National Post (National Edition)
WATCH, REWIND & WATCH AGAIN
DEEP DOWN, WE LIKE REWATCHING THE SAME OLD MOVIES AND TV SHOWS — ESPECIALLY DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC
When the pandemic struck, Julia Heney found comfort in the afterlife. Well, a show about the afterlife. Almost by accident, the 32-year-old Chicago resident fell into rewatching The Good Place after shutdowns began.
“It's just so soothing to me,” Heney said. “You can turn it on and, in any episode, they're going to try to be good. No one is going to be violently murdered. There's no huge, scary scenes that will pop out at you with the unexpected.”
Many have escalated their rewatching of favourite movies and TV shows during the pandemic, finding them to be creature comforts while stranded in their homes indefinitely, especially with the ever-growing number of streaming services making this content just a click away. All this rewatching raises the question: What makes something rewatchable in the first place, beyond the simple fact that you liked it?
People's reasons for rewatching — and their methods of doing so — vary. For some, the timeless activity has taken on a more creative form. Take Brooklyn resident Natasha Padilla, who began hosting a virtual “Zoom(ovie)” night with friends every Saturday, choosing various themes such as Christian Slater movies or summer flicks. Eventually, she began digitizing old VHS tapes from her closet, only to find herself rewatching classic MTV award shows and '90s commercials featuring Cindy Crawford and Little Richard. (Her take-away? “Everyone was shilling for some kind of sugar.”)
Or Maggie Mertens, a 33-year-old freelance writer in Seattle who teamed up with her college friend and fellow journalist Megan Burbank to dive back into Gilmore Girls “to deal with the stress” and to give “us something else to talk about.” They took things a step further and started a newsletter on Substack called Gilmore Women, in which, as its tag line states, they “discuss everything that's wrong with every episode of Gilmore Girls & why we still love it.”
“It's literally the show I would watch when I was a heartbroken teen,” Mertens said in a Twitter direct message when asked why they chose Gilmore Girls. “So something about it just being so familiar, I think. And reminding me of simpler times, maybe?” But, like many older programs, aspects of it haven't aged well, so the newsletter allows the two to explore those issues while relishing in “this world where the drama is about feelings and family connection and not ALL the big-picture world problems outside.”
Movies are also getting revisits, and not everyone is reaching for soothing fare. Many of those cinefans are chronicling their treks into the past on Letterboxd, a social media platform dedicated to publicly journaling movie-watching.
The communal aspect of the platform proved particularly enticing during isolation. David Larkin, the company's “business guy,” as he describes himself, said the rate of commenting among its three million users nearly doubled in 2020. And because users follow one another, one's rewatch of, say, Erin Brockovich might prompt others to follow suit.
Larkin followed many personal rewatch journeys while embarking on a couple of his own. He screened all of Michael Mann's movies, from Heat (a rewatch for about the 12th time) to Blackhat (an unfortunate first-timer).
“He made three movies almost in a row about corrupt cops in New York. It was so interesting to watch them sequentially and see how the themes got more complex and morally ambiguous,” Larkin said. “It was a great opportunity to rewatch some of your favourites and be more thoughtful about them.”
While being trapped in homes may have converted some folks into rewatchers, the contingent was strong even before the pandemic. No one understands the pleasure of rewatching old movies better than the hosts of the Ringer podcast The Rewatchables.
In each episode, a roundtable of Ringer personalities such as Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey and Mallory Rubin dive deeply into a movie they deem rewatchable — ranging from The Godfather to Home Alone to Den of Thieves. They break each episode into various categories, including “most re-watchable scene,” “what's aged the worst (and best)?” and “the Dion Waiters heat check award,” which is given to an actor who does the most with the least amount of screen time, named for a National Basketball Association player prone to hot streaks during games.
Clay Routledge, a professor of management at North Dakota State University, suggested the impulse to rewatch such films comes from the fact that “we're meaning-making animals, as humans.” We like to ask: Who am I? What made me who I am? Revisiting the movies and TV shows we grew up on can feel like a rumination on those questions.
“It's the way our minds naturally work, trying to find some continuity and connection across time,” he said.
The networks figured out how to select a movie that sparks such connections — often one that “captures the collective attention of our culture, which serve as time stamps,” like Jaws is to summer in the 1970s. And they began replaying these films ad nauseam, creating ever more connections.
“It's comforting,” Padilla said of her Zoom movie nights and her personal pandemic rewatching. “These are reliable things, where you can flash back to a happier, simpler time in your life.”