No, the hyphen in the title is not in error. I find it interesting to re-view films that I’ve saw in my youth. Time (and age) have a way of changing perspective, so that the same story reads differently in a different time.

It was my friend Kelly who first made me think about this. One of our mutual favorite films as teenagers was “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robard. In our youth, we loved the tale of Robards free-spirited, whimsical character wanting to hold onto his freedom, but also retain custody of his nephew. Kelly saw it again, years later, as a mother of two and years of working in non-profit administration. I paraphrase from memory: “He should have had that kid taken away from him. He was offered a good job–a great job! Writing for a kid’s TV show! How cool is that! And it’s not good enough for him. He won’t even get a job to support his kid.”

I had a similar reaction when I saw “The Graduate” about a year ago. It was one of my favorite films growing up; I related to Ben’s alienation and his wanting to be genuine and rejecting the “plastic” people around him. Looking at the film now, I wanted to slap the whiny little brat. At the very least someone should have offered him a prescription for prozac. He supposedly rejects his parents’ values, but not so much that he won’t lie around sunning himself in their pool and refuse to look for a job. He even made screwing his Dad’s friend’s wife look like too much work.

I don’t confuse being a lazy, arrogant mooch with any kind of moral purity. Fiction often idealizes behavior that in real life we find threatening, repugnant or annoying: people who take the law into their own hands, people who are violent, rude, greedy, ruthless, amoral. So I guess idealizing whiny-pants who refuse to get a job and spit on the friends and family who try to help them is to be expected.

What brings this up is that a couple of nights ago, Barry and I watched “The Dirty Dozen.” I can’t say that this is a re-view; I’m not sure if I saw exactly that film, but I grew up on a steady diet of World War II movies so it’s a genre I know well. I see WWII as the last morally unambiguous war the US fought. In a film fiction of such a war, the good guys are people like my father and uncle and their friends, and the bad guys are people who killed dozens of relatives of some of my friends. Despite the war’s ending 12 years before I was born, it is a war that resonates with me personally, more so than most of the wars of my own lifetime.

I found myself a bit queasy, nonetheless, watching the scene in which the good guys trap dozens of people in a basement and set them on fire. If this were an actual incident that helped win the war, I would view it as an ugly but necessary part of defeating an awful enemy. But cheering for screaming, terrified people to be trapped and burned to death strikes me as a dubious form of entertainment. I’m much more cautious about what violent films I’ll see as I get older; partially because the violence has become so pornographically gruesome, but also because it has become more difficult for me to view it as something fun to do, and not an ordeal to be endured.