I Love Nothing In The World So Well
I was thinking recently about the short list of films I've seen multiple times in the theater. The Little Mermaid was the first movie I went to repeatedly and I ended up seeing it four or five times. Same with Silence of the Lambs, Much Ado About Nothing and Basquiat. Basquiat is particularly notable because I was in college at Auburn University at the time and it wasn't showing anywhere near me. I drove two hours to Atlanta five times to see it.
In college I fell in love with The Godfather series — I will argue the merits of the third film to the death — and all things Sidney Lumet. As a film fan, I sort of hang my hat on my love of the gritty, masculine epic. But that list of movies that kept bringing me back to the theater is probably much more illustrative.
The Little Mermaid came out when I was 15 and in love with a boy named David who I met at church camp. He lived about 30 minutes away and went to West Birmingham Christian Academy. To get there from my house one had to take Highway 59 and get off at the Arkadelphia Road exit; an exit that my mother equated with the Bermuda Triangle. It was the dead man's curve of off ramps and even when I got my driver's license later that year, she still wouldn't let me take the car to see him. So we would see each other about once a month, whenever we could get someone to drive us, and then make out for hours. I got cramps in my arms from restraining his more nefarious advances. I had never had a boyfriend I had to fend off. Everything before had been innocent. But David was an exceedingly attractive guy with bright blue eyes; I think he had a perm when we met. His lips were so perfect I found myself forgiving the occasional racist remark that escaped them. (I mean, who wasn't a little racist, right?)
This was the time when I really started to get the feeling that the whole world was passing me by. It wasn't just this hot boy I couldn't get to, it was life itself. I was bored with the mechanics of my daily schedule: school, basketball practice, TV, dinner, homework, more TV, sleep, repeat... I imagined faraway buildings and distant climates, their secret stories playing out behind doors that would never open to me. I would lie in bed at night with the weight of so many miles heavy in my heart. It's really no wonder that The Little Mermaid was so appealing. At first I thought I was a little old to be so moved by it, but it's ultimately not a story for young girls. I actually appreciated the happier ending Disney used for the movie. I considered the Little Mermaid of the original to be a bit of a doormat who sacrificed herself for a man who wasn't equal to her, when it should have been an uncontrollable love of the world that stole her heart. The red-headed dynamo in the Disney version was more my speed. She was as passionate about forks and knives as she was her prince. The details of the world didn't escape her. They drove her to break from the life she knew, to touch and understand them rather than simply observe them from afar. This meant something to me.
A year or two later Silence of the Lambs was in theaters. I had been meaning to hang out with Edan, my brother's girlfriend's sister who was a year younger than me and ridiculously cool. She was the first person I ever saw wear Birkenstocks. She had style, taste and an innate grace that I couldn't quite wrap my head around. She was so cool in fact that I was nervous about asking her to hang out with me. I called her up to go see Silence of the Lambs and it was like asking someone out on a date. But I needed a new friend. I was shedding the bookworm/jock persona I had so carefully cultivated over the years and was becoming one of those teenagers that mothers of other teenagers politely describe as "unique." We went to the movie and both loved it, then talked and ate burgers after. Well, I ate a burger. Edan had her trademark "rabbit food." She had to be the only student in our school who would order the tuna salad plate. Why anyone would eat anything that had the word "salad" in it when fries were an option was beyond me.
I instantly identified with Clarice Starling, but I felt guilty about it. I identified with her pain, but I had never experienced anything that would warrant that kind of empathy. She was orphaned at an early age and bounced around foster homes until she came of age. I grew up in a warm house with both parents, three older siblings and plenty of money. But it was the idea of absence that I understood; the hollow feeling that something that should be with you isn't. Hannibal Lector says to Senator Martin, "Amputate a man's leg and he can still feel it tickling." Clarice could still feel her father. I could feel the world outside, something real that I had to spend my whole life thus far only imagining. There were mysteries to be solved, things to study, men to know, men to love and men to fear. Clarice Starling had made it all the way to the F...B...I... I wanted to make it somewhere and then be taunted by a madman for it.
Much Ado About Nothing came out the year I graduated high school. I loved it for the lusciousness of the filmmaking alone. I've recently been reading Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, a book that makes you pause at the rapturous beauty of language in the hands of someone who isn't afraid to use it, and it's lead me to wonder how many people, how often allow themselves to love something uncontrollably. We're all often too shy to let ourselves go over the things that move us. I routinely humiliate myself by my near pornographic delight over music, comedy, snow or a well-turned phrase. I was sitting in a bar in Boston reading the opening paragraphs of Winter's Tale when a guy next to me leaned over and asked, "Any good?" I looked up at him with tears in my eyes, only on page 10, and squealed eloquently, "It's fucking awesome!"
Much Ado About Nothing was an embarrassment of pleasure. A gooey cinematic wonderland of costumes, light, charm, skin and rapturous language. The opening sequence of poetry, picnics and driving horses rendered my world in flat gray. I fell out of love with boyfriend Kirk during that movie, because there was nothing uncontrollable in the way I felt about him.
And that's my problem, really. I can't experience the sublime without simultaneously imagining it's unavoidable absence in the near future. I saw Sigur Ros for the first time in Coney Island and was moved to the point of delirium only to immediately imagine the grief of pure silence.
Basquiat.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is probably my favorite painter. He was the epitome of uncontrollable love, and all the good and bad that goes with it. He was New York City. I was studying painting at Auburn when Julian Schnabel's film on his friend Jean-Michel came out, and, upon seeing it, I discovered that faraway land I had been pining for. That mess of concrete and sound, aching beauty and fierce architecture. A place where you need to wear shoes outside, but sometimes don't...just because. New York City was the one place where I could make the world slow down it's deliberate pace away from me. People who don't live here say they wouldn't be able to keep up with New York. What they don't understand is that New York is only as fast as you will it to be. It's as fast as your desire is deep. Jean-Michel Basquiat wanted so much and the city spun around him like a top. But while he was here he painted it in every color imaginable, and saw all the details...the 46th and 47th leeches, the Bowery bums, the sad curve of his mother's smile. The course of my life was decided by that film, probably more so than I even know at this point.
There is a refrain in Winter's Tale, that our goal is to stop time and bring back the dead. Disney brought back the dead by turning The Little Mermaid into a woman capable of getting exactly what she wanted. Clarice Starling brought back the dead by saving Katherine Martin's life. In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero comes back to life after her slander dies. And Julian Schnabel brought Jean-Michel back, and in doing so, stopped time for me. Or at least my constant perception of its passing.
It all means something, but I know I'm forcing it. If movies were $10.25 when I was a teenager would I have been so cavalier about seeing them so many times? Is loving something uncontrollably now economically unfeasible? It snowed for five minutes this morning and I have 100 pages to go in Winter's Tale. When the Brooklyn Bridge is covered in snow, it won't cost me a dime to walk it. I think I don't go to movies repeatedly anymore because I've finally caught up to the world.
But those films gave me speed...and that definitely means something.
In college I fell in love with The Godfather series — I will argue the merits of the third film to the death — and all things Sidney Lumet. As a film fan, I sort of hang my hat on my love of the gritty, masculine epic. But that list of movies that kept bringing me back to the theater is probably much more illustrative.
The Little Mermaid came out when I was 15 and in love with a boy named David who I met at church camp. He lived about 30 minutes away and went to West Birmingham Christian Academy. To get there from my house one had to take Highway 59 and get off at the Arkadelphia Road exit; an exit that my mother equated with the Bermuda Triangle. It was the dead man's curve of off ramps and even when I got my driver's license later that year, she still wouldn't let me take the car to see him. So we would see each other about once a month, whenever we could get someone to drive us, and then make out for hours. I got cramps in my arms from restraining his more nefarious advances. I had never had a boyfriend I had to fend off. Everything before had been innocent. But David was an exceedingly attractive guy with bright blue eyes; I think he had a perm when we met. His lips were so perfect I found myself forgiving the occasional racist remark that escaped them. (I mean, who wasn't a little racist, right?)
This was the time when I really started to get the feeling that the whole world was passing me by. It wasn't just this hot boy I couldn't get to, it was life itself. I was bored with the mechanics of my daily schedule: school, basketball practice, TV, dinner, homework, more TV, sleep, repeat... I imagined faraway buildings and distant climates, their secret stories playing out behind doors that would never open to me. I would lie in bed at night with the weight of so many miles heavy in my heart. It's really no wonder that The Little Mermaid was so appealing. At first I thought I was a little old to be so moved by it, but it's ultimately not a story for young girls. I actually appreciated the happier ending Disney used for the movie. I considered the Little Mermaid of the original to be a bit of a doormat who sacrificed herself for a man who wasn't equal to her, when it should have been an uncontrollable love of the world that stole her heart. The red-headed dynamo in the Disney version was more my speed. She was as passionate about forks and knives as she was her prince. The details of the world didn't escape her. They drove her to break from the life she knew, to touch and understand them rather than simply observe them from afar. This meant something to me.
A year or two later Silence of the Lambs was in theaters. I had been meaning to hang out with Edan, my brother's girlfriend's sister who was a year younger than me and ridiculously cool. She was the first person I ever saw wear Birkenstocks. She had style, taste and an innate grace that I couldn't quite wrap my head around. She was so cool in fact that I was nervous about asking her to hang out with me. I called her up to go see Silence of the Lambs and it was like asking someone out on a date. But I needed a new friend. I was shedding the bookworm/jock persona I had so carefully cultivated over the years and was becoming one of those teenagers that mothers of other teenagers politely describe as "unique." We went to the movie and both loved it, then talked and ate burgers after. Well, I ate a burger. Edan had her trademark "rabbit food." She had to be the only student in our school who would order the tuna salad plate. Why anyone would eat anything that had the word "salad" in it when fries were an option was beyond me.
I instantly identified with Clarice Starling, but I felt guilty about it. I identified with her pain, but I had never experienced anything that would warrant that kind of empathy. She was orphaned at an early age and bounced around foster homes until she came of age. I grew up in a warm house with both parents, three older siblings and plenty of money. But it was the idea of absence that I understood; the hollow feeling that something that should be with you isn't. Hannibal Lector says to Senator Martin, "Amputate a man's leg and he can still feel it tickling." Clarice could still feel her father. I could feel the world outside, something real that I had to spend my whole life thus far only imagining. There were mysteries to be solved, things to study, men to know, men to love and men to fear. Clarice Starling had made it all the way to the F...B...I... I wanted to make it somewhere and then be taunted by a madman for it.
Much Ado About Nothing came out the year I graduated high school. I loved it for the lusciousness of the filmmaking alone. I've recently been reading Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, a book that makes you pause at the rapturous beauty of language in the hands of someone who isn't afraid to use it, and it's lead me to wonder how many people, how often allow themselves to love something uncontrollably. We're all often too shy to let ourselves go over the things that move us. I routinely humiliate myself by my near pornographic delight over music, comedy, snow or a well-turned phrase. I was sitting in a bar in Boston reading the opening paragraphs of Winter's Tale when a guy next to me leaned over and asked, "Any good?" I looked up at him with tears in my eyes, only on page 10, and squealed eloquently, "It's fucking awesome!"
Much Ado About Nothing was an embarrassment of pleasure. A gooey cinematic wonderland of costumes, light, charm, skin and rapturous language. The opening sequence of poetry, picnics and driving horses rendered my world in flat gray. I fell out of love with boyfriend Kirk during that movie, because there was nothing uncontrollable in the way I felt about him.
And that's my problem, really. I can't experience the sublime without simultaneously imagining it's unavoidable absence in the near future. I saw Sigur Ros for the first time in Coney Island and was moved to the point of delirium only to immediately imagine the grief of pure silence.
Basquiat.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is probably my favorite painter. He was the epitome of uncontrollable love, and all the good and bad that goes with it. He was New York City. I was studying painting at Auburn when Julian Schnabel's film on his friend Jean-Michel came out, and, upon seeing it, I discovered that faraway land I had been pining for. That mess of concrete and sound, aching beauty and fierce architecture. A place where you need to wear shoes outside, but sometimes don't...just because. New York City was the one place where I could make the world slow down it's deliberate pace away from me. People who don't live here say they wouldn't be able to keep up with New York. What they don't understand is that New York is only as fast as you will it to be. It's as fast as your desire is deep. Jean-Michel Basquiat wanted so much and the city spun around him like a top. But while he was here he painted it in every color imaginable, and saw all the details...the 46th and 47th leeches, the Bowery bums, the sad curve of his mother's smile. The course of my life was decided by that film, probably more so than I even know at this point.
There is a refrain in Winter's Tale, that our goal is to stop time and bring back the dead. Disney brought back the dead by turning The Little Mermaid into a woman capable of getting exactly what she wanted. Clarice Starling brought back the dead by saving Katherine Martin's life. In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero comes back to life after her slander dies. And Julian Schnabel brought Jean-Michel back, and in doing so, stopped time for me. Or at least my constant perception of its passing.
It all means something, but I know I'm forcing it. If movies were $10.25 when I was a teenager would I have been so cavalier about seeing them so many times? Is loving something uncontrollably now economically unfeasible? It snowed for five minutes this morning and I have 100 pages to go in Winter's Tale. When the Brooklyn Bridge is covered in snow, it won't cost me a dime to walk it. I think I don't go to movies repeatedly anymore because I've finally caught up to the world.
But those films gave me speed...and that definitely means something.
posted by Carol at 12:40 PM
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