I have several favorite websites, blogs, etc., but I don't check any of them regularly. As a result, I tend to binge-read several entries in a row. On occasion a posting will lead to thoughts I want to share but, because the post I'm responding to is sometimes weeks, if not months, old, my thoughts are no longer relevant to that site's comments section. "Professor Too-Late" is all about expressing those thoughts without posting them on someone else's site when everyone but me has moved on with their lives.
Professor Too-Late's delayed reaction to Dan Kois's New York Times article about "cultural vegetables" (which I learned about from reading Glenn Kenny's second "I'm not going to react" reaction)
The idea that some films "need" to be seen ("need" in this case implying "to make oneself better, culturally") is pretty ridiculous. Citizen Kane is just a movie, man. If you're into movies, all movies (as I am), you might find it interesting because it provides a fascinating history lesson on the birth of modern filmmaking. But if it sounds boring to you, that's fine too. Don't watch it; you'll just be wasting your time.
Regarding Kois's specific example, I enjoyed Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and I enjoyed Stalker even more (it's a movie that reenters my consciousness, unbidden, frequently, which is the mark of a movie that has buried itself in my imagination and successfully transformed the way I think). But I'm under no illusion that I'm a better person for it. Because let's be honest: a movie is just a movie, regardless of how "difficult" or "important" it's supposed to be.
Whether you're watching Solaris or Captain America, either way you're just sitting on your ass, staring at a screen. Watching Solaris isn't a noble exercise, and it doesn't make the world a better place, or you a better person, just because you've seen it. Watching Solaris is just as much a waste of your time as watching Captain America is. The question is whether it's an interesting (or at the very least an entertaining) waste of your time. That's all that matters, because there's no point in wasting your time on something that isn't providing a return on the time you're spending with it. We only have so much time on this earth, and we can't watch everything we want to watch, because there's too much of it and there are too many other things to do. So choose to watch the things you think you'll get something out of--otherwise you are literally wasting your life.
The same goes for books, plays, television shows, music, concerts, and every other piece of entertainment you can possibly imagine. Reading The Recognitions doesn't automatically make you a better person, just as reading The Da Vinci Code doesn't make you a worse person. Likewise, the Pixies' Surfer Rosa is not better for you than Britney Spears's Baby One More Time. The very notion of a "sophisticated" culture versus a "popular" culture is one of those concepts that only gets traction in a society where the people who think about this stuff have nothing more constructive to do with their time.1
In short, watch what you want. And if you're watching Solaris to impress somebody else, I have some advice for you: get better friends.
Pointless Footnotes
1 Okay, that's not strictly true, especially in, say, a politically restrictive country where, if one substitutes a phrase like "socially conscious" for "sophisticated" and "state-controlled" for "popular," the former form of culture is undoubtedly more important (and dangerous) than the latter. But in the United States, such a distinction is largely meaningless insofar as a generally more sophisticated culture would not positively affect us, as citizens, more than our current, generally more popular (i.e., unsophisticated) culture does from a quality-of-life standpoint.
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