more noticeable than the internet’s sudden reappraisal for something widely hated than Spider-Man 3. While the film has genuine defenses, it’s by and large not considered to be a great film. Much of the “reappraisal” for it amounts to things like, “It may be messy and not as great as the other two films, but it’s fun and meme-worthy.”
In the same article, Mooney notes, “[…] despite Garfield’s enthusiasm, Sony is never going to let Marc Webb make The Amazing Spider-Man 3, because fans don’t actually want that. It’s nice to see Tobey Maguire in No Way Home and Michael Keaton in The Flash, but perish the thought of another Sam Raimi Spider-Man or Tim Burton Batman.” This is true in many ways, especially since after the fan dream fulfillment of No Way Home, webzine outlets have been milking the topic of another film with Maguire or Garfield with vague non-answers from Raimi.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy is also noteworthy for this strange love-hate reappraisal, much of which stems from people who were children when they were released or from those who use George Lucas’s unique vision as fodder against the new trilogy and their alleged lack of originality. Much of their reappraisal, at least within the blogosphere, doesn’t necessarily originate from their actual quality, just faint praise like, “At least George Lucas had an overarching story in mind for all three films.” If that’s all you need to know about how far internet culture and film criticism has regressed in terms of cultural reappraisal for films with troubled backgrounds, then there are always overlooked gems from the film festival circuit to look to, especially those that weren’t critically acclaimed.
