Yesterday I watched an old movie with my mom. It was, from 1954, The Naked Jungle, starring Eleanor Parker and Charlton(pre 10 Commandments) Heston.
I first saw it on TV when I was a kid, and let me tell you the army ants creeped me out big time. The romance aspect didn’t register. I saw it again when I was perhaps in the seventh grade, I would have been a young and naive twelve. By this time the romance, or love/hate part of the story, held a little more attention.
But I’ve seen it several times as a full grown adult, and now some of the dialogue makes me go “Oh, that’s what was meant!” When Parker, who was a widow, say’s “If you knew more about music you’d know a piano is better when it’s played!” she’s replying cleverly to Heston’s implication she’s “spoiled goods” for having already been with another man. Or when he tells her how young he was when he came to the jungles of South America, and how nobody ever called him by the name used for “men who go to the villages at night” I figure he’s saying he’s never actually had relations with a woman. That sort of stuff sailed right over my head when I was a kid.
Are there movies of books you understand more, or differently, based on when or how often you have seen them?
The Usual Suspects, natch. Watching that movie the second time is entirely different from watching it the first time. After that, YMMV.
The second time I read Tristram Shandy it was a very different book from the first time. Alas, I have been lax in meeting my English professor’s charge to re-read it every five years and see how it changes over my life.
The biggest example for me is C. S. Lewis’ A Horse and his Boy, from the Narnia series. There were a ton of theological references woven into the text, that I didn’t notice at all as a child (though I did recognize a lot of them in the other books). It’s gone from being one of my least favorite of the Narnia books to being one of my favorites.
My favorite example of this is I Capture the Castle, which on the surface is a teen coming of age/romance novel written in the 1950s (weirdly, by the same author who wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians). But the characters are so complex and subtly drawn and have such layered motivations that I find new things to like about it every time I read it.
Loads of books I read as a child are very different to read as an adult (and the best ones grow with you) - the Little House on the Prairie books, definitely, and My Friend Flicka and the sequels come to mind. In both now the parents are by far more interesting than the kids.
I used to have a rule of thumb for movies I saw multiple times, back when the only way to see a movie was in the theater (or wait years for it to show up on T.V.)
First viewing = plot
Second viewing = characters
Third viewing = visuals
Fourth viewing = sound/music
Those were the specific things I tended to notice on each viewing. For books, context definitely plays a huge role. I find that a book can change immensely for me just based on what I learn about the author and the circumstances under which it was written. Tess of the D’Ubervilles was a completely different book for me in high school and in college. In high school, I could barely understand it and disliked it; in college I immediately followed it up with Hardy’s other works.
I first read Moby Dick for a high school English class. And hated it. In college, I bought a copy on impulse, and read it cover-to-cover. When you are not forced to read it, it’s a fun book.
I first read Logan’s Run when I was in junior high school. Most of the characters were older than me, so the fact that they were all teenagers never registered in my brain. I read it again, when I was 22. Now all of the characters, except one, were younger than me. The doctors, the cops, the homicidal maniacs, everybody! It was a wierd experience.
I read ‘Wuthering Heights’ in jr high school. thought it was fine, romantic. Re read as an adult - and was horrified by the characters, how selfish, thoughtless & generally un likeable they are. truly a hateful book, nothing resembling “love” in the book at all. hate it now.
As a child, I found the Little House books to be boring. As an adult, I find them fascinating. I was particularly affected by the one about the dreadful winter…a whole town was slowly starving to death over a particularly harsh winter, because no supplies could get through. Laura and her father twisted hay or straw into bundles to burn for warmth, for instance, and everyone took turns grinding grain in a coffee mill. I DID wonder why Laura and her father went out into the shed to twist the straw or hay, rather than bringing it back into the house to be warm while they twisted.
I went to a used book store on Sunday, and was browsing the kids’ section for donation materials. I picked up Flicka, and I’ve read a few pages of it. Already, I can tell that my sympathies lie with the father now, rather than the younger daydreaming boy. When I was a kid, I completely sympathized with the boy, and thought that he should be given a horse in order to prove that he could take care of it. As an adult, though, I know that it’s not a good idea to give a child an expensive item, and especially not a living creature, if he’s shown that he’s careless and irresponsible with other things.
I’ll never like most of The Little Prince (there is one individual story I like - one), but when it was first dumped on me I was 6 or 7 - definitely not the target age for it. Only because a book’s main character is a kid doesn’t mean it’s a book for kids. I threw it against the wall in a fit of rage within the first few pages…
Now I find most of it way too sugary, but I don’t throw it against the wall.
The same applies to many books which I had to read in school: they simply were not age-appropriate. At 13, even the “selected” bits of El Quijote we got fed were way over our heads; at 43, I read both volumes cover-to-cover.
Before I entered my Ph. D. program, I read a novel by one of the men I knew would be my instructor, a “getting to know you” kind of thing. I picked a book that won a few prizes, that was slim, and which --bonus!–turned out to be about academic life.
I came away impressed with how hard getting a Ph. D. would be. In it, someone takes and fails his oral exam in literature, and I thought “Man, those are tough questions, and he’s giving good answers. Why did he fail?”
When I got my doctorate, a few years later, I re-read the book. Now I understood: the questions I thought were so hard were softballs, and his answers, that I thought were so good, were weak attempts to bull his way through. I would have flunked him, too, only not so gently.
Amazing what a little knowledge will do for you. I was amazed that anyone who hadn’t gotten a grad education ever made sense of this book, but maybe I was just particularly ignorant and ill-read for a member of the general public (with a BA and an MA.)
I hated Winnie the Pooh as a kid. Once I read it later, I could appreciate it. Like Alice in Wonderland, it’s categorized incorrectly as a children’s book, but children really can’t understand either.
I had an opposite reaction. I hated it when I read it in high school. Throw it against the wall hate. Read it a couple of months ago and couldn’t put it down. Yes, the two main characters especially are horrible beasts, but they are fascinating beasts, especially Catherine.
Go back and reread the whole thing - the parents’ relationship through the whole trilogy of books is so realistic and can be so heartbreaking - there are times when they drift apart, and then back together again, in such a real way.
I read* As Good As It Gets* differently every time I see it. I watch it maybe every two years, and every time my own take on the world has changed enough that I see the movie in a new light.
When BSG (The reboot) was playing on SyFy, it played on Friday nights.
Friday night was also my beer drinking night. Yep, that was my thing on Friday nights. Drinking beer and watching my geeky sci-fi shows.
Well, just recently, I decided to rewatch the entire series. This time sans the beer.
Boy! What a difference! I’m a little embarrassed to admit I missed a good 30 - 40% of what was going on the first time around.
The work is not different at all. Nothing has changed there but you have changed. “It” is the combination of the work and the viewer. So it will be a different combination than any previous viewing.
I just listened to this. I’d read it thirty years ago, but this time I was struck by how much fun Lewis had writing it. The talking horse is so dismissive of human inferiorities like two legs and limited digestion (“I suppose, like all humans, you won’t eat natural food like grass and oats… you’re rum little creatures, you humans.”). I appreciate the adventure and humor more now that I’m not as “mature”.
Oh, and there’s a movie that is totally different the second time you see it, but the first rule is not to talk about it…
