Here's Looking at You, Kid

In the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, The Maltese Falcon, a detective picks up the statue of a falcon, sizes it up, and says, perplexed, “Heavy. What is it?” Then Bogart’s character, Sam Spade, answers with the classic line, “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

However, when showing students old movies such as The Maltese Falcon, LAS professor Pat Gill has noticed that many of them have a hard time connecting with the stories and with characters such as Bogart’s Sam Spade. The reason: They do not think that old movies are the stuff that reality is made of.

“The complaint my students make about old movies is: ‘It is so unrealistic,’” says Gill, a University of Illinois professor of communication who teaches several classes on film and popular culture. By “old movies,” students are not only talking about black-and-white classics, such as The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca. Even movies from the 1970s-1990s, such as Taxi Driver, have a hard time connecting with contemporary students. That’s because our notions of realism change over time, she points out.

“The mainstream Hollywood films of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s interest and amuse, surprise and challenge many of my students, but only between 10 and 20 percent find these films compelling and watch them again on their own,” says Gill, one of this year’s recipients of the Lynn M. Martin Award for Distinguished Women Teachers.

Her students cite off-putting features of older films, such as that they are black-and-white or that the story and characters are clichéd, but Gill believes their reasons go deeper than that. So she probed further, asking her students why they find more recent shows, such as the popular TV series, The Wire, so much more realistic than the classics.

“The camera is static in The Maltese Falcon,” one student explained, and that makes it feel less real to today’s viewers. But Gill finds it ironic that “the steady camera pointed at the characters several feet away, a view that mimics real-life conversational distance, is considered far less real than a mobile camera that moves above and around the characters—that often makes quick jumps between characters and scenes. Explain to me how that is more real.”

According to Gill, more recent television and film productions use dizzying jump cuts, fast pacing, and plentiful action scenes “to make complicated narratives more palatable and appealing. The flash and the surprise serve to keep viewers’ attention.”

The inability to connect with older stories is nothing new, she says. In 1850, the French critic Victor Cousins declared that the massive novels of the 17th century were “unreadable.” So it should be no surprise that many 21st century readers and viewers have difficulty connecting with 20th century fiction and movies. The notion of “what is real” continues to change.

Many of today’s stories, particularly serial television shows such as The Wire, Justified, Breaking Bad, and The Killing, have extremely complicated storylines, Gill says, and students have no trouble following them. So it seems odd to her, she says, when some students complain that they have a hard time following the stories in certain older films.

Gill suggests that even though TV series such as The Wire, Dexter, and Breaking Bad are complicated, they build in “triggers” for viewers that recap the story. For instance, each new episode begins with a recap of the previous episode. In addition, visual or verbal reminders of important plot points are elegantly worked into the story itself, helping viewers remember what came before.

Old movies do not do that. They assume viewers will give their undivided attention to the film—something that does not always happen in today’s texting and tweeting world.

“Many of my students feel guilty if they’re just sitting and watching a film and doing nothing else,” she says. “They feel they could be texting or writing or looking at their computer. If they’re watching with buddies, they’re drinking and chatting and pausing the film. They feel uncomfortable and somehow culpable if they’re not multitasking.”

Students sometimes struggle with old movies because they also do not understand the cultural context. So Gill uses old movies to explore the culture of past periods, which helps her students understand the films—and history. For instance, many students do not know the context of a movie such as Casablanca, which was set in 1941, when America was trying to remain neutral in WWII while the rest of the world plunged deeper into conflict. Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick Blaine, is also trying to remain neutral, even while being surrounded by the nightmare of people trying to escape Casablanca and the Nazis. His change of heart was a compelling piece of wartime propaganda, a clear lesson for Americans of the times, she notes.

Gill says some people throw up their hands and say that it’s useless trying to teach students today to appreciate old movies, but she does not fall into that camp. She knows from experience that it can be done, for she has had success using old films in her class for prisoners through U of I’s Education Justice Project. These prisoners range in age from their 20s to their 60s.

“They love the old movies, and they watch them over and over,” she says. “No matter what their age, they find the old movies completely compelling and realistic. So it is clearly something that can be taught and people can respond to.”

As she puts it, “Old movies, like a number of other good things in life, are an acquired taste.”