In his memoir from 2019, author Bret Easton Ellis used pages upon pages of material to talk about his love for the neo-noir thriller “American Gigolo” (1980) (his love is obvious from reading any of his novels). However, the year of its release, a different film captured Bret Easton Ellis’s and America’s attention. 

“That fall, Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” spoke most passionately to my sixteen-year-old, with Timothy Hutton as the movie character I most identified with,” he said in the book. “But now I can barely watch it. For all its flaws, I can watch ‘American Gigolo’ endlessly.” 

Bret Easton Ellis essentially includes this movie to explain why “American Gigolo” was only his second favorite new movie in 1980 and doesn’t seem interested in discussing “Ordinary People” any further. Tragically for him, this sentence stuck out to me for two reasons: the fact that he would include it at all (“Ordinary People” is about the mental problems plaguing a wealthy family from Chicago and is so unrelated to “American Gigolo,” a thriller about a male escort accused of murder while driving around Los Angeles listening to Blondie); and that he never rewatched “Ordinary People.” He implies that “American Gigolo” has more flaws, but that he likes it more. Okay. But why didn’t he rewatch both? What if he got tired of “American Gigolo” and wanted to see something from his youth? After researching “Ordinary People,” I can confidently say that I have an answer to both of my questions: It is of an extinct species of movie that I am terming an event movie. 

The event movie had two key features: it was super popular and everyone related to it, but then it was gone just as quickly as it arrived. “Ordinary People” fits these features better than any other movies I have watched. The movie grossed the equivalent of around 350 million dollars, adjusting for inflation (with a budget of only 23 million dollars, adjusted for inflation) and also swept through the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Screenplay, and receiving nominations for Best Actress and a second Best Supporting Actor. Despite all of these facts, you never hear about it.

The cultural critic Chris Vogner wrote an article about how he saw himself in the lead, Timothy Hutton. He writes paragraphs upon paragraphs about the emotional depth of the movie and its perfection.

“As I watched the film recently, I started wondering how it might play today,” he wrote.“Would it be too WASP-y? Would it catch flack for its sense of white privilege? (I don’t think there’s a non-white speaking part in the film). Would viewers have trouble warming up to a wealthy Chicago family wrapped in a hermetically sealed crisis? The world has changed a lot in the last 40 years. We expect…different.” 

This ending stuck out to me for two reasons: the movie is of its time, and the writer implied with his opening that he hadn’t rewatched the film in a while. Both reasons fit into the definition of the event movie. It goes quickly; all these separate people in 1980 related to Timothy Hutton because that’s when he grew up. The plot feels dated: There is something that feels particularly 1980s about both the detachment of parents who claim to love their kids and about needing a therapist in a world that suppressed discussions about it. 

I have read a number of articles with interviews with the cast and crew of movies, and what struck me about the interview with “Ordinary People” cast and crew was that the director and two of the stars (including Timothy Hutton) never rewatched it. 

“It belongs to the public now; it no longer really belongs to me,” director Robert Redford said.  

After talking about how much he loved the movie and how he carefully selected the materials and cast, he immediately moved on. This was yet another example of the remarkably fleeting appeal of “Ordinary People.” 

And it’s not like people don’t rewatch movies; people rewatch a lot now. This fact is mainly chalked up to the rise of streaming, which offers many choices, promoting indecision, which leads us to seek comfort in what is already there. In contrast, cable TV had fewer options for rewatching media, and so we were more interested in watching whatever was on. And many movies from the 1980s have been rewatched over and over again (I genuinely can’t count the number of times I have watched the “Princess Bride” (1987) and, obviously, Bret Easton Ellis would say the same for “American Gigolo”). This really highlights that there is a certain type of movie that came and went that no longer seems to exist anymore at all.

To demonstrate my point further: what movie feels like the 2020s? “Tár” (2022)? Not really. I can’t think of anyone who related to the main character. I know people who related to various indie movies (like “Lady Bird” (2017), “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (2022), “I Saw The TV Glow” (2024)); however, these movies all talked about an experience that someone could relate to regardless of the year it was set in. Basically, these new movies of today will be rewatched and will not require any clarification on the religious and privileged connotations of their time. Additionally, since the time is relevant, these experiences actually do speak to specific groups of people and not everyone: I know many people who found these movies annoying. So we have movies that certain people do relate to, and we have movies of their time, but somehow we don’t have both, and thus we lost the event movie. 

The event movie almost worked as a standard to live up to: to be so completely of the time that everyone wants to see it during its time and then feels done with it afterward. In a world where movies make the most money in theaters around the country where they only play temporarily, a movie that leans into the ephemeral nature of film while still appealing to everyone at once almost “beats” the system itself. But it is as impressive as it is fleeting: For a brief second, we were all Timothy Hutton, and then we decided to move on and leave it at that. 

Henry Kaplan is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu.