Recently I watched an episode of an old TV western. I didn't care for the episode, nor did some of the reviewers, who called it a knock-off of (1952) "High Noon", starring Gary Cooper. I didn't even care for "High Noon" all that much, despite it being considered a classic movie.
Of course there is more than one level or angle for appreciating a classic anything, and maybe "High Noon" is worth rewatching. Think of a classic as a general template, a Platonic Form, that can be reincarnated in different eras and locations. We shouldn't dismiss the reincarnation as an unoriginal knock-off. Novelty isn't what matters.
It is "mind-expanding" to be concerned with a tangible person or situation today, and then suddenly realize that it fits a timeless template. You walk out of the small pond of Today, Here, and Now and paddle off to a large and long river nearby, one that represents the general flow of the human condition.
"High Noon" on the surface was about criminals taking over a town, and most 'normal' citizens of the town being cowardly and disunited in confronting that threat. It was an allegory about McCarthy-era Hollywood and America.
But it is more flexible than that. Do you remember how craven many people were to corrupt authorities during the Covid lockdowns of just a couple years ago? Some of the heroes of that movie lost their jobs, paid fines, or went to jail. Do you think that Hollywood will ever make a new version of "High Noon" about the lockdown era?
Even better is our current era, the Gaza Genocide era. Do you feel ill thinking of starving people in line for food, while Israeli soldiers shoot them in the head? That's fine, just don't say it out loud. They have us so terrified of being called anti-Semitic that most people won't say anything. Neither will the corrupt leaders of Egypt and Jordan. Neither will the mainstream media.
We live in a modern age. And yet the label of anti-semitism has been whipped up into a superstitious Fear. It makes the cowardly citizens in "High Noon" look almost reasonable.
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