I wonder how many classics are ruined that way.
I was in B&N the other week, and saw a father buying “Jane Eyre” and “Candide” for his nine-year-old. (And was transported to when my dad made me read Don Quixote at about the same age) And while it’s great that the dad’s encouraging his daughter to read, he was really playing up both books. You don’t understand those books at that age, you simply haven’t got the experience for it.
And, IMHO, the movie The Graduate. Saw that as a new college freshman and was deeply moved by the protagonist’s plight. Saw it again just before graduating and was like “Hey moron, what are you anyway, a POW in a Nazi camp or something? They’re your parents, they don’t hate you, at least try to TALK to them!”
Another would be Madame Bovary. I read it in high school, because it was on the list of 100 greatest books. I told my English teacher that Emma was an idiot. She told me to read it again in 20 years. I did, and my heart about broke for her. A little life experience made a different book.
Clerks was hilarious when I was 20. After I graduated from college it was still funny, but given my situation I could identify with Dante and Randall’s laziness. I could still feel myself settling into a comfort zone as they had. The movie lit a fire under my ass, in that respect.
It was the same with Office Space. I appreciated the jokes when I saw it at 19, but it really resonated with me when I saw it again at 24. Interviews had left me pretty frustrated, so I could relate to Peter’s angst. But what I took from the movie is that not being 100% satisfied with your career doesn’t mean that you’re in the wrong place.
Also, I loved Harold and Kumar, but it seems that it caters to people who were college students or just getting into the real world at any point during the last five years, give or take. I strongly suspect that people younger than that wouldn’t really relate to it, while anyone over the age of 30 might think it was hopelessly stupid. Call it a generational thing.
And I agree on The Graduate and Calvin and Hobbes.
I just read it last year and while I certainly sympathised with her situation, my heart about broke for her simp of a husband. I found Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street to be a much more sympathetic character in the repressed wife vein.
I think the move Lost in Translation fits neatly into this catagory. All of the people that I know that hated this movie are at least under 30, if not 25. I think you need some experience under your belt to appreciate what Bill Murray’s character is going through.
I’m 52 and I’d prefer having my teeth drilled with a jackhammer than ever seeing another minute of this awful film again.
I’m under 25 and I loved this film.
I’d agree with you there, looking at it from the other side of the fence (23 here). I didn’t hate the film, but it was very “meh” for me.
Sideways seems to be another similar one. The critics all rave about it, but the trailers I’ve seen for it leave me feeling cold. Definitely a mid-life crisis movie, and I’m nowhere near that stage yet.
I’m really intrigued by PRR’s suggestion that Robertson Davies is for the maturer reader – thinking about it, lots of his narrators are quite old, and, as you say, there’s lots in there about what age and experience can teach you. (And count this as another recommendation, twickster, if you haven’t had enough already. ;-))
It seems that, for some books, you get more out of them when you haven’t experienced what they’re describing (Pride and Prejudice, for eg, I wouldn’t have found so enchanting if I’d already fallen in love) but others do need you emphathise quite closely. I hated Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in school because I found their indolent, obsessive sexuality offputting, but now I’ve been lucky enough to have lots of good sex courtesy of the current mr fortean I get far more out of the play. 
I loved Sideways, too. And About Schmidt, both the novel and the movie, should anyone get around to mentioning that. I’d peg myself as prematurely old, but then again, I also love Catcher In The Rye, gangsta rap and Napoleon Dynamite.
Okay, how about Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler. Ostensibly a memoir by an Alzheimer’s patient, with edits by his son, it requires a certain amount of life experience to really appreciate.
I knew I was getting old when I’d see a teenager bitch about her “clueless” parents, and I sympathized with the parents.
Rebel Without A Cause – you want a cause, I’ll give you one. Now rake that yard, dammit! And be home by 9!!
True enough. As his last work of fiction it also required a fair amount of life experience to write as well.
I’ve maintained for years that Rocky and Bullwinkle was the best adult cartoon series ever made.
True – but kids dig it also, albeit on a completely different level. I’m talking about stuff that kids either totally get whooshed by, as with Flying Ramen Monster’s reaction to Brokeback Mountain, or things that they think are really cool but don’t have the life experience to fully appreciate, like my own reaction to Magister Ludi.
Hm. I wonder what Anna Karenina would look like to me as an adult? And, damn, show-off that I was, I read Remembrance of Things Past (yeah, all of it) in my early 20s. Didn’t get a freakin’ thing out of it except bragging rights.
The first movie I ever saw that I really had to struggle to keep pace with was Wall Street. I’d seen movies that didn’t have any kids or teenagers in them, but this was the first one I’d seen that was really for grown-ups. Compare it with 9 to 5, which I’d seen when I was 10 and thought was terrific. That had a very simple premise: Dabney Coleman’s character was a jerk to his employees, so they took matters into their own hands. But Wall Street was a different matter entirely. During the scene with the younger and older Sheens, I honestly didn’t know whose side I was on, because I’d never thought about that issue before: integrity vs. ambition.
Not that I thought in those terms, of course. But I was able to understand the concept when it was presented on a smaller scale. Daryl Hannah’s character, the interior decorator, has a scene where she analyzes the decorating scheme in someone’s house (Gekko’s? I forget.) She’s attuned to the flaws in it, but the message is, if someone asks her to do something that pains her artistic sensibilities, whatever. They’re the client, and as long as the check clears, they can mix Louis XV with Early American for all she cares. Plus which, many of her clients simply don’t have a clue, or care, what the end result looks like: they’re paying her to give the appearance of taste, and therefore success. Paying her to think for them, IOW. Now that’s power.
Why was Charlie Brown not excited about Christmas?
Two things in particular come to mind re. maturity and music appreciation:
a shifting interest from the more bombastic (and often thematic) symphonic works to chamber music. I went through a heavy classical-music immersion phase as a teenager, but I was never able to fully appreciate the refined pleasures of chamber ensembles until I was well into my 20’s. (Now I’m more interested in original film scores, but that’s another story.)
an empathetic, mixed romantic/Marxist appreciation of the efforts of even the worst pop music acts. (Even when I dislike their music, I see them as struggling working-class heroes, who’re trying to be creative and express themselves, writing and recording music that may never find an audience, busting their butts for a recording contract that’s totally screwing them over, striving against all odds, spending arduous months or years on the road…). Whereas my younger self would dismiss, with derisive laughter, entire sub-genres of pop music and particular musicians as essentially soulless purveyors of worthless dreck, now I’m much more forgiving of them as persons and even as artists. (My, that’s big of me. :rolleyes: )
I first read Orwell’s Animal Farm when I was, I think, nine. I “got it” fine, though I didn’t know anything about history.
I’ve re-read it regularly ever since, and it gets less and less funny every time.