The Ethical Cringe,or the Dated Film as Revelatory Genre

Abstract

In this essay, I propose both a definition and a pragmatic reclamation of the dated text—and specifically the dated film—not as endorsement or nostalgia or camp, but as embodied temporal revelation. In particular, I seek to reappropriate the (now) racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise ethically compromised film as a means of seeing ideology, of perceiving societal change, of re-cognizing the contingency of every historical moment, including our own. Indeed, I define the dated film here as one that provokes the embodied experience of contemporary ethics as such. Presentist critiques of the past, however well-intentioned, inadvertently reify the present and its ideologies. They erroneously imply, like Francis Fukuyama, that we have reached the “end of history,” that our values now are (and should be) eternal. The dated film, then, serves as an antidote to the hubris of the present and opens onto greater possibilities for the future.

“That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what is meant to be.”

Powers (2018, 375), The Overstory

“Time is only a word to designate a set of conditions of possibility.”

Rancière (2020, 118), “Anachronism and the Conflict of Times.”

Inscriptive media—those that leave traces others may later encounter—put us in an estranged relation to the present moment. Reading a book by an author no longer alive, I am conscious of confronting the words of the dead, of the past speaking to me through silent, inked shapes on a page, and—while this experience through reading has occurred for millennia now—such temporal estrangement has only deepened with the invention of sound and image recording technologies. Indeed, the past few generations may have experienced this estrangement most strongly as the experiential intensities of recorded media have escalated. Today, I can press a button to actually see, hear, and feel what the 1930s, or 1970s, or early 2000s were like—not so much as representations of but as emanations from a different moment, no matter what time period is represented. Even period pieces attempting to recreate a past age or esthetic, always self-conscious about producing pastness, are simultaneously unselfconscious about their present in relation to the future. And it is this unselfconsciousness toward the future that allows readers and viewers of our present to experience the pastness of the past, as out-of-step with the now. Casual sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on are precisely that: casual, unaware of the offense they may now generate. We cannot fully experience the biases of the present because we are inside it, but now we can viscerally experience those of the past, albeit as mediated ghosts, in the form of the dated text. ¹ By definition, the dated text throws us out of the present, disorienting us in time. While our discomfort may impel us to turn away from the dated text, I want to argue that the experience of temporal miscorrelation it instigates is not necessarily a bad thing.

In this essay, I propose both a definition and a pragmatic reclamation of the dated text—and specifically the dated film—not as endorsement or nostalgia or camp, but as embodied temporal revelation. ² In particular, I seek to reappropriate the (now) racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise ethically compromised film as a means of seeing ideology, of perceiving societal change, of re-cognizing the contingency of every historical moment, including our own. Indeed, I define the dated film here as one that provokes the embodied experience of contemporary ethics as such. Presentist critiques of the past, however well-intentioned, inadvertently reify the present and its ideologies. They erroneously imply, like Fukuyama (1989), that we have reached the “end of history,” that our values now are (and should be) eternal. ³ As much as one might like to think this true, it is not. The dated film, then, serves as an antidote to the hubris of the present and opens onto greater possibilities for the future.

Defining the Dated Film

Being dated, of course, is not exactly the same thing as being old. Some films from years ago can feel more or less in sync with the current moment while some quite recent films may feel, upon a slightly later viewing, out of step with the now. Synonyms for dated include old-fashioned, passé, and behind the times. These terms all imply pastness. However, the “dated” does not, at least not directly. It simply signifies that the object is “of its time.”

So, what does it mean for a film to be dated? Clewis (2012) has suggested that for a film to read as dated, certain aspects of the film must “become obtrusive in their failure to achieve their intended function.” He further argues that these aspects must have been “unobtrusive when the film first appeared” and that the approach to these aspects in current films must be “in some objective sense superior to what it was at the time of the film’s release.” ⁴ While this is a useful starting place for discussion, I argue that datedness is precisely not about the superiority of the present. It is instead a matter of preceding a particular transformative moment, whether this is a shift in esthetic norms or in cultural values, and—crucially—of betraying that precedence to the audience.

Esthetic datedness is distinct from cultural datedness. Genre films that depend on state-of-the-art graphics quickly date because new graphics technologies are constantly being developed. What was, in Prince’s (1996) term, “perceptually realistic” in a 1980s science fiction movie like Tron (Steven Lisberger 1982) likely seemed unconvincing even to 1990s audiences, and for those used to the computer graphics of the present moment, they seem downright ridiculous. ⁵ Blackmore (2007) wrote in 2007, “What passed for computer speed that made the eye wince in 1982 when Syd Mead’s light cycles shot across Tron’s mainframe game board is now a laughable dribble of action seen retrospectively with affection by its creators and fans.” ⁶ Such laughability will likely only increase as more time passes. This, however, does not make newer technologies superior; it simply makes them newer. Moreover, the graphics that feel so immersive right now will also date, so that in another ten or twenty years, they will feel as laughable as Tron does today. Notably, such esthetic dating is not only a matter of the technologies available at a given moment but also what styles are popular at that time. Even films that do not deploy special effects now look esthetically dated to us simply because they use a film stock that is no longer widely used or deploy cinematographic techniques that are not currently in fashion. Moreover, esthetic datedness generally does not necessarily pose an ethical problem. It is more likely to give rise to a nostalgic or campy mode of spectatorship, which enjoys the pastness of the text but does not find it disturbing or offensive.

Cultural datedness can be harder to trace to a particular moment because cultural norms are not introduced at trade shows; they tend to shift more gradually, the change often imperceptible until after the fact. However, certain events can help us locate these shifts. For instance, many comedies made even in the past few decades but before the 2006 #MeToo movement made jokes about sexual harassment that—post-#MeToo—simply are not funny to a lot of people anymore. While sexual behavior is still highly charged and potentially contentious, it is quite clear that now (in 2023), at least within mainstream cultural circles, sexual harassment can no longer be written for laughs. ⁷ The culturally dated film refers us back to a particular moment in which certain things were sayable that no longer are.

Indeed, the opposite of the dated is not the new but, rather, the timeless—if such a thing truly exists. It is crucial to note, however, that datedness is not a function of the text itself; it is, rather, a relation between the text and a given audience at a given moment. In other words, it is a dated film for a particular audience now. In fact, although datedness must accrue over time, the same film may not read as dated for every viewer even in the same moment. Different groups of people, contemporaries within objective time, in a sense live in different “time zones,” as it were, when it comes to ideological and ethical values. ⁸ Datedness, then, is not an attribute of a film but rather a historically and culturally—even subculturally—situated viewing experience.

The Temporal Other

For me, the experience of watching a dated film is punctuated by moments when my body physically responds in the form of a cringe. My arm and leg muscles tighten, my shoulders rise as if I might retract my head like a tortoise, a hollow feeling fills my stomach. At moments, I jerk backward, wincing and grimacing as if in physical pain. Although some comedies intentionally induce cringing sensations in order to make people laugh, the cringe I am describing finds no release in laughter. The sensation is similar to that of shame; even though no one is looking at me, I still feel embarrassed. To state the obvious, this is not a pleasant feeling. One possible reaction to the cringe is anger or offense. Some of this may be rooted in its relation to shame, a miserable emotion people often transform into anger to escape. When I cringe at the dated film, I feel ashamed, both for those onscreen and those behind the camera, trapped in their—from the perspective of now—retrograde views of racial, gender, or sexual identity. In the cringe, I physically experience the condensation of ideological shifts over time, the contrast between the “then” and the “now.”

Indeed, since most cultural change happens slowly and incrementally, the dated film operates as a form of historical time lapse, allowing us to see difference across time we simply could not see without an archive of texts from earlier decades. No generation of humans born before the twentieth century at least has been able to witness social change so clearly, to experience it so viscerally. And this can be fundamentally unsettling. This confrontation with temporal otherness may, in fact, lead to a crisis of the ego, not unrelated to confrontations with comparable types of otherness. A return to psychoanalytic theory, then, may help explain how intensely some viewers react to dated films.

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha draws on Sigmund Freud’s theories of fetishism and sexual difference to discuss racial and cultural difference within a colonial context. In his discussion of the stereotype, Bhabha (2012) notes that “colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible.” ⁹ He argues that the recognition of racial and cultural difference, like the recognition of sexual difference, poses a threat to the (Imaginary) integrity and coherence of the colonizer’s ego. Within this framework, the stereotype of the colonized plays the role of the fetish for the colonizer. However, to be effective the stereotype must be continually reasserted. “For fetishism is always a ‘play’ or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity—in Freud’s terms: ‘All men have penises’; in ours ‘All men have the same skin/race/culture’—and the anxiety associated with lack and difference—again, for Freud ‘Some do not have penises’; for us ‘Some do not have the same skin/race/culture’.” ¹⁰ To the threat to self posed by the recognition of sexual or cultural difference posited by Freud and Bhabha, then, I want to add the threat of historical or temporal difference, to which contemporary inscriptive media give us unprecedented access. In other words, the temporal other poses a similar threat to the integrity of the contemporary self, by which I mean the self of the now, whenever that now may be. ¹¹

Yet, I am arguing here for the value of the encounter with temporal otherness as the embodied experience of contemporary ethics. It is also, by implication, a recognition of contemporary ethics as contemporary, as historically contingent rather than absolute. Just as visiting another country or locale can help us locate our own cultural norms, seeing them suddenly for the constructs they are and therefore open to change, the experience of datedness can help us further locate and historicize those norms – which will also date. Approaching the dated film not in order to immediately idealize or condemn, condone or mock it but, rather, in order to understand and contextualize it, opens a space for humility about the contingency and relativity of our own ethical positioning. Rather than immediately imposing the values of the present on the past in a form of hubristic presentism that assumes people today are better—on some absolute scale—than they were “back then,” we can use the dated film to pinpoint the precise kinds of values that have shifted and to more clearly articulate our own ethical commitments.

Instead of being offended by, feeling hurt by, or simply dismissing the dated film, we might instead develop a new kind of reading practice that accounts for the irreconcilable otherness of the past. When we judge a dated film through the ethical prism of the present, we mistake ethics for morals. Whereas morals presume to be absolute, unchanging no matter the circumstance, ethics are collectively and contextually determined and can change over time. In the future, our children or grandchildren will likely cringe at certain social values embedded in the most celebrated media of today. However, the ethical cringe is the sign that human values change, which also means they can get better—even if there is no absolute scale by which to judge. If we never cringe at the past, it means we are still trapped in its norms. The fact that we cringe looking at the dated film is concrete evidence that social—and personal—change is possible.

In fact, social and personal change may both be reflected in the cringe and may not always be easily distinguishable. Returning to the notion of different “time zones” within the same objective period of time, we must note that different groups as well as different individuals will be differently attuned, especially when it comes to representations of groups of which one is a part. Regardless, however, reception is not monolithic or unified even in a single historical moment. Even within one society, we are hardly synchronized when it comes to changing values. Yet, the point I want to make here is the cringe may be a sign that we—individually or collectively or both—have exited a previous social paradigm, that we (who cringe) have changed.

I am not arguing that dated films should be celebrated; we should certainly acknowledge and critique the racism, sexism, homophobia, and whatever other discriminations have become visible to us now. Instead, I am suggesting we make use of the cringe. It is unpleasant. It is an experience akin to shame, and there are few emotions more uncomfortable. But shame is also what teaches us, from the time we are children, to be better according to the ethics of our age. The dated film exists as a function of a given viewer being able to see something that was unmarked that is now marked, something invisible that is now visible, to be accepted or rejected. However, in order for dated films to be illuminating rather than simply upsetting, we must learn to watch them in a particular way.

Toward a Polychronic Reading Practice

Indeed, precisely because of their “failings,” I would argue that dated films are worth watching now—and not just as bad objects that allow us to feel superior to those who participated in its making or who enjoyed it at the time of its release. In a sense, I want to put forward an alternative to “cancelling” the past. Indeed, what is lacking in contemporary discussions about dated texts is the utility of irony as a mode of reading. In fact, I contend that dated texts demand an ironic reading, which requires that audiences be primed to read ironically. In place of generalized “warnings,” which may predispose audiences to be offended (or else be considered complicit), I want to propose a broader training for viewers in an ironic mode of reading. ¹² This requires audiences to recognize meaning as fundamentally both polysemic and contextual.

In common parlance, irony is often presented as a linguistic structure in which one says one thing but means another. In fact, irony is often conflated with sarcasm, which is only one kind of irony. In sarcasm, two opposed meanings are asserted but one is privileged while the other is dismissed. However, in the kind of irony I am interested in, two (or possibly more) meanings can be held in tension with one another so that neither is immediately privileged nor dismissed, even if these meanings are incompatible. Indeed, in order for us to learn anything from it, the dated film requires us to deploy what Hutcheon (2003) dubs “inclusive irony,” which entails “the discovery of two or more ‘isotopies’ or principles of coherence in an utterance thought to be single and homogenous. . .The ironic sign would thus be made up of one signifier but two different, but not necessarily opposite signifieds.” ¹³ In the experience of inclusive irony, one meaning does not cancel out the other; rather, they coexist even if they cannot be reconciled. An inclusive ironic reading of the dated film would mean being able to hold two meanings, based in mutually exclusive historical contexts—that of the text’s production and release and that of the viewer’s present—in one’s mind simultaneously without immediately subsuming one to the other. For history to have any value for the present and future, viewers need to read historical texts from the perspectives of the past and the present, without negating either.

Meanings, of course, are not static. They are produced by particular communities in particular contexts; hence, texts have different meanings for different groups of people in different times and places—and sometimes even within one space and time. Hutcheon has written brilliantly about the ways in which irony is not a characteristic of the text but an event that happens—or does not happen—in the encounter between a text and a given interpreter. While this can be an intended or encoded irony, it can also be unintended. As Hutcheon notes, “irony happens because what could be called ‘discursive communities’ already exist and provide the context for both the deployment and attribution of irony.” ¹⁴ I am suggesting that such discursive communities can be actively constructed so that irony can be intentionally deployed as a reading strategy.

What I am calling for, then, is a polychronic viewing practice. The unironic judgment of the past according to the cultural and ethical norms of the present commits the sin of anachronism, overlaying one time period with another and thereby confusing the two. By imposing an anachronistic gaze onto the dated text, we collapse then and now; inclusive irony falls by the sword of moralistic judgment. And this, in my view, is dangerous because such a reading allows for no (plausible) exterior to the present and its values. Another synonym for “dated” is “outdated,” which suggests temporal exteriority. Indeed, what is at stake in developing a polychronic reading practice is the very possibility of standing outside the now, however briefly and partially.

The term “anachronism” literally means “against time.” Yet, rather than saying that something is anachronistic, I want to emphasize that anachronism is a relation. We now are anachronistic in relation to the dated film, and it is anachronistic in relation to us; indeed, the experience of anachronism (when it occurs for a given viewer) is what constitutes the dated film as such. A chasm of social and/or personal change over time separates us from it, but the point is that anachronism is reversible. The past is anachronistic in relation to the present (and the future), but the reverse is also true. Thus, rather than deploying the one-way self-justifying mirror of the anachronistic gaze, we would do better to deploy an inclusive ironic gaze. We need to move from anachronism—imposing the present on the past or vice versa—to polychronism, understanding the same object through the lens of (at least) two different temporalities at once. A polychronic gaze would, instead of reducing past to present and therefore making the past available to judgment exclusively according to our current ethical norms, engage two simultaneous sets of meanings (one of which must be informed by careful historical, contextual research about the moment of production and release of a now-dated film) that coexist. Reading polychronically requires being able to recognize the polysemy of any dated film, which generates two historically distinct sets of meanings in the same moment of reception now.

There are serious political stakes in the ability or inability to read polychronically. In the past few years, it has become contentious to show culturally dated texts even in a university setting. Absurdly, some contemporary viewers seem to be asking that fixed traces of the past magically catch up with the ideologies of the present—or be excluded from the curriculum. Instead of asking the impossible or pretending that the past can be ignored, we need to do the work to understand texts in both their own contexts and today’s context, which—in the case of the dated film—essentially means watching two films at the same time, or the same film with divided attention. However, this is not a viewing practice that comes naturally. As Carroll (2003) notes:

Often when we are watching films that are remote from us in time and place, we will not be able to depend on our own emotional responses to the film because we do not have the appropriate cultural background. . .Film historians and ethnographers can supply us with the background necessary to make the emotive address of films from other cultures and other periods in our own culture emotionally accessible to us. ¹⁵

Thus, we must watch dated films with a double lens. Suspending judgment, at least for a moment, we should begin by simply making note of what makes us cringe. Then, afterward, we need to determine what that cringe signifies, what has changed since then and is out of synch with the now.

Cringing through a dated film offers an opportunity to rejoice in the fact that we can now see the “flaws” of the past, that we have moved toward what we deem a more ethical stance in relation to certain forms of human difference. However, we should never assume that our current values (no matter our gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, etc.) will be any less horrifying to our descendants. We can only hope that they will read our films polychronically, using them to reflect on social change and historicity, trying to understand rather than immediately condemning us.

The Dated Film as Phantom Genre

Thinking of the dated film as a genre may help us move closer to a polychronic viewing practice. We often create genre categories to indicate the kind of affect associated with a film: comedy/laughter, tragedy/sadness, horror/fear. As Carroll puts it, “raising various preordained emotions in spectators is the sine qua non of certain film genres. In these cases, the genres in question aim at the production of a particular emotion whose tincture colors the film as a whole.” ¹⁶ If the dated film is a genre, however, it is an accidental or unintended one. Indeed, its effect (and affect) is most pronounced when it takes us by surprise: I sit down on my couch and press play thinking I am going to watch a comedy and laugh. Suddenly, my body seizes up as a (now) racist, sexist, or homophobic caricature appears. The genre—for me, now—has changed. The comedy suddenly feels more like a horror film (but without the cathartic release of the scream). In other words, the dated film is constituted when the intended and previously realized affective response—laughter, for instance—is replaced by the cringe. As a time-based medium, film can set us at ease and then horrify us—or, perhaps more accurately, fill us with shame—by making us feel complicit.

Yet, if the dated film is a genre, it is a phantom genre. I mean this in two senses. First, it is a phantom in that phantoms only exist at certain times to certain people and may suddenly appear out of nowhere. Second, since dated films come from the past, they affect a haunting. The experience of watching them—if we cringe, which shows that we no longer share their social and ethical paradigm—is one of being haunted. While this might sound undesirable, I want to reframe it as the opposite. By encountering these ghosts, we can experience our distance from them, and that can be empowering. Indeed, one potential objection to my argument is that it suggests that members of marginalized groups should watch dated films even if they find such texts upsetting. Of course, I have no interest in making anyone watch anything that will cause them pain. Yet, I would argue that an ironic, polychronic reading practice can actively and productively deflate the power of the dated film. It allows us to see their representations for what they are: dead tropes that—by definition, according to my theorization of datedness—have no ideological power over us anymore. Moreover, in my view, articulating our complex contemporary relationship to dated texts can help us transcend (rather than just foolishly try to repress) the past. Indeed, although I argued above for the reversibility of anachronism and the historical contingency of ethics, I am at heart a humanist who believes that human beings can become better—in the sense of more ethical in our treatment of one another and our world—and that the dated film can actually assist us in doing so.

Perhaps if we teach ourselves to think and watch polychronically, the phantom genre of the dated film and its associated cringe may become a tool for reorganizing what Jacques Rancière (2020) calls the “set of conditions of possibility.” ¹⁷ They may allow us to better see the discriminations and abuses that are still invisible because they are largely regarded as normal right now. Watching dated films in this way allows us to visit an other temporal world, but we must respect its otherness to us and our otherness to it—so that we can learn from it. Again, this does not condone, excuse, or justify the values inscribed in the dated text; but it can make us aware that there is an outside to ideology, of what we take to be normal or universal in any given moment. What we think of as “the world” is really just “the now.” What the dated film allows us to do—if we deploy a polychronic gaze—is to experience not only the datedness of the past but also our own datedness and to thereby see the now and our own contingency more clearly. If doing so means there is a greater possibility of a better world for future generations, we may find hope rather than shame in the humble acknowledgment that we—and our values now—are no more timeless than Tron.