"Mulched In"; or, What's the Name of that Thing with that Guy from Basic Instinct?

Near the end of John Updike's wondrous novel "In the Beauty of the Lilies" his heroine - a famous movie star of the 50s, now ageing and superannuated - is greeted by a middle-aged fan who gushes about how much he's always adored her films, especially "that Strawberry Blonde you did with Cagney". The actress is gracious but a little dismayed, because - despite his love for her onscreen self - the fan has got it wrong: "She thought of telling him it had been Crosby, the one with Cagney had been Rita Hayworth, but what did it matter? She had been mulched in - what had once seemed to her absolute immortality turned out to be a slow dissolution within a confused mass of perishing images, like a colorful mountain of compressed and rotting garbage".

Though a mountain of rotting garbage isn't exactly my description of choice for the Century of Cinema - Updike is predictably curmudgeonly about the impact movies have had on our collective psyche - I can't help thinking back to that passage every time I meet someone whose life was changed by a movie they can barely remember. And I definitely think of it when I hear, for example, that the re-released Star Wars (oh all right, the "Special Edition") took more money in its opening week at the US box-office than all the rest of that week's films put together.

That particular phenomenon has been "explained" at least in part by the nostalgia factor, with much talk of Star Wars' pre-blockbuster "innocence" - but, even if that's right, is nostalgia really as simple as that? Is it about reconnecting with an old, remembered innocence, the way taking a drink reconnects you with a particular kind of high? Or is it something much fuzzier, the way you follow any half-familiar sign when you're lost and alone in a strange city? In other words, did the millions who flocked to Star Wars - including, and especially, those who'd seen it before in a 1977 cinema - know what it was they were going to see?

When I was younger, the notion of seeing a film more than once was inexplicable to me; now, I often feel I could just keep watching the same movie - any movie - over and over. Indeed it sometimes feels like all movies are really one, the same story endlessly repeated with different faces and places. Everything has been mulched in, compressed into a rich pungent mixture of no-longer- individual parts - so many different ingredients mixed together, in fact, we can barely remember what they all were, or else we confuse one with another. Bits of films constantly crop up, both in life and in other films, and watching any one movie is like lifting the lid on the whole fragrant stew.

Yet, in this Frankenstein's-monster of shreds and patches, certain parts remain familiar - landmark movies which, for whatever reason, stand above the mulch. Not necessarily the best films, but those that are (or seem to be) the purest - the ur-movies that everything else is drawing on. Things like E.T., Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz - and, of course, Star Wars. I'm not remotely surprised by that film's successful re-release, nor do I think nostalgia has anything to do with it; you can't be nostalgic for what you never had.

Star Wars in 1977 was a terrific ride, an exciting eye-opening movie; but it's only now, with the passage of time, that it's achieved its near-mythical status. I think people going to the re-release don't want to be entertained and excited per se, or even to recapture the excitement they felt 20 years ago; they want to shake hands with a legend, to feel something beyond the composite mulch of other movies. Thing is, Hollywood films as a whole have grown to resemble a Hollywood party - but a very minor one, at the home of some obscure producer: a lot of glitter, a lot of has-beens and TV-movie names, a lot of vaguely familiar, confusingly similar faces - plus a handful of real celebrities, round whom everyone else clusters and fawns, awed by their very presence.

It's perhaps not surprising that movies as a whole have become so mulchy and undifferentiated - after all, real life is equally incoherent: long before films had learned how to talk T. S. Eliot was bemoaning the "heap of broken images" that is our lot. Yet, somehow, we expect more. Maybe it's because films, unlike books, take over Time, imposing their own timeframe - they feel separate from Life, not subject to its rules. Or because, more than any other medium, movies feel so vividly real, so mesmerising: each film draws you in to its own particular brand of reality, even when you know there's nothing unique about it. The most formulaic drivel feels real - hence one-of-a-kind - when you're actually watching it. No wonder it's so disconcerting to find it dissolving into a mess of random images at the back of your mind a mere day or two later.

So what am I saying here? That Updike is right, that film history is no more than a shapeless mulch? OK, but then what? That people should therefore not watch movies? That movies can therefore not be Art? Obviously, that would be nonsense. But perhaps, if every individual film we watch is doomed to be fused invisibly in our minds with all the others that we've seen, then, if we want to appreciate movies, what's important must be the sum of what we've seen. The more films you watch the more confused they all become in your mind - yet, oddly enough, that's a good reason to watch even more movies, or at least more different kinds of movies. At the moment we have the worst of both worlds - films are everywhere, but they're all the same. Classic movies, foreign language movies, experimental movies, even independent movies are all marginalised: all we get are the films being made by big Hollywood studios in the year 1997. No wonder John Updike is so worried: as things stand, watching movies today does indeed add up to a pile of colourful, shapeless garbage. But it doesn't have to. If we could see all the films we're not currently allowed to see, if we could enjoy the full potential of movie-watching - well then, sure, they'd all be mulched together after a while, but the mulch would be rich and wholesome, a worthy fuel for the imagination. Maybe we could even use it to start growing something new.