If I had a dime for every time in my adult life where I watched a movie I loved as a kid, got to the end, and thought “that wasn’t as good as I remember,” well … let’s just say I’d have a lot of dimes.
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This past weekend, though, I had the strange but pleasant experience of watching a movie from my childhood and thinking “huh, that wasn’t as bad as I remember.”
I’m using “childhood” loosely here—it was my senior year of college, which was (ahem) a few years ago. Thinking about myself now compared to myself then, though, I was absolutely still a kid in a lot of ways. So for the purposes of this post, it counts.
But I’m keeping you in suspense, aren’t I? Wondering what the movie is? (Hee, I should write the whole post and never say what it is. 😉)
Nah, I won’t do that. It’s Avalon High, the 2010 Disney Channel original movie.
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If you’re now staring at your monitor thinking “seriously, Mary?”, the answer is yes. When I watched this with my roommates in college, I remember a lot of groaning and eyerolling at all the obvious hints, foreshadowing, and traditionally overdone YA-ness of the time. This was deep in the years of Hunger Games and Twilight, so I, personally, was hyper-critical of teenage-girl protagonists at the time. Back then, my friends and I concluded the movie was good but if it had been a half hour longer and fleshed out some things, it would have been better.
Fast-forward (ahem) a few years (okay, 15 or so), and that assessment, for me, still stands. I would have loved another half hour to really dig into the story. But far from the groaning and eyerolling I did 15 years ago, I actually found myself really invested in the story and characters this time.
If you’ll pardon me while I put on my editor hat, there are a few takeaways here. First, media is a product of its time, and consuming it when it first comes out within the culture of the time makes for a very different experience than consuming it away from its initial appearance. To understand what I mean here, try rereading or rewatching a book or movie you haven’t experienced in 10, 15, or even 20 years. Compare the cultural backdrop of when it came out versus the backdrop of today as you do, and you’ll see how it represents a moment in history, a snapshot of a world. To take this a step further, think about how your current work in progress is a reflection of right now. Then, consider how it might be viewed in the world ten years from now. If you really want to dig deep, picture a few different worlds and how your work meets each.
And now for my psychology hat, the other thing at play here is how we change as we get older. When I watched Avalon High as a 21-year-old college student, I was desperately trying to distance myself from what I felt was the folly of my teen years. So I was far more critical of any and every little thing the characters did. (I was also realizing I wanted to go to grad school for creative writing, so I thought I knew everything about storytelling. Oh, past me …) Anyway, with 15 years, two degrees, and lots of life between then and now, I was able to watch Avalon High and enjoy it for what it is—a fun modern-day take on Arthurian legend with some teenagers who, honestly, were a lot less teenager-y than I thought back then.
I’m not telling you to go watch Avalon High. But if you want to, it is worth a watch, even if all you do is then come back here and tell me you can’t get 1.5 hours of your life back. 🦹♀️
Or you can pick another piece of media you haven’t interacted with in years and experience that instead.
And if you do, don’t forget to think culturally and psychologically about it.
👋 Fair travels,
Mary
P.S. A big thanks to Janson_G from Pixabay for the image.