Tracking Mass Ideology on IMDb’s Top 250: How Shifts in Societal Values Appear in the Popular Film Canon

No film on the list embodies a retreat into populist myth as totally or as troublingly as Forrest Gump (1994). Though critically and popularly lauded at its release (winning the Oscar for Best Picture, among other plaudits), its star faded in the late ’90s. However, since 2004, it has rocketed from a rank of 120 to a rank of 12, rising farther and faster than any other film. We believe that this is because Forrest Gump represents a potent confluence of some of the thematic properties that we associate with other films rising up the list. For starters, it centers on the whimsical misadventures of a Chaplinesque “innocent” white male protagonist, it resolves narrative conflict sentimentally rather than realistically, and it subjugates the perspectives of women and people of color beneath his. But more importantly for this section, it treats history as a playground for fantasization. It avoids historical analysis in favor of intentionally syrupy, romanticized myth, and crafts one important plotline around the white wish-fulfillment of racial reconciliation. When situated next to other films with similar tropes, Forrest Gump’s rise prompts two sobering reflections on IMDb’s voter base (and perhaps mass film culture in general): they are interested in stories about race, but only when told from a white perspective, and they are interested in the patinas of historical periods, but only when meaningful analysis of that history is replaced with morality tales or wish-fantasies.

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Introduction

Within the field of film scholarship, there is no shortage of interest in spectatorship or the ideological content of media, especially with respect to identity and politics of the everyday. Ostensibly, these research areas attempt to diagnose ideological patterns in production and viewership. However, most such studies surface little introspection into how their corpuses were constructed or whether those corpuses actually reflect the public’s interests or desires.

Such blind spots have plagued the field for quite some time. When Siegfried Kracauer set out to quantify the rise of fascism in Weimar culture through film (From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, 1947), he assembled a hand-picked corpus of studio-produced films, since, as he put it, the profit motivation of film studios naturally gravitates toward “satisfy[ing] existing mass desires” (5). Though his account of Weimar cinema was thorough and compelling, scholars since have pointed out that he did not meaningfully consider public response when selecting the films he included in his analysis. As Franklin Fearing wrote in his 1947 review essay, “Kracauer’s approach gives us a plausible and even exciting picture of what goes on in Kracauer’s mind – and a shrewd and subtle mind it is – but there is not much evidence that the mass audience sees what Kracauer sees. We need that evidence” (Fearing 426). John E. O’Connor, writing in 1973, raised much the same concern with respect to From Caligari to Hitler, asking, “How are film and public opinion related? Conceptual questions such as this must be settled before historical research in film can reach its full potential” (O’Connor 550). Moreover, while Kracauer did arrange his study into chronological periods, so as to track German studio Ufa’s output over time, he could not in any way produce a “control group,” since he had no way of investigating how attitudes toward existing films changed over time. Then again, maybe tracking sentiments toward past releases didn’t matter as much in an era when older films were not available for on-demand streaming and repertory screenings were rare or nonexistent. The emergence of many new platforms for film viewing since Kracauer’s day, however, has changed how the public interacts with cinema history.

With the multiplex now long-ago unseated as the primary site of cinematic reception, and internet streaming transforming every laptop and living room into a de facto repertory theater, mass culture surrounding film history has changed dramatically. No longer must we gauge the public mindset by whatever tepid blockbuster momentarily dupes people into buying a ticket. Rather, film and television fan sites allow for the direct quantification of their response to those films. Moreover, since home video has extended contact time with movies from first-run engagements of weeks or months into ongoing relationships stretching across decades, that online tallying of mass sentiment can now be studied longitudinally.

On the website IMDb.com (the Internet Movie Database), users may rate any film on a scale from 1 to 10. The site inputs these ratings into an algorithm to generate a Top 250 list of the greatest films of all time. Most of the films on the list have hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of user ratings – an aggregation of public sentiment impossible in Kracauer’s time. Thus, film studies is no longer limited, as Kracauer was, to grouping the latest high-profile releases into a cultural narrative; instead, it has become possible to mount a diachronic analysis of how the popularity of a corpus of films slowly realigns in response to underlying ideological trends. In particular, historical snapshots of IMDb’s Top 250 as captured by both the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine and 250.took.nl, offer a substantial dataset for anyone interested in investigating how attitudes toward many films change over time and in relation to each other.

However, despite the potential fruitfulness of such new datasets, most film scholars still assemble their corpuses much the same way that Kracauer did. Even when authors purport to demystify mass beliefs, they rarely consult the masses when selecting movies to analyze. Consider, for instance, cultural-studies analyses of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a form of mass desire. To be sure, as Pickering and Keightley point out, the public do not move as a singular bloc when it comes to nostalgic media, but instead continually contest its look, content, function, and purpose. Nevertheless, nostalgia operates as a modality of collective memory. As such, if scholars studying nostalgia in film want their work to respond to or be relevant to those mass desires, they ought to consult some measure of the public’s preference when setting research priorities.

But few scholars do. In her study Screening Nostalgia, Christine Sprengler writes that her focus will be “on American popular film,” in particular films that “mobilize props, costume and ‘deliberate archaism’. . . in ways that suggest the source of a film’s engagement with nostalgia might also be the source of its critical consciousness” (Sprengler 3). Here she pulls something of a critical sleight-of-hand: the films, she hints, will be reflexively nostalgic – films meant not to feed or stoke nostalgia, but to wear the mask of nostalgia as a means of analyzing it. As such, the bulk of her corpus – films like Far from Heaven (2002), The Aviator (2004), and The Good German (2006) – may have been hits with certain critics, but never once appeared on the IMDb Top 250. The lone exception in her study is Sin City (2005), which ascended into the ’60s by early 2006 and remained on the list until early 2017. In one chapter of his 2015 book Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema, Jason Sperb zeroes in on “the wave of new nostalgia movies that garnered significant attention in 2011 – Midnight in Paris, The Artist, and, especially, Hugo” (Sperb 34). Again, why these films? Certainly, all three inspired critical accolades, and both The Artist and Hugo even garnered enough popular acclaim to crack IMDb’s Top 250. But they didn’t survive there. The Artist was gone by the end of 2013, and Hugo lasted less than three months. Midnight in Paris never appeared at all. In fact, the last new release Woody Allen film to even blip onto IMDb’s Top 250 was Match Point (2005) (for a single day, March 1, 2006), and as of the writing of this essay, not a single Allen film remains on the list. At present, five films from 2011 still stand on the IMDb Top 250: The Intouchables, A Separation, Warrior, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and The Help. Since The Help fully fits the definition of a nostalgia movie, why doesn’t Sperb consider it in his analysis? Christina Lee’s edited collection Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema compiles 13 articles by various authors on its topic. Of them, only four center on films that have ever appeared on IMDb’s Top 250: The Royal Tenenbaums, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, and All the President’s Men. At present, all of those titles are moving steadily down the list or are long gone already. This is not to say that the aforementioned films are not worthy of analysis. Rather, we mean to call attention to the fact that although films like Donnie Darko might be fun to write about or hold sway as fetish objects in certain film studies circles, they have not captured the popular imagination in the long term, and thus serve as a poor proxy for nostalgia as a mass phenomenon.

Consider the composition of the top 25 films on IMDb’s list as it stood on April 1, 2019 (above). If IMDb’s Top 250 may be held to function as a guide to mass sentiment, the films of history, memory, or nostalgia that do loom large in the public’s attention include Life Is Beautiful (1997), Forrest Gump (1994), Schindler’s List (1993), The Godfather (1972), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Accordingly, we believe that the discipline of film studies should spend more time accounting for their continued appeal. Indeed, the purpose of this study is to establish a point of departure from which that work might begin.

In short, with this project we wish not merely to argue for the use of publicly available user-generated data in film studies, but to demonstrate some of the ideological insights that the analysis of such data might generate. We collected historical snapshots of the IMDb Top 250 from Archive.org’s WayBack Machine into a simple database that allowed us to plot changing Top 250 ranks over time and overlay the graphs of multiple films to identify trends. Such longitudinal tracking of the public’s shifting attitudes toward films in the years and decades following their release has the potential to provide a compelling barometer of mass ideology. Classifying each film by the shape of its graph, we determined which trendlines were common and which were rare, and then grouped films that displayed rare behavior by their shared narrative and thematic elements. In brief, these elements suggest a heightened mass embrace of or appetite for fantasy, sentimentality, male melodrama, romanticized revisions of history, and racial reconciliation. These themes tend to co-occur in the Top 250’s most notably rising films. Forrest Gump (1994), the film to have ascended most dramatically over the last decade and a half, contains all of them.

Method

Both the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and 250.took.nl collect historical snapshots of the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 list, with the earliest snapshots beginning in 1996.1 At that time, IMDb’s user base was much smaller, and consequently the Top 250 was a much more volatile place, with films appearing, disappearing, and swinging up or down the list very quickly. Scott Hicks’s film Shine (1996) went as high as #2 in 1997 before it disappeared from the list forever by late 1998. The composition of the list is much more stable now, over two decades later, when some of the top-rated films on the list have been rated over 2 million times. Not wanting to clutter our present study with that erratic early data, we settled on a mainly arbitrary start date of April 1, 2004, a decade and a half ago. Here is what the Top 25 looked like then, as compared with 2019:

Even this comparison of only two dates offers a wealth more insight than the 2019 list by itself. No doubt, the composition of the list at any given moment in time sheds damning light on social norms and structures of power. For instance, the fact that only two films directed (or co-directed) by black men and three films directed or co-directed by women currently2 appear on the top 250 reveals pervasive bias (both latent and overt) in both film production history and cinephilia today. According to the data available on 250.took.nl, as of September 2019, 955 films have appeared on the IMDb Top 250 since 1996. Of these, only 24 were directed or co-directed by women and only seven were directed or co-directed by black men (no films by black women have ever appeared on the list). Of those 24 films directed or co-directed by women, 13 appeared and disappeared from the list within the last four years of the 1990s. Thus, only 11 films directed by women ever appeared on the IMDb Top 250 during the first two decades of the twenty-first century.3

Examination of IMDb rankings of recent blockbuster releases proves just as probative: whereas Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) peaked at 19 and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) peaked at 9 (nine!) on their early-release meteoric rises and falls, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and Black Panther (2018) never appeared on the list at all. Since these pairs of Star Wars Saga and Marvel Cinematic Universe offerings were both produced according to the same studio tentpole logic and made similarly huge grosses at the box office, what distinguishes them? Certainly not mainstream critical response; The Last Jedi and Black Panther enjoy either commensurate or much higher esteem than their counterparts on both RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic. What could be the difference? Perhaps certain viewers’ resentment (acknowledged or not) toward black people and women in positions of power? For the most part this resentment manifests as a slight (again, probably not intentionally biased) downward shift in user ratings – that is, fewer ratings of 9 and 10 and more ratings of 6 and 7. But it also manifests as explicit hate-voting. Black Panther has twice the percentage of 1-ratings (the lowest rating) that Infinity War has. The Last Jedi has nearly three times the percentage of 1-ratings as The Force Awakens.

All this information provides certain illumination of broader patterns of social belief, but it lacks statistical significance in this anecdotal form. This calls for a better method. We believe that dramatic shifts in rankings over time paint a more compelling picture of mass ideology than any instantaneous snapshot. When groups of films sharing common thematic elements move in tandem on the list over time, this may suggest concomitant underlying ideological trends. Of course, countless concerns confront each other within a film’s ranking. It would be impossible to account for every variable that influences the popularity of a film, especially longitudinally. However, we propose that:

• if a set of films shares a particular specific and salient collection of properties (and not other properties which might supersede them in salience), and
• if these films change in rank similarly over time, and
• if the manner in which they shift in rank is rare compared to other films’ shifts in rank, and
• if there are no other films with the same collection of properties moving differently on the list,
• then this rare rank shift between films with important shared properties suggests a shift in underlying social attitudes pertaining to those properties.

In order for a shift to be relevant to our analysis, it must be persistent over time. That is to say, in order for a shift to count as remarkable, it must occur across a sufficient historical interval to constitute something more substantive than a fad or a news cycle. Thus, in the following analysis, we consider only films that held a spot on the IMDb Top 250 for no fewer than three consecutive years between this study’s start date of 1 April 2004 and its end date of 1 April 2019. By our count, 340 films meet those criteria. Furthermore, since the framework outlined in the previous paragraph also assumes that certain rank shifts are rare while others are commonplace, we sorted films according to the shape of their graph of rank vs. time in order to determine the relative prevalence of various patterns of movement. In short, we graphed the films in order to establish what constitutes “normal” behavior on the list and what behavior is rarer. In the next section, we discuss normal behavior before turning to rare behavior.

Normal Behavior

The most common behavior among all films was to slowly descend in ranking over time. One hundred and four films (30.6%) simply fell steadily downward at a variety of rates. For example, between 2005 and 2019, Citizen Kane (1941) dropped from a rank of 9 to a rank of 73 (considered logarithmically, that’s 3 orders of magnitude in base 2). Over the same time period, The Apartment (1960) fell from 77 to 107 (less than half an order of magnitude in base 2). Below, we have plotted the downward trajectories of some of the more notable films to steadily fall over the past decade and a half. Please note that the y-axis (rank on the Top 250) is scaled logarithmically, with powers of 2 (4, 8, 16, etc.) marked. We opt for the logarithmic scale for all graphs in this project, because the linear scale minimizes the significance of rank shifts near the top of the list and over-amplifies the significance of rank shifts near the bottom. We believe that a shift in rank from 20th to 40th is of far more consequence than a shift in rank from 220th to 240th. We also hold that when a film doubles or halves its rank, this fact should carry equal weight regardless of where the film began. That is, falling from 100 to 200 ought to be interpreted as having the same significance of falling from, say, 10 to 20. Thus, we employ the logarithmic scale.

Sixty-two films (18.2%) rose steadily, reached a peak (often lasting several years), and then began to fall steadily. The amplitude of these waves varies widely. For instance, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) rose from 22 in 2004 to 4 by 2007, holding that spot for much of the time until early 2012, after which it began to steadily decline to its current rank of 9. That’s a rise of 2.5 orders of magnitude followed by a fall of 1. During that same time, Groundhog Day (1993) rose from 197 in 2004 to 157 in 2011, back down to 233 in 2019, for an amplitude of about half of an order of magnitude.

Sixty-eight films (20.0%) appeared on the list shortly after their release, rocketed up to a peak, and thereafter fell much more slowly than they rose. We nicknamed these films “meteors.” Their rises and falls also come in a number of sizes. For instance, an arthouse release like Hotel Rwanda (2004) took nine months to rise from its debut rank of 176 to its peak rank of 43, which it achieved in late 2005. Since then, it has fallen steadily to its current rank of 223. By contrast, Avengers: Infinity War (2018) entered the list at a rank of 33 early in the morning of April 26, 2018. About 44 hours later, it reached its all-time peak of 9, a spot that it held for about three and a half days, after which it began to fall. By about a year after its release, it leveled out around a rank of 60, where it remains.4 A very small number of films, like Whiplash (2014) and Warrior (2011), have not fallen by a statistically significant margin since achieving their peaks. To closely illustrate the remarkably consistent behavior of these “meteors,” we have plotted separate graphs of the performance of four different meteors – Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens (2015), La La Land (2016), Logan (2017), and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) for exactly the first year of their release (below). Below that, we have also included a graph of every film released between 2013 and 2018 that entered the Top 50 within the first year of its release. Clearly, it is normal for these films to quickly reach a peak and then fall steadily to a consensus rank.

Eleven more films (3.2%) also fell, but either fell jaggedly due to changes in IMDb’s algorithm (like periodic adjustments of the definition of a “regular voter” (i.e., whose votes get counted when the ranking is determined)) or fell for a time, rose briefly, then fell again. This slim category includes films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The General (1926), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and Roman Holiday (1953).

Twenty-two films (6.5%) neither rose nor fell by a significant-enough margin to suggest a trend. These films belong to two rough sub-categories. First, there are highly ranked films that maintain their ranks, such as Schindler’s List (1993), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and The Godfather: Part II (1974), which has held the ranking of 3 consistently for the last decade and a half, save for moments when it was briefly unseated by meteors like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Dark Knight (2008), and Inception (2010). Second, there are films near the bottom of the list that entered or exited, often during an algorithm change, but did not move enough to be classified as rising or falling. These include Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Overall, 78.5% of the films considered held steady or fell in one of the ways listed above. This result ought to comport with our intuition about the esteem that mass culture accords to popular films – that is, films are most likely to be well regarded at their release and wane in popularity proportionally to the time that has elapsed since their release. We may fetishize the comeback of a rediscovered gem, but such films compose a tiny minority of all releases. To confirm this point statistically, we computed the average ranking of the top-10-highest-ranked films by decade of release once per year from 2004 to 2018 and charted those averages over time (below).5

As you can see, the average top 10 rank for release-decades far in the past tended to decline over the course of the last 15 years, and the number of places fallen tended to be greater for older decades. The 1930s average fell 66 places and .75 orders of magnitude (in base 2). The 1940s fell 46 places (-.88 orders of magnitude, a larger fall due to the fact that its average rank was higher), the 1950s fell 30 places (-.98 o.o.m.), the 1960s fell 29 places (-.73 o.o.m.), and the 1970s fell 19 places (-.67 o.o.m.). Filling in these prior decades’ lost ranks, the 1980’s rose 10 spots (.23 o.o.m.) and the 1990’s also gained 10 spots, but with a much higher average rank, for an ascent of .76 orders of magnitude. Films released in the 2000s and 2010s gobbled up the remaining losses from older decades. The lone anomaly was the 1920s, which actually rose in rank, albeit by less than .1 orders of magnitude, thanks almost entirely to the extraordinary resurgence of Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid, which entered the list in mid-2008 and incredibly cracked the top 100 by early 2015. The 2018 reappearance of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), which vanished for six years starting in 2012 for failing to meet the raised minimum vote threshold, also played a role.

Notes on the Algorithm

In the previous section we used the terms “regular voter” and “minimum vote threshold” in passing. Before examining rare behavior, it is necessary to define these terms and offer some caveats regarding the many imperfections of IMDb’s Top 250 as a dataset. Though IMDb may present its Top 250 as somehow impartially reflecting the tastes of the mass populace, in truth the shape of the list depends powerfully upon the design of the algorithm and the method of voting. Though this may be self-evident already, IMDb user ratings do not constitute a scientific poll, since they were not solicited from random samples of film viewers. Each IMDb user chooses which films to vote or not vote on, and there is no indication that any user is required to have seen or voted on a certain number of films (in the Top 250 or otherwise) before their votes count. IMDb has no way of ensuring that users vote in good faith, which is to say they do not “troll” films with low votes or vote on films they haven’t seen. In order to ensure that their Top 250 reflects current attitudes toward films, IMDb could have designed a site that periodically purges older votes or flags them for users to update. However, IMDb claims that they do not purge older votes.6 If this is the case, that means that votes logged over 20 years ago count equally as votes entered last week. Additionally, users vote on films by entering their rating for each on a whole-number scale from 1 to 10. If users were instead prompted to rank the films they’ve seen rather than rate each one in isolation, the Top 250 would almost certainly look different. And, of course, the Top 250 does not include short films, documentaries, stand-up comedy, made-for-TV movies, or television shows.7

Once users vote, three factors determine a film’s overall ranking. First of all, a film must meet a certain arbitrary minimum vote threshold, which IMDb publicly discloses. While this number has changed several times over the years, the most recent and dramatic change was implemented on July 19, 2012, when IMDb raised the threshold from 3,000 votes to 25,000 votes, a move that instantly booted 23 films off the list – including The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Tokyo Story (1953), and Fanny and Alexander (1982) – and, therefore, ushered a different set of films onto the list – including Edward Scissorhands (1990), Ed Wood (1994), and Big Fish (2003). Second, IMDb weights this rating using a formula that it also publicly discloses. This formula – which takes into account a film’s mean user rating, its number of votes, the minimum vote threshold (currently 25,000), and the average user rating across the entire site – produces what IMDb calls a “true Bayesian estimate” of a film’s rating. Finally, and most crucially, IMDb admits that in their Top 250 “only votes from regular voters are considered.” What is a “regular voter”? IMDb intentionally keeps this information secret, supposedly to deter those who would attempt to manipulate film rankings by clever subterfuge. However, even if we do not know how IMDb defines a “regular voter,” we can identify several moments when this definition must have changed. At irregular intervals, the rankings of many films simultaneously leap up or down at rates utterly out of character with their trend lines to that point. As may be clearly seen in the graph of an illustrative sample of film trend lines below, the most obvious apparent adjustments to the “regular voter” backend of the algorithm occurred between March and May 2005, between September and November 2009, between October and December 2010, and between October 2013 and January 2014.

Between March and May 2005, many films rapidly lost or gained an average of 40 or 50 places (though some films moved by much more), leading up to May 10, when suddenly, most films immediately leapt back to about where they had started. We could not discern a reason why some films lost and other films gained. For example, on March 1, 2005, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) had 6,361 votes, a number that steadily increased, as vote counts always do, to 7,283 votes on May 9. During this time, the film fell from a rank of 106 to a rank of 196. But on May 10, the vote count for The Best Years of Our Lives dropped from 7,283 votes to 6,133, and its rank instantly snapped up to 105.

During the 2013 adjustment, the ranks of certain films ­– in particular The Intouchables (2011), 3 Idiots (2009), and Like Stars on Earth (2007) – soared upward nearly an entire order of magnitude, while the ranks of other films were affected less or not at all. Overall, these changes to aspects of the algorithm may be disruptive, but once they are identified and accounted for, valuable insights may still be gleaned from the data.

RARE BEHAVIOR

It is common and, indeed, utterly expected for films on the IMDb Top 250 to either fall steadily over time or to rise briefly, reach a peak, and then fall. It is less common for films to slowly rise up the list. Of the 340 films considered, 53 (15.5%) steadily rose. This group includes slow-rising films such as Alien (1979) and Trainspotting (1996), which both steadily rose by about a third of an order of magnitude in the last 15 years to an apparent plateau.8 But it also includes a handful of films stampeding their way up the list. The one that has risen the farthest and fastest of all is Forrest Gump (1994), which in the last 15 years has rocketed from its April 2004 rank of 120 to its current rank of 12 – more than 3 orders of magnitude. Excepting meteors, only four films besides Forrest Gump have risen by 2 orders of magnitude or more: The Lion King (1994), Back to the Future (1985), 12 Angry Men (1957), and Fight Club (1999). The only films that have risen at a RATE comparable to Gump’s (.22 orders of magnitude per year) are The Lion King (1994), which entered the list in March 2007 and has since climbed to comfortably inside the top 50, and the Bollywood films Like Stars on Earth (2007) and 3 Idiots (2009), both of which entered the list in 2012, leapt almost a full order of magnitude thanks to the aforementioned October 2013–January 2014 “regular voter” change, and then continued to rise, into the 80s.9

While steadily-rising films are uncommon enough, it is even rarer for a film to reverse course in the middle of a downward trend. Of the 340 films we considered, 16 films (4.7%) fell for a time, stopped falling, and started rising again. They are: all three films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy – The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) – The Dark Knight (2008), The Pianist (2002), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Life Is Beautiful (1997), Braveheart (1995), Princess Mononoke (1997), The Green Mile (1999), The Gold Rush (1925), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Gladiator (2000), Toy Story (1995), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and Spirited Away (2001). A further 4 films (1.2%) we classified as a “complex rise,” which means that they turned around twice; that is, they rose (possibly as a new-release meteor), then fell, then rose again. They are: Modern Times (1936), Ikiru (1952), The Departed (2006), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).

ANALYSIS

We argue that when a set of films with salient shared themes or values simultaneously rises or falls then rises, this rare rank shift suggests a corresponding shift in underlying social attitudes pertaining to those values. But we also acknowledge that a multiplicity of factors – and, indeed, a multiplicity of film-viewing communities with overlapping, entangling, and contradictory concerns – clash within the rating of every film on IMDb. No single monolithic bloc of voters is or could be responsible for the films on the rise on IMDb. Moreover, the Top 250 at every moment in time represents an imbrication or a combing-together of many different interests and values. Thus, in our analysis we seek to group films by shared ideological features in an attempt to isolate and identify the multiple underlying trends that intersect and converge on the Top 250. We believe that the closer-knit these groupings, the greater the likelihood that their simultaneous rise might indicate or betoken underlying ideological shifts. In this section, we propose groupings according to the following topics: fantasy, sentimentality and masculinity, crime and melodrama, mystery and investigation, populist/revisionist historicity, and racial reconciliation.

Fantasy

The clearest trend of the past 15 years concerns high fantasy films. High fantasy films are those that take place in an alternate reality from our own. To be clear, high fantasy is not the only modality of fantasy relevant to this project; we will return to other films inflected by fantasy, particularly fantasizations of history, later on. Over the past 15 years, two significant sets of high fantasy films have exhibited unambiguously similar behavior: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, comprising The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003), and films directed by Hayao Miyazaki, namely Spirited Away (2001), Princess Mononoke (1997), and My Neighbor Totoro (1988). All of these films had their lowest rankings from 2008 to 2010, and then rose concurrently, each rising by about an order of magnitude in the following years. The rise of these fantasy films seems also to have pulled three more Miyazaki films, Castle in the Sky (1986), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), into similar rising trajectories. Even Grave of the Fireflies (1988), another Studio Ghibli film not directed by Miyazaki, also exhibits a strong upward trend. Many have already observed that the public appetite for fantasy has been on rise recently, with The Shape of Water (2017) becoming the second fantasy film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar and HBO’s fantasy epic drama Game of Thrones dominating television. At a superstructural level, an argument could be made that the timing of the simultaneous fall and rise of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Miyazaki’s catalogue, all of which reach a minimum near the end of the George W. Bush presidency and rise concurrently with the Obama presidency, corresponds with a mass turn within the U.S. political left wing from despondent disillusion to yes-we-can magical thinking. On an economic level, the turn toward fantasy also coincides with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when those struck by the housing bubble may have gravitated toward escapism in entertainment over realism. However, such conclusions cannot be directly supported by data (since IMDb does not collect information regarding political affiliation and since Americans are not the only voters on IMDb), commit cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies, and probably read history too superficially. Nevertheless, we feel that preferences for fantasy do not operate in isolation. As we will explore throughout this section, sentimental films, populist revisionist histories, and racial reconciliation dramas all depend on certain fantasizations of reality.

Chaplin and Sentimentality

After high fantasy, the second-clearest trend of the past 15 years involves the dramatic upswing in the popularity of Chaplin films. Every film from the 1920s and 1930s exhibits a downward trend except for the films of Charlie Chaplin. Every film of his that has ever appeared on the Top 250 has climbed in recent years, and even his archly sentimental melodrama The Kid (1921) entered the list for the first time in March 2008 and has since soared to inside the top 100. As mentioned earlier, because of The Kid, the 1920s is the only decade before the 1980s to be trending upward in the average ranking of its highest-ranked films. After Chaplin’s entire body of work, the next-earliest film that could be said to exhibit a rising trend is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), though its uptick is so comparatively minor that we opted to classify it as neither rising nor falling. Considered alongside It’s a Wonderful Life, the resurgence of Chaplin suggests a renewed public appetite for sentimental, allegorical, even whimsical stories that for the most part take place outside of any recognizable history but within a clear moral (and moralizing) framework.

Examining the list of films that either rose or fell then rose, we find it rife with sentimentality: Ikiru (1952), Umberto D. (1952), Star Wars VI: The Return of the Jedi (1983) (no longer, I guess, do the Ewoks hegemonically read as childish and maudlin), Cinema Paradiso (1988), Dead Poets Society (1989), Forrest Gump (1994), Good Will Hunting (1997), Life Is Beautiful (1997), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Like Stars on Earth (2007), The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), and Mary and Max (2009). Even among the films with “sad” endings, like Ikiru, Life Is Beautiful, and Mary and Max, the films inject sentimentalized tinges of beauty, heroism, or messaging relating to the preciousness of life. This kind of less overt but nevertheless distinct orientation toward the sentimental may easily be detected in some of the other films that fell then rose, including Braveheart (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Green Mile (1999), and Gladiator (2000), all of which prominently feature some version of a sacrifice narrative, often with allegorical undertones. Note that while sentimental stories have long been a mainstay of cinema, they were previously most associated with the “women’s film” genre of the tearjerker or the weepie. But milestones of this genre, from Stella Dallas (1937) to All that Heaven Allows (1956) to Out of Africa (1985) to Still Alice (2014) are not only not rising – they are not on the list at all and never have been. What we wish to underscore about the appearance of The Kid (1921) and the rise of Chaplin’s other films is not simply that they traffic in overt sentimentality; it is that they center their sentimentality on a male character. Likewise, nearly all the other sentimental films moving up the list (as mentioned above) also feature men as protagonists.

Crime Films and the Male Melodrama

It should come as no surprise that the Top 250’s overwhelming preference for male protagonists does not end with the sentimental drama. For the 30 or so films that rose 1 OOM in ranking or more over the past 15 years, about a dozen could be classified as violent crime films (colloquially, “guy movies”): Casino (1995), Fight Club (1999), For a Few Dollars More (1965), Goodfellas (1990), Heat (1995), Leon: The Professional (1994), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Oldboy (2003), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Scarface (1983), Se7en (1995), and Snatch. (2000). A further two films that fell before rising, The Dark Knight (2008) and The Departed (2006), also fit this classification. While the values and interests of these films are not monolithic, they share some key qualities. They are all set in worlds populated mainly by men, with men as protagonists and bearers of power; they all center on criminal activity, often undertaken by professional criminal organizations; and they all deploy violence either operatically (making notable use of music, virtuoso montage, outré camera angles, slow motion, long takes, or other similar formal flourishes to heighten the audience’s cathexis of that violence) or with arch irony (that is to say, in the context of an overtly clever, detached caper plot, in which the violence intensifies the irreverence of the film’s puckish games). The list also skews especially toward films made in the 1990s and features multiple films each by directors David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Guy Ritchie, and Sergio Leone.

This simultaneous ascent of so many films rhapsodizing masculine exercises of criminal violence as both narrative means and aesthetic ends could imply a number of things. On the one hand, most of the films in this grouping center on violence perpetrated outside of a meaningful historical context. That is to say that these films, whether set in the past or the present day, deploy period detail and other stylization to romanticize the violence rather than to portray real historical events or to analyze history. The violence appears as its own end. To confirm this conjecture, we examined the war film genre. The war film features most of the pleasures of the crime film – violence mediating drama between men – but war films tend to be moving down the list, not up. This applies to war films of all eras: The Battleship Potemkin (1925), The General (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Stalag 17 (1953), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Paths of Glory (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Great Escape (1963), Patton (1970), The Deer Hunter (1978), Das Boot (1981), Platoon (1986), and Glory (1989). The only war films on the rise are Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Inglourious Basterds (2009), the former a sentimentalized sacrifice narrative and the latter a gleefully self-aware historical-fabrication fantasy.10 Of all releases from the past 5 years, the highest-ranked war film is a superhero movie: Avengers: Infinity War (2018) (currently at 60), and the only non-fantasy war film of the past five years still on the list is Hacksaw Ridge (2016) (at 178). Of all of Christopher Nolan’s films released in the last 15 years, the only one no longer on the list is his war film, Dunkirk (2017). The trend regarding war films is clear: older ones are sliding off the list and they aren’t being replaced with newer ones. This is not to say, of course, that the U.S. is no longer a pro-war culture; rather, it suggests that while some segments of the population increasingly conflate national pride or patriotism with saccharine displays of militarism or jingoism, other segments may be reflexively avoiding images of the military in their entertainment altogether (unless it arrives wearing a superhero cape). Simply put, war films are no longer films with consensus appeal, whereas putatively apolitical non-historical crime films remain so.11

But even the rise of the masculine crime film is an ambiguous trend. Other classic violent action films, like Die Hard (1988) and The Wild Bunch (1969), and other celebrated ’90s crime films, like The Usual Suspects (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Fargo (1996), are slowly falling or have already disappeared from the Top 250. Moreover, while two Leone films are on the rise, his two highest-ranked films on the list – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – have been falling since about 2012. The fall of Leone’s two most acclaimed Westerns should come as no surprise, since every Western to appear on the list in the last 15 years (except For a Few Dollars More) is either steadily falling or gone already. This includes Red River (1948), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), High Noon (1952), The Searchers (1956), Rio Bravo (1959), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Wild Bunch (1969), Unforgiven (1992), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Django Unchained (2012), and The Revenant (2015). Coincidentally, Unforgiven was still on the rise until late 2012, about the time when Clint Eastwood performed that infamous dialogue with an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, and ever since it’s been falling. Its trend line doesn’t even slowly plateau; it just instantaneously rebounds like a billiard ball off a rail, its angle of reflection equal to its angle of incidence (within 10%).

Regardless of how we might situate crime films, war films, and Westerns in terms of their relationship with history, what is not in doubt is that the large rise of those dozen or so violent crime films confirms and, indeed, suggests a shoring-up of IMDb’s users’ already patriarchal bent in voting – a rechristening of populist film history on contemporary forms of the male melodrama. The current top five of the 250 bears this out especially well: The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), The Dark Knight (2008), and 12 Angry Men (1957). One omits women entirely, one assigns the vast majority of its screen time for women to pin-up posters, and the others center on worlds of men in which women are marginal. Compare this top five to the American Film Institute’s much-debated 1996 list of the Greatest American Films of All Time. Their list was led by Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942), the two non-meteor films that fell the farthest in the past 15 years (each about 3 orders of magnitude),12 followed by The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Casablanca and Citizen Kane may fail the Bechdel Test, but they both feature rich, detailed female characters, and Gone with the Wind, for all its other problems, centers its plot on multiple women and affords them ample agency.

Mystery and Investigation

Analysis of the rising films on the Top 250 suggests a further trend that runs parallel to the crime film: an upswing in several varieties of the mystery/investigation/adjudication genre. The most obvious exemplar of this group is 12 Angry Men (1957), which surged 2 orders of magnitude up the list and into the top five. But far behind it, three similar and contemporaneous films are also climbing: Dial M for Murder (1954), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Of these, Dial M for Murder is probably the most remarkable, since it is the only film directed by Alfred Hitchcock currently on the rise (see below). Of the 13 Hitchcock films that have ever appeared on the Top 250, all of them are falling or already gone, except Dial M for Murder. But why? What distinguishes it from his other films that are falling? Like 12 Angry Men, it was adapted from a play and largely confines its action to a single room. Then again, so was/does Rope (1948), which disappeared in 2015. Also like 12 Angry Men, its narrative arc concerns the precise analysis of a series of clues toward the careful unraveling of a mystery, but so do other Hitchcock films like The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Rear Window (1954). Then again, the investigator in Dial M for Murder is a detective inspector (a rarity in Hitchcock due to his famous antipathy for the police), so audiences may interpret his presence as an extension of state judicial procedures. This aligns the pleasures of the film with 12 Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution, and Judgment at Nuremberg, all of which take place in and around a trial. But there are far too many other courtroom-related films on a downswing to be able to make a broad claim here. Mentioning that there are several other recent criminal-investigation films on an upward trajectory does little to clarify the trend. Nevertheless, they are: Se7en (1995), The Hunt (2012), and Prisoners (2013). Unsurprisingly, almost all of these dramas center on male protagonists, though Marlene Dietrich’s and Grace Kelly’s characters in Witness for the Prosecution and Dial M for Murder notably exercise more agency than is typical for either their directors or their genre.

Though the mysteries and whodunits of the past gave way to the modern twist-ending puzzle film, some of the most prominent recent exponents of that genre, The Usual Suspects (1995) and Memento (2000), are trending down on the Top 250. Others, however, are on the rise; most notably The Prestige (2006). The Prestige is one of only two films (the other being racial-reconciliation dramedy The Intouchables released five years later) to have meteored onto the list and then continued to rise without falling. Why should its star shine brighter while Memento, also directed by Christopher Nolan, dims? First, the twist-ending puzzle film might have a limited shelf life (similar to the violent crime film, as mentioned earlier) that Memento is beginning to exhaust. Second, The Prestige, with its gadgetry, heightened costumes, and dark cinematography, hits more notes of what we now recognize as the Nolan brand, visually speaking at least, than Memento does. In both The Usual Suspects and Memento, the culprit turns out to be an established character in the story who, for one reason or another, fell into the audience’s or the investigator’s blind spot. In The Prestige, the center of the mystery has migrated to a different quadrant of the Johari Window; there, the solution to the puzzle is an unknown, and finding it depends on uncovering the very existence of a character (who was hiding in plain sight all along). This trope, in which a fundamental property of a character’s world remains unknowable to them until a moment of epiphany, appears in a variety of forms in other films ascending the Top 250. In particular, in The Truman Show (1998), Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and even Shutter Island (2010) an “ordinary man” protagonist slowly discovers that he is mistaken about his fundamental outlook on or picture of reality itself. Ideologically, this shift in the relationship between mysteries, epistemology, and worlding could cut several ways. To some viewers, a tearing back of the curtain of reality might heighten their awareness of hegemonic machinations of discursive power in the crafting of master-narratives of national history and identity. But for others, the rise of this trope may both indicate and reinforce their inability to believe in any factual historical account and hurry their retreat into comforting populist myths.

Populist Revisionist Historicity and Forrest Gump

No film on the list embodies a retreat into populist myth as totally or as troublingly as Forrest Gump (1994). Though critically and popularly lauded at its release (winning the Oscar for Best Picture, among other plaudits), its star faded in the late ’90s. However, since 2004, it has rocketed from a rank of 120 to a rank of 12, rising farther and faster than any other film. We believe that this is because Forrest Gump represents a potent confluence of some of the thematic properties that we associate with other films rising up the list. For starters, it centers on the whimsical misadventures of a Chaplinesque “innocent” white male protagonist, it resolves narrative conflict sentimentally rather than realistically, and it subjugates the perspectives of women and people of color beneath his. But more importantly for this section, it treats history as a playground for fantasization. It avoids historical analysis in favor of intentionally syrupy, romanticized myth, and crafts one important plotline around the white wish-fulfillment of racial reconciliation. When situated next to other films with similar tropes, Forrest Gump’s rise prompts two sobering reflections on IMDb’s voter base (and perhaps mass film culture in general): they are interested in stories about race, but only when told from a white perspective, and they are interested in the patinas of historical periods, but only when meaningful analysis of that history is replaced with morality tales or wish-fantasies.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, Forrest Gump fancifully inserts its protagonist into a slew of major historical events, where he intervenes in imagined ways. Surely, this plotting has its own problematics, since, as some have pointed out, he often finds himself acting as a white savior or usurping the achievements of people of color – problems in common with Robert Zemeckis’s other fast-rising revisionist fantasy film Back to the Future (1985). However, when we speak of Forrest Gump as an ahistorical fantasy, we mean instead to underscore that its view of the latter half of the twentieth century both utterly misrepresents several important historical moments and movements, while at the same time either misrecognizing or intentionally ignoring and falsifying the forces that gave rise to history in the first place.

As Jennifer Wang perceptively argues, the early 1990s were defined by a rightward swing in American politics during which conservatives attempted to buttress white American patriarchy by claiming that 1960s civil rights legislation and legal victories for women ended inequality and, therefore, no further reform was necessary. Forrest Gump’s narrative centers on those moments of turbulence from the 1950s through the 1970s when African Americans, women, and anti-war protesters attempted to radically reshape American society around equality and peace. However, Forrest Gump’s creators characterized the film as “the romantic, rollicking tale of an innocent at large in an America that is losing its innocence” (qtd. in Wang 95). That is to say, the film considers America’s foundational exclusions of and violence toward everyone besides white straight landed men as its “innocence” from which those decades of resistance were a falling-away. The film opens with Forrest describing his namesake Nathan Bedford Forrest and the KKK not as racist terrorists maintaining white supremacy by mass murder but rather as people who “[did] things that, well, just don’t make no sense.” The film’s totalizing anti-historical method follows from this, as it dotingly recasts America’s postwar upheavals not as dialectical struggle against oppression, but rather as the tale of some exuberant but confused young people who didn’t know any better. By narrating this story from the perspective of the 1990s, the film suggests, in a Fukuyama-like twist, that in the fullness of time these misguided flower children and meandering Vietnam vets arrived at the present, where all their struggles have resolved and history has ended. From the perspective of Gump’s lionized “innocence,” which the film regards as a panacea for all division, the ’60s and ’70s flow by as a series of disconnected events – a mixtape or blooper reel of society-of-the-spectacle iconicity – in which the Black Panthers mean no more or less than a “Shit Happens” bumper sticker, all subsumed in a play of surfaces. Worse, the film seems to argue that Forrest’s superficial impressions of the past – and by extension the film’s lobotomized historiography – actually give him greater insight into the truth of things.13 At Jenny’s graveside, Forrest compares Lt. Dan’s certainty in destiny with his Momma’s belief that everyone is “floatin’ around, accidental-like, on a breeze” and decides that they are both right. In the film’s scheme of positioning Forrest as a bridge between differences, this compromise is offered as a rapprochement between determinism and chaos; but note that in both of these folk systems of historicity, individual agency plays no part and the past remains illegible. In this way, the film caters to a mass audience’s shared frustrations over their difficulties understanding the forces of history. It tells them, “Don’t bother trying to make sense of it – there’s nothing to make sense of, and anyway, it’s all in the past.” Forrest Gump does not simply traffic in false consciousness; it overtly encourages un-consciousness.

Though perhaps nowhere as egregiously as in Forrest Gump, many of the historical dramas trending upward on the Top 250 involve some degree of trade-off between historical accuracy and fantasy, in favor of a romanticized past. Though some of these romanticizations are mainly harmless (as in the case of 1988’s Cinema Paradiso), others openly reject a critical stance toward history, treating moments as serious as the Vietnam War or even the Holocaust (1997’s Life Is Beautiful) as mere backdrops for ahistorical, sentimental comedies. Just as Forrest Gump boils down vectoral struggles like racism, sexism, and militarism to mere individual interpersonal encounters, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) also misrecognizes the historical forces behind poverty and the exploitation of labor as a struggle between Mr. Potter’s will to do evil and George Bailey’s will to do good. And just as Forrest stands as a pillar of selfless innocent sacrifice (despite the fact that he remains alive at the end of the story, unlike Bubba and Jenny), so also several other historical dramas rising on the Top 250 center on allegorical or sentimentalized personal sacrifice, as in Braveheart (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Gladiator (2000). And even though Forrest Gump is in no way based on a true story, the wish-fulfillment and revisionist optimism that animate its narrative may also explain the rise of other it-all-worked-out-in-the-end based-on-a-true-story films like A Beautiful Mind (2001) and The Pianist (2002). In A Beautiful Mind, John Nash’s mental illnesses resolve happily in a Nobel Prize (never mind that the story also falsifies his sexuality and many other details about his personal life). And, of course, The Pianist resolves the Holocaust with a narrative of survival. As A. O. Scott put it in his New York Times review of the film: “Accounts of survival . . . are both representative and anomalous; they at once record this all but unimaginable historical catastrophe and, without intentional mendacity or inaccuracy, distort it.” Moreover, Scott added, in opting for a sentimental ending that hinges on the power of art to overcome genocidal racism, the film does little to help the viewer situate or understand Nazism beyond, as Forrest Gump put it, “things that, well, just don’t make no sense.”

To the extent that a director could be considered a brand, the films of prominent individual directors tend to trend in tandem on the Top 250. A few notable exceptions to this rule find explanation in those films’ stances toward history. For instance, Quentin Tarantino has had eight films on the list in the past 15 years,14 and all of them are moving downward on the list except one. Inglourious Basterds (2009), with its gleefully self-aware rewriting of history, is that single exception. Christopher Nolan has directed 10 feature films so far. Of these, eight have appeared on the Top 250: Memento (2000), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). All of them entered the list as meteors, and all but one remain on the list. This lone exception is Dunkirk – his only film that attempts to retell a real historical event.

Racial Reconciliation and Forrest Gump

Films with themes of racial reconciliation, often where a white man finds enlightenment through an interracial friendship, have also noticeably risen on IMDb’s Top 250, including recent meteors The Intouchables (2011) and upset Best Picture Oscar winner Green Book (2018). While not the sole narrative concern of Forrest Gump, Gump’s relationship with Bubba shares some of the tropes common in white-authored films about race. These tropes include the co-opting of black historical achievements also seen in Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985), where Marty McFly inspires a black man to become mayor and also invents rock-n-roll for Chuck Berry, to preachy white-inflected parables of the history of racism (1998’s American History X), to stock characters like the “white savior” (1999’s The Matrix) and the “Magical Negro” (The Green Mile the same year). 12 Angry Men (1957), while it never explicitly foregrounds race, does not feature any nonwhite characters. Even IMDb’s top-ranked film of all time, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), centers on an idealized black/white friendship.

Given the vast range of backgrounds and identities of the users whose votes go into the IMDb Top 250, no film stays on the list for long unless it appeals broadly. Thus, the list is always-already a compromise of representation. Consensus, which the nature of the IMDb’s algorithm inherently calls for, does not naturally bend toward diversity, inclusion, or challenging films. Consensus gravitates toward and probably even amplifies existing biases. No one disagrees that 12 Angry Men is a great movie. But given the overt racial bias that infects the list as a whole,15 we must acknowledge that at least some aspect of 12 Angry Men’s soaring success on the list depends on its total exclusion of nonwhite and non-male characters. Most people who enthusiastically rate 12 Angry Men highly do not consider this. But misogynists and white supremacists do.

CONCLUSION

If the list of films that comprises the IMDb Top 250 had been compiled by one person, what might we surmise or conclude about that person? What attitudes would we ascribe to them pertaining to race, gender, history, realism, fantasy, and so on? Whatever our conclusions, we must be willing to apply them equally to the body politic as a whole, because the IMDb Top 250 emerges from the aggregation of their latent beliefs. Emergent systemic or structural prejudice does no less harm to society as a whole than individual prejudice, and we must be willing to confront them with equal urgency.

While popular films tend to rise and fall in predictable cycles, tracking the last decade and a half of IMDb’s user-voted list of the Top 250 films of all time reveals increased esteem for male-centered melodramas, in particular those that rosily revise or sentimentally fantasize about the past. This appetite for ideological wish-fulfillment probably just confirms the pernicious tendencies toward ahistoricism, anti-intellectualism, and belief over fact that already characterize the public sphere. However, we hope that this project might re-focus attention on the political necessity of identifying, decrying, and otherwise intervening against popular but problematic media not just at its release date, but in the years afterward as well. One need not be a historian to recognize the unacceptability of Forrest Gump as a framer of mass attitudes toward history, not just for Baby Boomers but also for younger generations who continue to fuel its rise without grasping its ideological toxicity.

To that end, this dataset merits more investigation. In particular, we want to explore how the trends we observe here comport with data from the World Values Survey. We wish to delve more into the theoretical connections between sentimentality, ahistoricism, and fantasy. We believe further analysis is necessary on the influence of awards shows, the appearance of sequels, the importance of release date, and other as-yet-unimagined factors on a film’s rank over time. We will investigate whether it is possible within this dataset (or some other dataset) to disentangle the various voting blocs and fan communities that the list combs together. Finally, in the spirit of activism, we wonder how IMDb’s voting and ranking practices could be best revised to encourage inclusion, tamp down the conservatizing pull of consensus, and, in the meanwhile, make casual readers of the list aware of its patterns of exclusion. It’s simply not enough for revised academic film canons to have found room for Oscar Micheaux and Ida Lupino; popular user-generated Best-Of lists need to make room for them, too. And Charles Burnett. And Ava DuVernay. And Agnès Varda. And so many more.

Bibliography

In addition to various pages on IMDb (see footnote 4), the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine (https://archive.org/web/) (see footnote 1), and “IMDb Top 250 History” (https://250.took.nl):

Fearing, Franklin. “Films as History.” Hollywood Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Jul., 1947), pp. 422-427.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004 [1947].

Lee, Christina, ed. Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2008.

O’Connor, John E. “Historians and Film: Some Problems and Prospects.” The History Teacher, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Aug., 1973), pp. 543-552.

Pickering, Michael and Emily Keightley. “The Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology, November 2006, 54: 919-941.

Scott, A. O. “Surviving the Warsaw Ghetto Against Steep Odds.” The New York Times. December 27, 2002. Web: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/college/col27surviving.html.

Sperb, Jason. Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2016.

Sprengler, Christine. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Wang, Jennifer Hyland. “A Struggle of Contending Stories: Race, Gender, and Political Memory in Forrest Gump.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 92-115.

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This project would not have been possible without the extraordinary research and data-crunching assistance provided by my undergraduate research assistant Mackenzie Shields. My thanks to her and to Missouri S&T’s First Year Research Experience program for supporting this project.