I have been thinking about the film Eraser recently.
It hasn’t been because it’s a particularly great film – it wasn’t – but instead because it seems to be a completely forgotten film. I imagine most people don’t actually remember Eraser exists. The Arnold Schwarzenegger film from 1996 was notable for something, I’m sure, when it was released – it was even nominated for a technical Oscar – but in the years that followed, everyone seems to have forgotten about Eraser.
Which somehow makes it interesting.
The film was a reasonably big deal at the time, and opened at number one at the box office, yet one struggles to remember anything about it. What unique mix of qualities has made Eraser so forgettable? What is it about Eraser that has caused it to slip from our collective consciousness? Why has Eraser been erased?
It’s sometimes fascinating to think of the ebb and flow of public interest in various things. What seemed like a big deal one year is nothing at all decades later, while something under the radar is suddenly a big deal.
Keeping it in the realm of movies, the opposite of Eraser has to be It’s A Wonderful Life. Believe it or not, the film was a failure when released in 1946 and marked the beginning of the end of director Frank Capra’s relevance as a director. Now it’s considered a classic, aired perpetually over the Christmas season.
In a highly compressed version of the story that I can fit in a paragraph, the film became a hit partially because it was cheap to air on television due to the way copyright worked on it. So, for not much money, television stations had a Christmas-themed movie to air during December, and by making it a staple of television it gained a new level of popularity.
The result is that the reputation of the movie is now much better known than it ever was 72 years ago when it came out.
Would Eraser be well remembered if, by some quirk of licensing and cost, it had become a staple of Saturday afternoon television? Other action movies from the same era have a bit more of a television presence and seem a bit better remembered, something like Con Air. But then again, maybe Eraser just plain isn’t memorable enough, and all the television presentations in the world can’t make it something people care about.
It’s telling that I have actually watched Eraser and have been unable to actually think of a plot-relevant joke. Which is fine, because nobody would get it anyway.
It doesn’t take very long for history to start changing what’s important about any given period of time. It’s also interesting to wonder what is going to be forgotten in twenty years and what is suddenly going to be regarded as incredibly important that we might be overlooking. I’m using movies as an example, but it applies to all human endeavor. We don’t know yet what is going to shake out from the lives we’re living right now and what people in the future are going to look back on as important from what is happening right now.
Eraser has been effectively erased from the public consciousness, and that’s probably fine, but at the time it was impossible to know that in twenty two years nobody would know what it was.
