What makes a work of art seem dated, I would suggest, is a sort of overdetermined reliance on the tropes, whether of subject or style, of the day—a kind of historical narcissism. A director like Alfred Hitchcock seemed to go out of his way to avoid this fate, as discussed by the actress Eva Marie Saint in an interview:
Hitch had a theory about the wardrobe. He didn’t want it dated, and so he wanted everybody to wear clothes that were almost classic clothes. One day, I remember, we were doing I believe the auction scene, and I was in my black dress with the red roses. Everybody that day—especially the women—were in dresses that were without belts. That was kind of the chic look at the time. And he sent everybody home and we did some other scene.
Datedness runs in all kinds of temporal directions. Science fiction, the genre that should seem the least dated, can often feel the most, because the future as depicted came to pass and lookednothing like that. In the same way that period films often commit the mistake of showing everyone driving shiny new period cars (as those are the only ones that have survived to the present), science-fiction films often assume that the future, to paraphrase William Gibson, will be “evenly distributed”—that everything, from computers to clothes, will represent a radical break from today. A film like “Blade Runner,” however, reminds us that periodicity can be messy. As Gibson has written, the best way to write about the future is to write about the present.