Spiderman, get off my lawn!

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Millennials seem to have little use for old movies

For young people, the focus seems to be on what can be talked about now — new movies serve an immediate social function. Old films are being forgotten.

By Neal Gabler

A lot of folks have wondered whether it is too soon, just 10 years after the release of the original film and five years after the third installment, to relaunch Spider-Man. When questioned, a producer of the new picture snapped that anyone who asked that is "too old." He may have been dismissively arrogant, especially to geriatrics over 30, but he may also have been right.

Obviously, remakes are nothing new, even if the time between the original and the next version has shrunk dramatically. As Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures, which distributed the new "Spider-Man," said, "Five years is a lifetime in the movie business," by which she really meant it is a lifetime for the young audiences to which the movie business makes its primary appeal.

But the new "Spider-Man" betrays something else — something important about the young audience's relationship to film. Young people, so-called millennials, don't seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to warrant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents' movies than they are in wearing their parents' clothes. Indeed, novelty may be the new narcissism. It obliterates the past in the fascination with the present.

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What this points to is that movies may have become a kind of "MacGuffin" — an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends' romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film's intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about. In any case, old movies clearly cannot serve this community-building function as they once did. More, the immediacy of social networking, a system in which one tweet supplants another every millisecond, militates against anything that is 10 minutes old, much less 10 years.

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All of this makes it tough not only for old movies to survive but for movie history to matter. There is a sense that if you can't tweet about it or post a comment about it on your Facebook wall, it has no value. Once, not so long ago, old and new movies, middle-aged audiences and young audiences, happily coexisted. Movies brought us together. Now a chasm widens between the new and the old, one aesthetic and another, one generation and another. It widens until the past recedes into nothingness, leaving us with an endless stream of the very latest with no regard for what came before. Old movies are now like dinosaurs, and like dinosaurs, they are threatened with extinction.

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