Abstract There has been a long-standing problem in understanding the details of energy dissipation of AC flows in superfluid films. Flow dissipation in a superfluid may seem like a contradiction, but experiments on superfluids have always shown that the manifestation of "super" properties depends on geometry and the nature of the experiment. Experiments done at Wesleyan have shown that the pinning of quantized vortices is a more important dynamical feature in films than previously thought. The contrast between vorticity in classical fluid mechanics and the behavior of quantized vortices in the superfluid provides an insightful approach toward understanding how the vortices in the superfluid behave.