Sometimes I’m astounded at the impact movies have made on my life and the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent watching them.
This is particularly surprising to me because as I kid I watched a lot more TV than films and in my early teen years certainly spent more time obsessing about singer-songwriters and their relentless existential introspections. (Note: I came of age in the early seventies when this was all the rage).
Ditto Broadway musicals.
I am not going to once again write about my Dad telling me he would get us tickets to see anything I chose for my 11th birthday as my first experience at the theatre (Note: A rarity since my family went practically nowhere as a group and my Dad and I had even less than that in common).
Or that somehow I chose Mame. Ahem.
I will only comment to future 11 year olds that my father likely knew me better than I thought. Or, at least was trying.
Yet somehow this all shifted as I became an adult. Sure, I remember having my life changed when I saw Mary Poppins as a kid on the big screen or how I looked forward to the then only once-a-year showing of The Wizard of Oz on TV (Note: Yeah, that was also a thing).
Or the time young teenage me found Lana Turner’s Madame X on NYC’s Million Dollar Movie (Note: Channel 9 or Channel 11, I can only recall they showed it all day and night) and I obsessively watched it four times in a row.
Ahem.
Times 12.
And let’s hear it for the sensitive, overly-theatrical lads.
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
There was some moment where movies began speaking to me most personally. A time when the immersive experience of sitting alone in your thoughts at a movie theatre, yet surrounded by people who for me, most of the time, might not as well have been there but luckily were there, supplanted everything.
Part of it might have been the waiting in line (Note: I can still remember three plus hours in freezing cold Manhattan waiting for tickets to The Exorcist and bonding with a ton of waaay cooler people than myself also desperate to be scared “to death.”).
But more likely it was that films had a way of making everything bigger and more important than anything else in the world because they were literally HUGE.
So I learned pretty quickly that movies could address your fears, your hurts and your yearning for happiness, albeit in a somewhat ironic, funny yet loving way and SUPERSIZE your personal concerns in a way that you KNEW they deserved to be.
Films were way better than real life. They BECAME real life. Or real life experiences, at any rate. I often found that for those who didn’t understand me fully, I could simply recommend a film that dealt with my “issues” and refer it to them to watch if they wanted to know in a very real sense what truly concerned me.
It wasn’t the be all or end all. But at least it was a starting point.
I’d forgotten about this because in the last few decades movies, as a whole, have changed a lot. Oh, of course there are still great films, meaningful films, and every year there are more than a handful that speak to me personally.
But it wasn’t until my friend Ray Morton reached out to me via Facebook in a challenge where you have to publicly post ONE MOVIE IMAGE per day for 10 straight days with NO COMMENT (Note: The latter being the toughest part for moi), that I began to once again recognize the impact of the films I chose.
Maybe impact is not the correct word because it wasn’t so much that I was shaped by them. It was that I felt they represented me or that somehow they saw me or read my mind at a particular place in time. I didn’t plan ANY of my picks, I just posted what came to me that day. But as I peruse the list on this final day of the assignment I’m astounded by the personal resonance of the list.
It’s not that these are the best movies I’ve ever seen (Note: Though they are pretty great), that I couldn’t name ten more that were ever better, or more sophisticated, or more dramatic, or funnier, or more….more, more, more.
I could. And you could.
But I stand by my list because in a purely knee jerk, visceral sense they are there for a reason. They are, or were, ME.
The Way We Were finally made me realize it is not enough to love someone, or for them to love you, for a relationship to survive. (Note: And it only took me eight viewings over 20 years to get that).
Strangers On A Train showed me that I was not as crazy I thought and that if I thought my family was really crazy, well, think again.
Blue Velvet taught me you can write serious movies and be as sick and funny and twisted as you like as long as you’re committed to your world and your characters.
Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the newly humorless and bereft me laugh for the first time in a long time amid all the death and condemnation and destruction at the height of the AIDS crisis.
The Godfather provided the gold standard of storytelling for an aspiring storyteller and made me confident that my obsession with dysfunctional family dynamics had nothing to do with being Jewish and gay.
Brokeback Mountain allowed me to cry (A LOT) and appreciate what I had and was likely in peril of taking for granted.
BlacKkKlansman made me angrier than I’ve been since the eighties about how f-cked up the U.S is; showed the absolute default privilege you get (Note: I got) for being white; and reinforced my constant desire to waterboard (Note: But not kill, that would be too nice) every person supporting the orange sh-t stain.
Rosemary’s Baby brings back just how much I still love the visuals of the sixties and why, deep down, I was right to be suspicious of almost everybody.
Harold and Maude told me your teachers and lovers always appear when you least expect it and in the strangest of ways.
and
La La Land is an endless, dizzying, constantly morphing dream of too many things to count, many of which you are likely not to achieve in the way you thought, certainly not in Hollywood. But that there are far worse things than being a dreamer. And nothing better.
Cass Elliot – “Dream A Little Dream of Me”
notes from a chair 