Relativity

My daughter's watching Meet Me in St. Louis this afternoon. It's one of her favorite movies. But it's not, she tells me, her favorite movie of all time. Marty is.

Meet Me in St. Louis, set in 1903, was released in 1944. I've always thought that an audience watching the movie in 1944 was looking back on an antique, bygone world. But now it occurs to me that their experience would be comparable to that of a 2006 audience watching a film set in 1965. And 1965 wasn't all that long ago. Heck, that's when Help! and Rubber Soul came out, along with The Sound of Music, which used to be my daughter's favorite movie of all time.