The Sunday Afternoon Rewatch
Creative Nonfiction: ‘Your favourite movie is probably not your favourite movie because it was the best film you have ever seen. It is your favourite because Zee Cinema played it a zillion times in the summer of 2014 while your mother folded clothes in the next room, and you unconsciously absorbed its dialogues through domestic osmosis.’
- Devanshi
(On Accidental Collective Memory. Forgive me, Halbwachs.)
I have a theory about why some films disappear, and why some live a longer life: To the discontent of filmmakers everywhere, it may have much more to do with Sunday afternoons than their genius. It may have to do with boredom, and Star Gold, and the very fact that one film happened to be playing, while another wasn’t. Nobody sat down and declared Sooryavansham the defining cinematic masterpiece of Indian cinema. It simply happened to be on for the 19th Sunday in a row at 3 p.m., and you simply happened to be there for that 19th consecutive Sunday, at 3 p.m., half-asleep on the sofa in an Indian household, where the television must always keep playing something.
Which is to say, your favourite movie is probably not your favourite movie because it was the best film you have ever seen. It is your favourite because Zee Cinema played it a zillion times in the summer of 2014 while your mother folded clothes in the next room, and you unconsciously absorbed its dialogues through domestic osmosis.
Which is to say cultural memory is not entirely meritocratic. It’s infrastructural, and I admit this sounds like something a Greek philosopher would say before getting banned from public office. But what I mean is not that we do not have tastes or are incapable of doing so, but that our tastes have never existed in isolation.
Not today, not 10 years ago.
This was the peculiar power of cable television: shared reruns, centralised memory, accidental attachment. You did not consciously choose to love these films. Your hippocampus did it for you.
Jab We Met didn’t become a classic because your favourite influencer insisted it on Instagram. It became a classic because, somewhere, your 2010 self still remembers dancing badly to “Yeh Ishq Haaye,” while satellite television replayed the film enough times for its emotional rhythms to become indistinguishable from your memory. This was the peculiar power of cable television: shared reruns, centralised memory, accidental attachment. You did not consciously choose to love these films. Your hippocampus did it for you.
Thanks to streaming, we are now, theoretically, free from this phenomenon. The television no longer decides what we watch at 3 p.m. on a Sunday, because streaming platforms have arrived, carrying the great modern promise of individuality. Watch what you want, when you want, where you want.
Cinema, finally, is at your fingertips.
Except, even this freedom had an uneven arrival. And yes, unfortunately, even streaming has a class history. Knowing about Money Heist or Stranger Things in 2017 was, in itself, a kind of class marker. Streaming them required good internet service, subscriptions, familiarity with English-language internet culture, and enough leisure to care about “shows” before they became mass conversation.
Today, of course, everyone knows these shows. The heist ended years ago, and yet references to “Bella Ciao” continue to appear in the most spiritually confusing corners of social media.
Streaming, therefore, did not eliminate centralised taste. It merely changed the mechanism through which taste usually gets centralised. While television once imposed repetition through scarcity, streaming imposes visibility through algorithms, discourse, and the subtle violence of recommendation culture. Now, films survive because they become “underrated gems”, and a YouTube essay with dramatic background music informs you that it was “ahead of its time”; because someone on Letterboxd gave it four-and-a-half stars and called it “haunting”; because an Instagram Reel with moody music and grainy colouring suddenly convinces thousands that a movie they ignored in 2012 is now cinema. The difference is that earlier, we accidentally watched the same things; now, we consciously perform as if we all watch the same things. (For my professors, this is around Goffman, yes.)
(None of this is new, by the way. Media scholars were writing about shared screens and centralised taste long before I was born).
Despite all this, some films continue to survive, because they deserve to. Discard, for a moment, the exhausting internet habit of calling every flop film underrated. Some films persist because they possess what most streaming content increasingly lacks: texture, rhythm, and rewatchability. Delhi Belly remains funny not because “Sir, Loondry” is inherently hilarious, but because the joke is layered perfectly within the architecture of the film. Here, the tension of the scene, the seriousness of the characters, the abrupt absurdity of the line, the rhythm of its delivery, and an accumulated familiarity we already have with these characters arrive at precisely the perfect moment. The joke cannot exist elsewhere in the film without becoming weaker. More importantly, the humour also emerges from recognition: everyone knows somebody who modifies English words in such a manner. The joke carries traces of class, aspiration, language politics, and the peculiar Indian habit of laughing both with and at people, simultaneously. The filmmaker (Abhinay Deo) and the audience all understand this, and we continue laughing.
Which is why I do not think cinema is dying, despite how frequently people announce its death, like exhausted mediaeval town criers. What is dying instead is accidental remembering. Memory is no longer infrastructural in the same way. It is more intentional now, more curated, more reliant on discourse and recommendation, and more dependent on whether you are willing or unwilling to repurchase a subscription. It is still not entirely free, still shaped by access, internet speed, social circles, and the algorithm’s idea of what it thinks I’m supposed to like, who I’m supposed to resemble, demographically.
But it is no longer as accidental.
You can still stumble upon things, of course. The last great cinema hall in India may well be a dentist’s waiting room, a grandparent’s house, or a Sunday afternoon. Someone, at some point, will leave the television on a channel nobody in the room would have chosen, and Helen will be dancing to “Mehbooba Mehbooba” in Gabbar’s den. By the second verse, your foot will start tapping, and so will the foot of the stranger across from you, and a teenager with braces will mouth the lyrics and never be able to tell you where he learnt them from. Domestic osmosis, again.
It is difficult to imagine cinema, particularly the kind of cinema we have grown up with, without these shared encounters. Bollywood would not quite be Bollywood if Helen’s dance numbers, Shah Rukh Khan’s outstretched arms, or “Mogambo Khush Hua” weren’t familiar to people who may never have watched the respective films in their entirety.
As viewership becomes more individualised, we need people, and places, to hold these moments. These moments travelled because people kept encountering them, in living rooms, in public spaces, and most importantly in the company of others. What we stand to lose is not stumbling upon a film, but stumbling upon it as a collective, for the chance that a scene you caught on a Sunday afternoon becomes one that millions of others know, that a film becomes a reference, a shared joke, a memory, and a classic piece of cinema.
Long live cinema, then. And long live the Sunday afternoon rerun.
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Devanshi is a sociology student at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, where she is one of three Editors-in-Chief of Dastak, the Department of Sociology’s magazine. She writes about cinema, media and popular culture, and has strong opinions about Sunday afternoon reruns. You can find her on Instagram: @ekcupdevanshi.
