I went back to a run of films and albums that mattered enormously to me at nineteen. Some were better than I remembered. Several were embarrassing. The pattern in which was which has been useful.
What collapsed
Consistently, anything whose appeal was primarily attitude.
Work that felt daring, transgressive or knowing at nineteen frequently reads as adolescent posturing at forty, because the posture was the content and the posture was calibrated for somebody working out who they were.
Anything that flattered the audience for being clever. The pleasure was being in on it, and that pleasure does not survive knowing more.
And anything whose emotional register was intensity without specificity — grand feelings without particular circumstances attached, which map onto anything at nineteen and onto nothing later.
What survived
Different qualities, and they were not the ones I would have identified at the time.
Craft. Things that were well made remain well made regardless of whether the content still speaks to you, and I noticed technique that had been invisible to me.
Specificity. Work about particular people in particular circumstances holds up, because the particulars remain interesting even when the identification has gone.
Ambiguity. Anything that did not resolve into a clear position at the time is still doing something now, whereas anything with a settled message is now a message I have either accepted or rejected.
And humour, which was the most reliable single predictor. Things that were funny are still funny.
The reversal cases
The most interesting category.
Several works I had found boring or impenetrable at nineteen were the ones I most valued on return.
These were generally about experiences I had not had — work, marriage, ageing parents, professional disappointment — which were abstractions then and are not now.
Which suggests that a proportion of what a nineteen year old dismisses is not bad but simply illegible, and that some works have an audience they will meet later.
What was actually being remembered
The uncomfortable realisation.
A substantial part of the attachment was to the circumstances rather than to the work — where I was living, who I was with, what I was worried about.
The work was a container for a period, and returning to it returns the period, which is a genuine pleasure and is not a judgement about the work.
Distinguishing the two is difficult and worth attempting, because it explains why recommending such things to somebody else so frequently fails.
The generational reception problem
A related observation about showing these things to somebody younger.
Work that was startling at the time frequently reads as unremarkable now, because its innovations were absorbed and became standard.
Which means the experience of encountering it fresh is unavailable, and explaining that it was original does not reproduce the effect.
This is a general problem with influential work — the more influence it had, the more ordinary it appears — and it is why so many attempts to share formative things go flat.
What I would advise about the exercise
Do it, and go in expecting some of it to be bad.
Be willing to conclude that something you loved was not good, which is not a judgement on nineteen year old you, who was correct that it mattered.
Revisit the things you did not like as well, since that is where the surprises are.
And notice what you now attend to, which is frequently more informative than the verdict. I spent the whole exercise looking at construction rather than at content, which was not a choice and told me something about how my attention has changed.
The one that surprised me most
A film I had considered profound at nineteen turned out to be a competent thriller with a portentous score.
What had been profound was that I had never seen the structure before. Having since seen a hundred versions of it, the original is legible as a well-executed example of a form.
Which is a slightly deflating discovery and is also, I think, what having watched a lot of films means. You trade the capacity to be astonished for the capacity to see how it was done, and I am not certain that is a good trade.
Doing it with somebody else
A variant that produces different information.
Watching a formative work with somebody who has never seen it is uncomfortable in a specific way, because you experience it partly through their reaction.
The parts that made you wince on their behalf are generally the parts that have dated, and you notice them faster than you would alone.
It is also the fastest way to discover which of your attachments are to the work and which are to the period, since the other person has access to only one of those.
The things you never went back to
A gap in the exercise worth acknowledging.
I revisited things I remembered fondly, which is a biased sample. The works that formed me and that I have forgotten entirely are not available to be tested, and there are certainly more of those than of the ones I recalled.
Which means the whole exercise measures what stayed in memory rather than what mattered at the time, and those are different sets.