The Ethical Cringe, or the Dated Film as Revelatory Genre

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.