Spirited Away is a classic. I think most people can agree on this fact. Mulholland Drive, too. There are other movies I think we can argue about that came out the same year; I happen to think Atlantis: The Lost Empire should qualify, but I know a lot of people disagree. But the big argument to me is that I simply don’t think 2001 was a particularly great year for movies, so there aren’t a lot of classics from that year to discuss, and you were fine with me until I mentioned the year 2001, a lot of you. I can tell.
We can argue a lot about what makes a classic. Why does one movie get the label and not another? Why is Twelve Angry Men a classic but not Fire Down Below? Why The Bride of Frankenstein and not The Raven? Why The Lion in Winter and not Oedipus the King? This sort of thing is the bread and butter of programmers for channels such as American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies, as well as their streaming equivalents.
I think the simplest definition is probably a movie that is respected by a lot of people for a long time. You don’t have to necessarily like it; I don’t like a lot of movies I’d agree are classics. But you can respect them and acknowledge that other people like them. You respect the work that went into it, the quality of the finished project even if that finished project isn’t for you. Maybe it’s not a genre you’re into. Maybe you don’t like the director or one of the actors or what have you. But what other people think of it, in this case, matters.
But the bigger issue, to me at least, is time. There is no such thing as an instant classic. I’ve seen many movies over the years get dubbed instant classics only to be forgotten by the time the next “instant classic” comes along. There are movies too young to be classics. Lots of them. After all, more movies are being made every day. And you have to wait for them to be old enough to be classics.
How long? In my opinion, twenty-five years. That’s it; that’s your length. That means that any movie from the twentieth century could at least in theory be a classic, no matter how you count the twentieth century. That doesn’t mean they will be; no one is talking about the acclaimed classic Joe Dirt. But any time you start to complain about a movie’s being too young to be a classic, think about your own time frame, how reasonable it is, and the inevitable passage of time. You think I like that movies that came out the year I graduated from college are classics now? No, but I live with it. So can you.
About the writer
Gillian Nelson
Gillian Nelson is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a child up for adoption. She fills her days by chasing around her kids, watching a lot of movies, and reading. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the '60s and '70s. She has a Patreon account.
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I hate the idea of an instant classic. I suspect those contradictory words were being used for Forrest Gump, for instance.
As Gillian says, I think an “instant” classic does not necessarily translate into a canonical one.
When we talk about film classics, we should acknowledge that this status is primarily determined by a discourse surrounding film over time engaged in by more selective audiences. That audience has become narrower, and operates on a different set of values and claims to authority than previous generations. Cinephilia, when I was exposed to it, grew in a more populist form of classic film viewership. Older films were regularly broadcast on over-the-air TV and revival house curators kept foreign language and cult films in the public eye. More than at any time since the pre-syndication era, the long memory of films has been structurally erased by the studios and the media, and those who choose to think of films and their long term meanings and significance do so in different, more elective contexts. In short, what we call film classics today aren’t even classics as they were when the term entered popular usage.
As for 2001, my choices for film classic status would be MOULIN ROUGE and MEMENTO.