Why I Love the Movies

As I prepped for writing a month's worth of articles in anticipation of NaNoWriMo, I realized that there are only so many lists you can do, and how often I rely upon the news around me on this blog to inspire my posts.  This makes sense, of course, because things that everyone is talking about are easier to read about as you come prepared with all of the facts, but it does take away some of the introspective articles I was hoping to create on my blog when I first started it, and so I'm going to throw in a few of these on TMROJ in the coming weeks while I'm moving ferociously through my novel.

The biggest question I get, when it comes to people who have known me for longer than twenty minutes is, "why movies, what started the passion for movies?"  People frequently want to know how it is that I took what is a shared pastime for all of the world (most everyone likes and goes to the movies) and turned it into an obsession that has led me to run a blog about the subject, make it a hallmark of my daily life, and make me literally structure my entire calendar around it?  The answer isn't particularly simple, but I can pinpoint four specific life events/traditions that probably created this passion.

The first of these was Saturday night movies as a child.  I didn't grow up in a Leave it to Beaver episode, but being a boy raised down the street from a cornfield, it occasionally feels that way when I talk about it, and part of that was that I had really loving parents.  They were occasionally a bit strict, and like all people we had our moments, but I genuinely loved (and still do love) spending time with them, and they were very good at wanting their children to be unique.  Though we lived in a small town, we were not taught as young people to have small minds or small attitudes.  My early love of the presidents was accompanied by a push by my mother to always celebrate the first ladies, the women who also helped shape our country.  My father would actively ask about the books I was reading, wanting me to share what I found interesting about them and what made me want to reread some and abandon others to the back of my bookshelf.  And each Saturday night, my brother and I would get to pick a movie, either from our local gas station (which had a video rental), or from my parents' collection of VHS tapes.

This opened me up to a world that wasn't entirely catered to myself.  Unlike a lot of kids, I didn't just watch the movies that were marketed to a 10-year-old, but instead was treated to movies that weren't entirely of my age group.  This meant that alongside of Beauty and the Beast or The Sandlot I also saw pictures like Sneakers, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or Baby Boom, movies that my parents loved (and were age appropriate for me to watch).  It meant that as I got older, I didn't just focus on what was present and right-now, but instead on movies as a 100-year enterprise.  As a result, my cultural touch-points were more cinema through-the-years, and not just when I was a teenager.

The second of these life events was the first time I ever watched the Academy Awards.  I remember it vividly, as it was taped rather than watching it live.  It was the 1994 Oscars, when David Letterman hosted, and as I was not yet a teenager my parents didn't want me to watch live, as Letterman's brand of humor was well-known to my parents (we were always a Late Show, never a Tonight Show, family), and decidedly not child-friendly.  But my dad knew that I was curious about the Oscars, as my parents would talk about watching it with their parents growing up, and so he taped the performances of The Lion King that were sung that year (since I would know all three of the picture's nominated numbers), and the Best Actress/Actor prizes which went to Tom Hanks and Jessica Lange.

I was hooked.  I watched the clips so often that my brother and I started to impersonate Hanks' pronunciation of "Jessica Lange for Bluuuuuuue Sky" (upon re-watching the clips this was a grossly over-exaggerated impression so I'm not entirely sure how this turned into a 20+ year private joke), and I discovered that my World Almanac, which I had received as a Christmas present, had a list of all of the "Big 6" (Picture, Director, and the acting prizes) winners from each year.  I decided then-and-there that I should set out to see them all, and would start to pile through the movie listings on the TV guide from the newspaper (we weren't "fancy enough" to get the actual TV Guide), recording every movie I could find that was in the almanac.  Once the American Film Institute came out with its list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time, I added that to my list of movies to be seen.  I would even create my own annual awards show the following year to mimic the Oscars, rewarding my own film prizes to the "best of the year."  This is all a practice I do still to this day-the awards are held at my brother's house now each year, like clockwork, and each month I will go through looking for OVP and other movies-of-note that are playing on Turner Classic.  I'm still enamored with the Oscars and the doors it opens to movies, the mingling of history and honor and immortality that it bestows.

Finally, of course, none of this would be possible if I didn't love movies in general.  Traditions are one thing, but you need the actual product to anchor it, and for me it does.  There is genuinely nothing I would rather do than talk about movies or watch movies or write about movies.  People often ask me if I prefer politics to movies, as they're my favorite things to discuss, and I occasionally demur, but really there's no contest-it's movies.  Politics are a sport, they are a passion that I want to win and that I love to interact with, but the cinema is my heart and soul.  It's what makes me feel whole as a person.

The two movies that I credit for grounding that love are A Streetcar Named Desire and Titanic.  I first saw Streetcar in 1995.  It was one of the movies that I had taped as of course it won three acting prizes and was listed in my almanac, and I was staggered.  I watched it while I was home alone, and I remember running through the house afterwards blown away by what I had seen.  It's SUCH a powerful movie, filled with the raw sexuality of Marlon Brando (whom I would understand later I was insanely attracted to, but at the time I just wanted more), and the desperation of Vivien Leigh's performance.  I was in awe of the acting, how it felt so vital and powerful, and how there were messages in it that didn't seem to be expositional.  I couldn't describe this, but upon countless revisits this is what I understood about my intoxication with the picture.  It was one of the very first movies I saved up my allowance to buy my own copy of, and opened me up to classic movies not being just a check off of a list, but instead something that could change how I look at the world.

Titanic, though, is probably my favorite movie experience in a theater, save for like a truly good date where it had nothing to do with the movie.  It was New Year's Eve, which meant the holiday spirit was still around, and we were in one of the fancy multiplexes that were in a mall AT NIGHT (more glamorous than it sounds to modern ears, but at the time was a truly unique experience) so there was already a lot of hype in the air.  I was thirteen at the time, so I did at least gage my attraction to the leading man this time, but Titanic was something more than just teenage lust-it was something big, and huge, and gigantically larger than myself.  Watching that ship lift into the air and romance being so deeply-felt that you could pine for it for 84 years, I was swept away in the story and the beauty onscreen.  It didn't occur to me that it was so late that we basically missed New Year's Eve, or that the packed theater was experiencing something similar-I felt like I was the only person in that movie theater, and was just swept up by the story and the grandeur.  I saw Titanic five more times in theaters (four as a kid, two more with the re-release), and countless more times in the years that followed, and it's still like reaching back into my stomach and feeling something indescribably large. Casablanca may be my favorite movie and The English Patient the one that speaks the loudest to me, but in that darkened theater at the age of thirteen, I don't think I've ever unabashedly loved a movie as much as I did Titanic.

So in terms of what spurred my movie love, I'd probably pin it out down to those four events.  There were others, and really every time I watch a movie or start an article, the love deepens-movies are an unending adventure for me, one that I'll probably be pursuing for the rest of my life.  If I don't end up watching a movie on the day I die, I will be severely disappointed in myself.  If you're a fellow movie lover, share your stories in the comments.  I'd love to hear them!