Last month, I found myself with a few hours to spare on a rainy Saturday night in Antwerp, and only three movie options in the immediate vicinity: Gladiator II, which I had no desire to see; the partly Irish-language rap comedy Kneecap, which I did want to see, but it was subtitled in Dutch; and the 1988 anime Akira, in Japanese with English subtitles, which I had somehow missed all these years. This is my favourite sort of choice: Hobson’s choice, that is. Akira it was.
The experience made me think of Max Cherry, the bail bondsman played by Robert Forster in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Asked what he is going to see at the multiplex that afternoon, he replies: “Something that starts soon and looks good.” For anyone who grew up on films prior to the streaming era, Max’s philosophy, and my Antwerp evening, may recall the days of watching movies on terrestrial television. In the UK, that meant appointment viewing, three channels (or four from 1982 onwards) and no catch-up facility. Time, tide and TV schedules waited for no one.
This might sound austere to anyone nursed on Netflix or reared on Roku. Remove near-infinite film choices, though, and you avoid the modern paralysis of abundance and indecision, the lost hours of wandering from platform to platform like a dazed tourist in a foreign station. You also bid farewell to the condescension inherent in streaming. There are thousands of options just a click away but we are mollycoddled by the algorithm, which suggests titles it knows we will favour. The risk of surprise or disappointment is kept to a minimum.
Gone is the prospect of an accidental viewing of an unknown masterpiece, or the kind of abysmal artefact that is equally valuable in defining taste and sensibility. It would be hard to know what we liked, after all, if we never saw anything that we didn’t. The Christmas TV schedules introduced me as a youngster to Psycho, To Have and Have Not and The Wizard of Oz, but it is the laborious musical western Paint Your Wagon that hogged whole afternoons during my childhood. Suffering through some of it helped make me who I am today – namely, someone who can distinguish between a good Clint Eastwood movie and a bad one.
During the holidays, the yawning hours were padded with movies one might not otherwise have seen, or thought to seek out. How would I have watched the 1930s and 40s Tarzan pictures, or developed a crush on their loinclothed leading man Johnny Weissmuller, if the BBC hadn’t programmed one of those films every day throughout the 1982 Christmas holidays, when I was 11? I may never have stumbled upon a giant of US comedy had Channel 4 not livened up a December morning in 1984 by screening the meta and masterful Never Give a Sucker An Even Break, made in 1941. To adapt a cliche, it was all WC Fields around here when I was a lad.
Leafing now through faded copies of the Radio Times and TV Times is like reading the schedule of an eclectic repertory cinema. The delirious 1975 Indian epic Sholay, which ratified Amitabh Bachchan’s superstar status, was sandwiched between The Navigator (Buster Keaton) and A Night at the Opera (the Marx Brothers) in Channel 4’s first ever Christmas Day schedule in 1982. ITV presented Vertigo late on Christmas Eve 1987, James Stewart ascending the dreaded bell-tower just as Santa Claus was climbing down the chimney. Far-fetched as it sounds, Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s stately period drama Effi Briest turned up on ITV one mid-December evening. Fassbinder on ITV! It’s like finding Michael Haneke on TikTok.
While the fledgling Channel 4 was transmitting masterpieces on consecutive nights (Stalker, Mon Oncle, Double Indemnity), the BBC was mixing a vintage Peter Sellers season with Burden of Dreams (about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo) and Ken Russell’s Women in Love. Older and artier films today tend to fall through the cracks, nudged out by blockbusters or cheapo Hallmark-style Christmas movies; only the hardy perennials such as It’s a Wonderful Life, The Great Escape and The Italian Job still maintain a regular presence.
All spectacles are prone to become rose-tinted, and it shouldn’t be overlooked that the prime-time slot on ITV a few days after Christmas 1987 went to the retrograde farce No Sex Please, We’re British, starring Ronnie Corbett. But the combination of a handful of channels with a varied back catalogue of films, and an audience staring down a fortnight of inactivity without recourse to streaming, produced the ideal circumstances for a cinematic education. Part of the magic was that the viewer had no hand in the selection, only the choice of several options. Very Antwerp, that. Very Jackie Brown.
That ship sailed so long ago that it isn’t even visible as a dot on the horizon. And it would be churlish to undervalue the wealth of options available on platforms like Mubi, BFI Player and the Criterion Channel, which is brimming with work far beyond the mostly white, male film-makers listed above. But it’s the drift toward plenitude, rather than diversity, that has altered the temperature of our viewing. When Mubi launched in 2007, it had only 30 films available at any one time, with a new title added, and another vanishing into the ether, daily. Now it offers a catalogue of hundreds. I can’t be the only subscriber who uses the new model far less frequently, and often ponders ditching it altogether.
Reflecting in 2019 on the modern viewing landscape, Todd Haynes, the director of Carol, told me that what he missed was “being presented with a single movie at a time, and enjoying the happenstance of a film just being on: you didn’t select it, you didn’t have to sit there and think, ‘What should I watch?’ You feel a deeper connection to things when they’re not totally being administered to your every whim. And, in a weird way, I think it changes desire. When everything is available at once, we don’t want it any more.”
Further reading
The Great Movies by Roger Ebert (Broadway Books, £50)
Hollywood: The Oral History by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson (Faber & Faber, £25)
Christmas in the Movies: 35 Classics to Celebrate the Season by Jeremy Arnold (Running Press Adult, £20)