The Theory of Everyskiing

A couple months ago, I decided to go skiing. I had never been, had a day off, and didn’t know if I’d have another chance before spring came and the snow melted. The night before, to learn the basics, I did what everyone should do when they want to learn something new: I searched for clips of James Bond doing that thing.

I had in my mind a scene from The World Is Not Enough (1999), but when I searched, “James Bond skiing scene,” this was the first result:

That’s from 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me. The first 50 seconds pack in some of our favorite tropes: the blonde Bond Girl who, in betrayal, reverts to her thick eastern-European accent. Bond’s dedication-to-England quip. The Bad Guys who, despite being in close contact with someone who’s literally inside his cabin, decide to wait for him at the bottom of a mountain instead.

At the :50 mark, the chase begins. It is gloriously, hilariously, fake. I don’t need to have been skiing to know that scene was filmed in front of a green screen. It’s almost as if they didn’t even try to make it look real.

To be fair, the Roger Moore Bond movies tended to be campy; almost intentionally, self-awarely so. But that view comes from our 2019 perspective — in 1977, that ski scene was about the best they could do, and would not have seemed campy, or out of the ordinary, at all.

The scene in Happy Days when Fonzie jumps the shark, also from 1977, is a little better—Henry Winkler actually waterskied—but compared to what our eyes are used to now, it’s still laughable.

A few clicks later, I found what I had been looking for.

Much more realistic (though not terribly helpful to a first-time skier.) But it occurred to me that someday, probably sooner than we think, this scene from ’99 will look every bit as ridiculous as the scene from ’77. Someday, watching movies on iMax-sized screens through 3D Goggles will be the norm. Someday, who knows? Maybe movie studios will be able to implant moving images directly into our brains, and the idea of watching a ski chase on a screen will be as quaint as listening to music on a spinning disc.

It’s not just movies and music. On a long enough timeline, almost everything that was once cutting-edge and widely accepted, from fashion trends to scientific ideas, from moral codes to medicine, becomes some combination of quaint, ridiculous, abhorrent, and dangerous.

The best and brightest human minds—the Malcolm Gladwells, Neil deGrasse Tysons, Stephen Hawkings, Elon Musks—of, say, the 15th century, would have unequivocally believed that the sun revolved around the earth. The notion that the world is flat was once beyond question.

We, fancying ourselves modern, enlightened people, should — and most of us do—hold positions based on the best evidence available to us. We believe in the theory of evolution, that the earth is round, and that climate change is human-made.

But Father Time is undefeated. Beliefs that virtually every human held or participated in are enduring cracks in their foundations and will, someday, crumble, to the point where they look every bit as campy and cartoonish — if not downright evil—as that James Bond skiing scene from 1977.

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