Almost exactly twenty-one years ago I saw this in a theater, and it frightened me so much I cried and pleaded with my mother to take me home. She didn’t, and I justly considered this, for years, to be one of the scariest films I’d ever seen.
It’s not any more, of course, but this experience recounts one of my qualities, for better or worse, as a film-watcher. That is, how different films viewed at different times derive different responses. Harry and the Hendersons is not a terrifying film, but to an impressionable eight-year-old who sees a new movie only once every two or three months, it’s potently terrifying.
This experience makes me question how I perceive certain films, and how perception is as influenced by context as it is by taste—and how both of these things evolve with age. It’s possible to rewatch something you consider one of the best films you’ve ever seen and to degrade its status, but the problem with this for me is that I really enjoy my favorites, so in rewatching them is the risk of liking them less. Perceptions are impermanent, but isn’t it one of the implicit goals of all criticism to make permanent an art’s status? Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic exist as testaments to this, aggregated consensuses based on the idea of a permanent critical record. And I guess this is fine and well; films, after all, are static objects. But the people who watch them are not.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Cable TV
25 Jul 2008 6:10 PM | Comments (2)
I had a similar reaction to Sigourney Weaver’s levitating scene in Ghostbusters. (Though there may have been some other feelings besides terror mixed in there as well…)
Who would have thought that Harry and the Hendersons would inspire such compelling ruminations about the nature of criticism? I like to view criticism as part of an ongoing conversation rather than a permanent record. The date of a review’s publication has it’s relevance.
Evan
25 July 2008
4:15 PM