How Many Times Should You See A Movie

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Nathan Lee, over at Slate, gives me a concrete example of something I’ve read a thousand times in movie critic speak.

And that much-maligned Billy the Kid section now seems to me, after three viewings, the heart of the entire project, the extra dimension Haynes needs to elevate his material beyond a merely (merely!) dizzyingly (wheee!) clever freefall through, as one of the Bobs puts it, “sign language.” This is where Haynes takes his biggest imaginative risk and finds his richest emotional payoff. It’s right on the edge of risible, no doubt (“The greater the success,” as Bresson once wrote, “the closer it verges on failure”), but would the movie really be better without it?

Dana Stevens, however, writes:

That Richard-Gere-as-Billy-the-Kid segment kind of blew, and I don’t mean in the wind.

Assume for the thread that they’re both right. If you watch the scene once it’s offputting and a failure, but if you manage to get through the movie three times the connections come together and it all works gloriously.

Now forget I’m Not There and go for the big general questions.

Can a movie be good if it takes three (or two or more) viewings to understand it sufficiently?

Does that mean that the movie is too wonderfully dense to take in all at once or that it is so poorly constructed that it can’t be taken in all at once?

Should a movie surprise you and be about that initial reveal or should a movie be familiar and fully absorbed before one looks seriously at it?

Do you learn to delve more deeply into the movie the third time through or do you just start to read things into it to justify the time spent.

Does it make a difference if the three viewings are one right after the other or several years apart?

How many movies do you view multiple times? Why? How many movies do you view just once? Why?

What kinds of insights do you usually get after multiple viewing that you didn’t see at first?

I’m torn on these questions. I could answer “good” on even days and “bad” on odd days and make real cases for both. And my guess is that the kind of movies that people tend to watch the most times don’t repay much in deep psychological understanding while the deep psychological movies that might be worth the effort never get viewed again by the majority of watchers. Are you different if you watch movies over and over? Has DVDs and Netflix and cable tv changed that? Is is different for recent movies than for oft-repeated classics?

Lots of questions. Pick any movie you want to talk about. Doesn’t have to be I’m Not There. For the record, though, I saw the movie once, and I’m with Dana.

[GuanoLad]

I think the assumption that an audience member will probably watch the movie more than once if they enjoy it is a sound one, and it’s therefore justifiable to make a movie knowing that a second or third watching may be required to understand it fully.

But not at the expense of the rest of the film. You can’t just make a confusing maze of weirdness that is only comprehensible if you watch it at least three times, but is otherwise dreck.

[OtakuLoki]

I think Guano Lad’s view is probably the best one. I can think of a number of films where I’ve re-watched and found something new in them or layers of subtlety that I missed the first time around.

But, before I’m going to review a movie like that, I have to have found the original viewing enjoyable. If that first part doesn’t work, the rest is dross.

[Le_Comte_de_Mortain]

I didn’t at all enjoy The Talented Mr Ripley the first time I saw it, but on a second viewing I found myself appreciating it. It is now one of my favourite films, and I wouldn’t mark it down just because I didn’t like it the first time. I judge a film on how it affects me now.

[Quartz]

@GuanoLad

I think the assumption that an audience member will probably watch the movie more than once if they enjoy it is a sound one, and it’s therefore justifiable to make a movie knowing that a second or third watching may be required to understand it fully.

I’m not so sure about this. I wonder if these days there are two primary objectives: first to get the moviegoer to recommend the movie, and second to get the moviegoer to buy the DVD? Although I suppose buying the DVD counts as a ‘second or third watching’.

[GuanoLad]

@Quartz

Although I suppose buying the DVD counts as a ‘second or third watching’.

Of course! I don’t think the decision to design the film for repeated viewings is a financial one, but is a response to the existence of home theatre, where it will be almost inevitable; it’s a very different expectation now than it was 40 years and more ago, so it gives modern filmmakers more leeway to experiment in this way.

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

There are certainly some films that are worthy of repeated viewings. A couple ofexamples off the top of my head

The Usual Suspects - knowing the ending makes a big difference to the rest of the film

Airplane - just so that you get all the jokes (unless, of course you sat through it stony faced the first time).

[CalMeacham]

It’s a complex question (set of questions, in fact), and, of course, it doesn’t have a simple answer. But it seems clear to me that a movie that has no initial appeal won’t invite repeated viewings. Even if some core group of critics holds that “No, you just have to give this a chance – it’s not as bad as it appears at first”, it seems to me that a film that has no hook to keep the viewer coming back for the required re-viewing has to be judged a failure.

And I’m very annoyed by critics who seem to think that you should know the essentials going in, and that there’s no place for revelation or surprises in movies. I hear and read this all the time, and it pisses me off (especially when the critics then go on to reveal crucial plot points. Roger Ebert did this a couple of years ago with “The Human Stain”, claiming he had the director’s permission. I find it hard to believe.). If the filmmakers didn’t thi nk there was a point to keeping this information hidden until a dramatic mopment, they would’ve told us about it up front, the way traditional Chinese mysteries tell you the murder at the beginning.

As for how many times you should see a film, I don’t know how you can answer that. There are details and plot points to movies (and books) that I only discover years later, after more viewings/readings than I can count. Often it depends upon the biewer’s experiences, knowledge, and maturity and personal development. How the hell can you quantify that for one person, let alone a collection of disparate viewers? I will say that the main thrust and central implications ought to be clear by the second viewing, or else something’s wrong.

[Wee_Bairn]

Once and only once- too many movies out there to spend time rewatching something you’ve already seen, unless its something like Memento or He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not with a neat trick and you want to rewatch for the clues you missed.

[Le_Comte_de_Mortain]

@CalMeacham

And I’m very annoyed by critics who seem to think that you should know the essentials going in, and that there’s no place for revelation or surprises in movies. I hear and read this all the time, and it pisses me off (especially when the critics then go on to reveal crucial plot points. Roger Ebert did this a couple of years ago with “The Human Stain”, claiming he had the director’s permission. I find it hard to believe.). If the filmmakers didn’t thi nk there was a point to keeping this information hidden until a dramatic mopment, they would’ve told us about it up front, the way traditional Chinese mysteries tell you the murder at the beginning.

I think there is a case often for being informed about the spirit or general sense of a film before viewing (although not specific plot points). I have sometimes been misled by previews and advertising into expecting the wrong kind of film and therefore been disappointed. When I saw ‘Tell No One’ I would have enjoyed it much more I think if I had known it was basically a conventional thriller. Instead I was preparing myself for an ambiguous and possibly tragic ending, like ‘Caché’.

[CalMeacham]

I think there is a case often for being informed about the spirit or general sense of a film before viewing (although not specific plot points). I have sometimes been misled by previews and advertising into expecting the wrong kind of film and therefore been disappointed. When I saw ‘Tell No One’ I would have enjoyed it much more I think if I had known it was basically a conventional thriller. Instead I was preparing myself for an ambiguous and possibly tragic ending, like ‘Caché’.

I certainly deplore the trend of advertising a movie as something it’s not (The current film the vBucket List is a case in point. It’s asdvertised as a whacky comedy, a la the End, but a Doper hass already claimed it’s definitrely not that).
But that’s light-years away from revealing surprises and hidden plot points.

[msmith537]

The answer is “as many times as you feel like”.

I can watch The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator and T2, Die Hards 1 and 3, Braveheart, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, Fight Club, Office Space, Old School, Anchorman, and probably a hundred other movies every single time they are on TV.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen them a hundred times or already know the plot twists or I can recite half the dialogue from memory. They are just enjoyable movies to watch.

Of course now that I have a 50" HDTV, I feel compelled to watch every movie again in high dev.

[NoCoolUserName]

Can a movie be good if it takes three (or two or more) viewings to understand it sufficiently?

It can be, but the chance that most people will discover its goodness will be slight. As already said by others, there are too many movies, good movies, out there to spend a lot of time re-viewing something that might be good if you only take several more hours to see it multiple times.

Does that mean that the movie is too wonderfully dense to take in all at once or that it is so poorly constructed that it can’t be taken in all at once?

Could be either. But the chance that anyone will be able to sort it out is small if it doesn’t make a good first impression. See #1.

Should a movie surprise you and be about that initial reveal or should a movie be familiar and fully absorbed before one looks seriously at it?

A good movie can do both. Or either. Or neither. The surprise is only a small part of what makes a good movie. The previously referenced Usual Suspects is an excellent example. The reveal is wonderful, but when you watch it again, the fact that you know the surprise changes your perception of the movie and it is wonderful again in a different way.

Do you learn to delve more deeply into the movie the third time through or do you just start to read things into it to justify the time spent.

Can’t answer this one. I see a movie another time because it was good the first time and I want to get more out of it. If I don’t get more the 2nd time, I won’t watch it a 3rd.

Does it make a difference if the three viewings are one right after the other or several years apart?

Of course. Along with your new perceptions because you’ve seen it before, the time you have spend mulling it over, as well as your new experiences in the world, and personal growth (whatever that may be) change how you see a film. A young person might see their favorite film many times thinking it’s the best thing ever made. Then after some years they could see it again and find it juvenile and shallow. “In the eye of the beholder” and all that.

How many movies do you view multiple times? Why? How many movies do you view just once? Why?

This varies.
Some I watch again for plot detail: Usual Suspects, Memento.
Some because they’re old friends and I’m in that sort of mood: Maltese Falcon, Dial M for Murder.
Some because the subject matter and performance are so compelling that I just must: Man for All Seasons, Lion in Winter.
Others just because they’re fun: Galaxy Quest, 39 Steps.

What kinds of insights do you usually get after multiple viewing that you didn’t see at first?

All sorts. I might see how beautifully a shot is framed, maybe a particular line turns out to be foreshadowing that I missed previously, sometimes it’s a nuance in a performance that I missed because I was paying attention to something else the first time around. Or maybe my old brain has simply forgotten some of the things I liked about a movie and I want to be reminded.

I’m torn on these questions. I could answer “good” on even days and “bad” on odd days and make real cases for both. And my guess is that the kind of movies that people tend to watch the most times don’t repay much in deep psychological understanding while the deep psychological movies that might be worth the effort never get viewed again by the majority of watchers. Are you different if you watch movies over and over? Has DVDs and Netflix and cable tv changed that? Is is different for recent movies than for oft-repeated classics?

The availability of at-will home viewing has completely changed our capability of understanding audio-visual artistic efforts. I can’t imagine that filmmakers are unaware of this. On the other hand, many of the movies that I watch multiple times are classics that were made before the home viewing revolution was even imagined (except by Science Fiction writers).

IMHO you can’t generalize “the kind of movies that people tend to watch the most times” at all. Certainly most younger viewers watch works that are not so deep, and I know at least one mature, and quite intelligent, person who considers The Matrix to be “the best film ever made.” I’m happy for him. But others watch “important” or “artistic” works and get considerable insight, and maybe even some of that personal growth, out of them.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@msmith537

The answer is “as many times as you feel like”.

I didn’t mean the question in the title to be read literally. I was going for something more along the lines of “How many times should you have to see a movie before you understand the director’s full intent?”

And the literal answer will obviously vary from movie to movie. I was just trying to start a discussion on an issue I’m not settled on.

[lissener]

I think the real implied question, judging from the tenor of the responses, is Should a filmmaker ever make a film that is more complex than can be absorbed upon first viewing? The resounding local consensus seems to be No: he must make it so that everything of value is all out on the surface. This of course is silly.

Each of you is free to avoid films that offer anything beyond simple surface story, but it’s silly to complain when a filmmaker chooses to make something worth digging for, because some of us like digging.

No one–paraphrasing **Cervaise **here–gets angry that James Joyce wrote books that require serious study in order to absorb all they have to offer, but somehow it’s “pretentious”–or whatever the word of the day is–when a filmmaker takes his medium as seriously as an art form as Joyce took writing.

Just because movies can be made with no other goal than a fleeting entertainment doesn’t mean that all movies should be made to accommodate the audience who wants nothing more.

Luckily, there are all kinds of filmmakers and all kinds of films.

[John_Mace]

Well said, Lissener. I agree 100%. Personally, I don’t really like a movie all that much if it’s only good for one viewing. I know this is TV and not film, but I just finished my third viewing* of the 2nd season of HBO’s Rome, and I liked it as much, if not more, than the first time around.

*it’s been raining like a mo-fo around here for the past week or so.

[MovieMogul]

Lissener beat me to it as well (and more succinctly and to-the-point than I probably would have managed). I love revisiting films for a variety of reasons–even ones that I think I might have misjudged the first time around. Sometimes my opinion changes, and sometimes it doesn’t. There are “canonical” films that I last saw in college. Part of me is perfectly content knowing I saw them once, but part of me knows that 15 years is a long time, and I’d like to think my taste has evolved and matured since then; maybe a film I dismissed back then is worthy of a second chance. And maybe the giddy alchemic reaction I have a first viewing is stunted when a second viewing doesn’t add as much to a movie I loved as I first hoped. Time and availability is always a factor, but even with so many movies out there I have yet to discover, revisiting films and unearthing new, wonderful things about movies I thought I already “knew” continues to be a personal pleasure.

But that’s me. Heck, I don’t even really consider a film “viewed” by me until I’ve seen it in a theater. Different strokes for different folks and all.

[OtakuLoki]

@lissener

I think the real implied question, judging from the tenor of the responses, is Should a filmmaker ever make a film that is more complex than can be absorbed upon first viewing? The resounding local consensus seems to be No: he must make it so that everything of value is all out on the surface. This of course is silly.

I think you’re proposing here an excluded middle. Either the film has to be completely transparent upon the first viewing, or it can be complex. And that wasn’t what I’d meant to set up, myself.

What I said was that a film had to be enjoyable on it’s first viewing. Which is not the same thing, at all.

I’m prefectly willing to go with a film and know that I’m missing things, if I find the overall ride enjoyable. For that matter, ISTR that there are a number of films where the audience perception changes, often dramatically, with repeated viewings, as the viewer becomes familiar enough with the work to spot subtleties that will pass by most viewers on the first viewing.

I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of such films, so I can’t offer you a huge list of films that I’ve enjoyed on the first viewing and found a different, and deeper, appreciation upon later viewings. And, well, I’ve not seen a film on the big screen for over two years, now.

If you’ll allow me to draw examples from anime, however, I think that Neon Genesis Evangelion offers a great deal of rewards for the viewer who goes back, having seen the whole run, and watches the show with the knowledge of what’s really going on. (Sorry, it’s the first example that comes to my mind - like I said, my viewing has been rather limited for the past several years.) But the original viewing, without that background knowledge, was something I found enjoyable, too. And if I hadn’t enjoyed the first viewing, I wouldn’t have bothered to re-watch and see the subtleties I’d missed my first run through.

A good, complex work, be it a book, poem, or movie is a treasure. But, I still contend that if it fails to entertain on the first run through for the audience it has failed in its purpose. Repeated study, or viewing, may reveal it to be a great work. But it won’t change my opinion that it may be flawed too.

To address Archive Guy’s point, though - I will say that’s based on the assumption that the viewer hasn’t changed during the interval between viewings. Tastes do change, to ignore that is to fall into the silliness that lissener has already accused some of us of falling into. The way I was reading the OP, however, the repeated viewings, to my mind, were those in a short time (no more than a few months) after the initial viewing. Gaining a different interpretation of a work, because the audience has changed, seems to me a different kind of situation than the one that the OP, or lissener, seems to be talking about.

[lissener]

FWIW, I was not excluding the middle; I was addressing the extreme that this board’s consensus seems to support.

ETA: On second thought, it’s not fair to call it a consensus. More like, the voices of the squeakiest wheels.

[MovieMogul]

@OtakuLoki

A good, complex work, be it a book, poem, or movie is a treasure. But, I still contend that if it fails to entertain on the first run through for the audience it has failed in its purpose. Repeated study, or viewing, may reveal it to be a great work. But it won’t change my opinion that it may be flawed too.

Sometimes, though, equal responsibility lies with the audience. Is it the work’s fault if the audience goes in with expectations that the work can’t live up to? If a work provokes when the audience wants to be placated, or if it subverts when the audience simply is looking for something familiar, does that make it flawed? There are plenty of different sets of expectations and different levels of receptiveness that a work faces when being consumed. Must it be considered a failure if it can’t be all things for everyone? That’s why I’d hesitate calling it “flawed” simply because it didn’t live up to my expectations. Some people are “entertained” by being challenged (even if that’s not what they were expecting), while some people consider that the antithesis of entertainment. Nobody will ever agree on everything, and while a critical consensus often develops over time, sometimes that consensus will run counter to what the general public considers “entertainment”. It doesn’t mean the work is flawed. It just means it’s not for everyone.