The Comfort Zone

Michael K. Vaughan is one of my favourite Youtubers, and his latest video is a particularly interesting one; he tells about a viewer who expressed disappointment that, for a while now, the sort of books he’s been reading and reviewing on his channel isn’t as broad as it used to be, and he should read more widely and out of his comfort zone, and dared him to read something by Jane Austen (there being a Booktube reading event devoted to her in June)…

Now, I’m sure the horror he expresses at that idea in his video was mostly performative and for comedic value, cos he has a couple of videos on the subject of favourite books (one of which I actually rewatched the other night), and he’s upfront about his broad tastes being pretty populist, but his top 100 also encompasses classical authors like Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus (whose Histories is his top book), Arrian, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy, and “serious” authors like Dickens, Steinbeck, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, Hemingway, Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte, John O’Hara, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Dumas, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Haggard, Wells and Hugo, and even his “genre” preferences would mostly be considered classics of their kind and even literature in general too (Asimov, Bradbury, Lovecraft, E.R. Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Matheson, LeGuin, Machen, S. King, Verne, Simak, Tolkien). So his tastes are much broader than his viewer possibly thinks. But he’s also made videos about all of these in the past, so it’s probably not like he feels the need to redo them.

And the whole thing made me wonder: what if someone did that with me? I mean, if someone came across this blog and looked at the page for the films I’ve reviewed and decided the stuff I’ve reviewed on here so far (which is mostly of a horror nature) so far constituted my “comfort zone”, and then told me I needed to watch something “good” instead… well, would I respond with similar grace to Michael? Cos I suspect probably not; I would note that yeah, horror is a lot of what I’ve been watching in the last few months, but I have seen plenty of the standard classics. I’m not stupid enough to make a top ten list or anything of the sort, but if they demanded I name some non-horror titles I have considered “great” over the years, I’d include a lot of the following:

• • Citizen Kane and quite a few other Welles films
  • Singin’ in the Rain
  • The Rules of the Game
  • Sunrise
  • The Great Dictator
  • Bad Day at Black Rock
  • The Searchers
  • A Matter of Life and Death and, again, most other Archers titles from the ’40s
  • Lucifer Rising
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Duck Soup
  • Sherlock Jr.
  • A Hard Day’s Night
  • North by Northwest
  • Blazing Saddles
  • Wild Strawberries
  • Forty Guns
  • Yojimbo and, again, several other Kurosawas
  • Sansho the Bailiff
  • Tokyo Story and, again, quite a few other Ozu films
  • Fitzcarraldo and, yet again, other Herzog films
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • King Lear (1971)
  • The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov triple bill)
  • Metropolis and, once more, several other Langs
  • Heat
  • Ben Hur (1959, though the 1925 one is also good)
  • And any number of Warner Brothers cartoons, especially from the 40s and 50s (and by Bob Clampett particularly)

Alternately, I could just point them at my Letterboxd, save myself time, and tell them to choke on my general experience of “good” cinema. It’s not like I feel the need to justify myself anyway, of course, but if someone were to approach me like Mr. Vaughan’s viewer and tell me to widen my horizons, I think they’d soon live to regret doing so…