It happened one night

I have nostalgia for a different time, a more ancient time, a time when the world felt bigger.

A couple of nights ago I watched the 1934 movie It happened one night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, gosh she’s so gorgeous! The movie is a comedy, it’s 86 years old, but it’s incredibly refreshing and I’m going to explain why.

I often feel the pressure of the time we live in. I see marketing and advertising everywhere and how they like to turn everything into a product. The funny thing is that this movie in 1934 was a product, made by Columbia Pictures, which back then was considered a minor studio, but it ceased being a product today. Time has changed it, time has stripped away its marketing value—nobody is pushing Clark Gable movies these days. And since its market value is pretty low, it feels somehow lighter, with no extra baggage attached to it.

It happened one night was a big movie. It was the first movie to ever win five Oscars in all five major categories: best picture, best director, best actor, best actress and best writing adaptation. And only two other movies ever managed to achieve the same in the history of the Academy Awards. Ok, so we can all agree it was a very big movie.

Now let’s compare this old big movie of 90 years ago with today’s big movies. Today’s blockbusters are usually trying to engage with their audience already months if not years before their release: promotion tour, trailers, previews, interviews, leaked footage, behind the scenes, you name it. I didn’t watch any trailer for It happened one night, I only knew that it was a comedy and I don’t remember where I heard it was a good movie, that’s it. I didn’t know anything about the plot, I didn’t know which actors were in it or who directed it. You already know more about this movie than I did when I pressed the play button! So, if you want to watch a big movie of a time that was, It happened one night could be for you.

I often feel like the real focus of today’s big movies is the audience, not the movie itself. The audience is so important that cameras have turned backwards. It’s actors coming in front of their fans with phones out, filming the audience and broadcasting live on social media. It’s athletes entering the arena with phones pointed towards the stadium. They are not the main event anymore, the audience is. The spectacle is seeing so many people gathering, watching and celebrating. And I understand how facing such an impressive crowd can be a feeling of its own right, I don’t want to take that away from anybody. But for once, just one time, I don’t want to be filmed, I don’t want to be a mirror of others’ success, I simply want to take a break and have a little silence to go with it to let me think on my own, that’s it.

There are also other movies that don’t fall in this blockbuster category, of course, movies that on the contrary, by some, are considered to be real cinema. And I am all for them, I watch them, I love them, and they will be the topic for another article. But sometimes, after a long day of work I just want to go to the park, I don’t want to go to the park and read Plato, I just want to sit and enjoy the breeze, I don’t want to look at the Mona Lisa, I just want to be me. Visiting the Louvre is for another time.

I want to escape to a world where nobody is asking me for my money or my attention, or my time, nobody is trying to activate me for a cause or to educate me for my growth, I want to escape to a world where I can just be me. This is what It happened one night represented to me—weird as it might sound. These moments I find them incredibly rare and extremely difficult to get to, but so important, and they fuel me and my creativity like almost anything else does.

When I turn on YouTube, channels are constantly asking me to subscribe, like and share. To fix a time and place is not enough anymore, what if I forget to check-in for a few days or a few months? What would my life be if I was to miss these world-changing ten minutes of a video? After all, as so many are gasping for my attention, the probabilities of me getting distracted and forgetting to tune in are quite high. This is not seen as competition anymore, there is space for everybody, that’s the consensus. But is it there really? Space for everybody. On the content creator side, yes, there is practically infinite space. The content creators don’t have to compete anymore for the same 6 PM spot on the evening television. But on my side—well, when I’m in the audience—my time is not infinite, I only have a finite amount of time per day.

Infinity! If the poet of a time that was, could only wonder about the infinite as something unreachable out there, we today have to deal with it daily. All of us have to funnel this practically infinite amount of information, requests and news into our finite amount of free time, and the only way to do it is to filter, there is no other way. In an older time, a simpler time in this regard, the filtering was already done for the audience. Today there is plenty of information, content, options, and plenty of decisions, but decisions cost energy.

We live in a smaller world. Or maybe the world hasn’t shrunk, but it enlarged at a slower rate than our arm’s reach grew. The further the arms reach, the smaller the room feels. How many times, a place that we remembered to be enormous when we were kids when then visited years later just didn’t feel as big and it actually felt quite small. The size of the hall stayed the same, but our reach extended. In the same way, now in society, we can reach the furthest we have ever been capable of, and not just metaphorically as humankind, but practically as individuals. Me, you, and basically everybody, we have the whole world at our fingertips, there is very little that we cannot reach from home in a few keystrokes. But despite the world holding an infinite amount of information and content and possibilities, it has never felt this small.

It all happened one night, but today, just for today, I have nostalgia for a different time, a more ancient time, when I was eleven playing football with my friends in an oversized field, and the whole world felt much much bigger.