Down in San Antone
Lynnette reappeared about half an hour after the last post, carrying shopping bags, of course. That night we went to Bucca di Beppo (or something like that) for Danny's birthday, where we ended up ordering a metric assload of food, as Brendon would say. Literally over a dozen pounds of country Italian (read: fatty) for six people. Apparently "Family Style" means "We're turning you into human pâté." It was cool and all, but since I came back to San Antonio today, I don't expect to see a crumb of the leftovers by the time I get back Saturday.
Here in S. A., four years after I moved, there is still nothing to do. We rented two movies tonight, Kicking and Screaming and 25th Hour. (I'm going to assume all of you have seen these movies, which means potential spoilers. Be forewarned.) It'd been a while since I'd seen any movie, much less two in a row, and I'd forgotten how cinema affects you differently than other art forms. Movies provide almost full visual and aural representation, in addition to creating a contained yet fully realized setting, which TV and plays don't, so they require less imagination to view. I think this makes them at once more expressive and more constricted.
For example, K&S is a movie I wanted to like but can't because it accurately recreated so well my college experience. Much of the humor depended on this shared experience: "Oh shit, I know that guy at UT who stayed in school for a decade and will work at the campus bar forever." Unlike, say, a novel, it wasn't my imagination grafting people and places from my life onto the plot of the story, but a recreation in every respect of some aspect of my experience. I laughed, but like someone whose collar is a little too tight. I didn't enjoy seeing the last four and a half years distilled into a two-hour movie, especially a movie whose grand message seemed to be that this time in our lives does not deserve the nostalgia people often attach to it. All told, it said "Here is your life, from your failed long-distance romance to your dirty-as-shit bachelor pad to your naive ambition to write." Then, to fuck with me, the movie would toss in a line like "I don't really do the coffee-shop thing. I think it's pretty stupid." But it ends without a resolution, which is fitting considering the the movie is about leaving college, which is not exactly a resolute time in life. But for all that it recreates, I don't feel like there's anything I can do with the information. I mean, okay, I've done all that stuff: now what?
25th Hour, on the other hand, went from being a movie I enjoyed the first time to one of my all-time favorites on my second viewing. It also ended without resolution, but it does so in a way that brings you to a point of departure. I wonder if it's the foreigness of Edward Norton's situation that allows me to feel this way. Whereas K&S was too literal, 25th Hour offered something more fictional: a story whose remoteness gave my mind room to wander. It could, of course, be a case of 25th Hour simply being a better film, but it was odd to react much more strongly to a movie whose characters I identified with much less.
It's the last line, in particular, that really brings it all together. I've seen this in a few essays, where a good, but not great, piece of work is suddenly elevated by a closing thought that recasts everything before with a sharper, more powerful meaning. In 25th Hour, the end, "How close this life came to never happening," is delivered by Norton's father in the middle of a hypothetical scenario — layers away from the "real" experience in K&S — yet I find it ten times more relevant to my day-to-day interaction with the world. I thought about that line a lot in the days after I first saw the movie, kicking it around in my head, trying it on various situations I found myself in. When I saw the movie again, I found it more compelling, because the struggle of this tragically flawed hero (I don't think that's an overstatement in this case) extends way, way beyond our daily flimflam. We have Norton's character, who is basically a good man, but one without scruples, one who is able to detach himself from the consequences of the drugs he sells. The conflicts he goes through with himself, with his intimate relationships, with his family, and with the cultural landscape of where he lives (all before entering a period of great doubt and possibly great harm in prison) work as a striking allegory to the post-Sept. 11 New York Spike Lee has set them against. The conflicts produce in Norton anger, fear, and distrust — of himself and of everyone around him — because he has to realize that he is responsible for the world that created him. And I think that's what's so poignant: through one man so far removed from any of our ordinary experiences, we see the internal struggle of a country that was wounded by both destructive, uncontrollable outside forces and by the results of our own actions. I don't know that we've ever admitted, as Norton did, our culpability.
So tonight I found a stronger trace of something universal in a movie about a white drug dealer living with a stunning Puerto Rican girl than I did in a movie about college guys who have trouble getting laid. I guess we're all a little more open to fantasy.
---
Sidenotes:
1. I just saw an add on dictionary.com for Wallace & Grommit, which reminds me: Justin, do you still have my DVD?
2. Against my will, I think I'm starting to like that new No Doubt cover of "It's My Life" or whatever. Man, I'm a pooner.
Lynnette reappeared about half an hour after the last post, carrying shopping bags, of course. That night we went to Bucca di Beppo (or something like that) for Danny's birthday, where we ended up ordering a metric assload of food, as Brendon would say. Literally over a dozen pounds of country Italian (read: fatty) for six people. Apparently "Family Style" means "We're turning you into human pâté." It was cool and all, but since I came back to San Antonio today, I don't expect to see a crumb of the leftovers by the time I get back Saturday.
Here in S. A., four years after I moved, there is still nothing to do. We rented two movies tonight, Kicking and Screaming and 25th Hour. (I'm going to assume all of you have seen these movies, which means potential spoilers. Be forewarned.) It'd been a while since I'd seen any movie, much less two in a row, and I'd forgotten how cinema affects you differently than other art forms. Movies provide almost full visual and aural representation, in addition to creating a contained yet fully realized setting, which TV and plays don't, so they require less imagination to view. I think this makes them at once more expressive and more constricted.
For example, K&S is a movie I wanted to like but can't because it accurately recreated so well my college experience. Much of the humor depended on this shared experience: "Oh shit, I know that guy at UT who stayed in school for a decade and will work at the campus bar forever." Unlike, say, a novel, it wasn't my imagination grafting people and places from my life onto the plot of the story, but a recreation in every respect of some aspect of my experience. I laughed, but like someone whose collar is a little too tight. I didn't enjoy seeing the last four and a half years distilled into a two-hour movie, especially a movie whose grand message seemed to be that this time in our lives does not deserve the nostalgia people often attach to it. All told, it said "Here is your life, from your failed long-distance romance to your dirty-as-shit bachelor pad to your naive ambition to write." Then, to fuck with me, the movie would toss in a line like "I don't really do the coffee-shop thing. I think it's pretty stupid." But it ends without a resolution, which is fitting considering the the movie is about leaving college, which is not exactly a resolute time in life. But for all that it recreates, I don't feel like there's anything I can do with the information. I mean, okay, I've done all that stuff: now what?
25th Hour, on the other hand, went from being a movie I enjoyed the first time to one of my all-time favorites on my second viewing. It also ended without resolution, but it does so in a way that brings you to a point of departure. I wonder if it's the foreigness of Edward Norton's situation that allows me to feel this way. Whereas K&S was too literal, 25th Hour offered something more fictional: a story whose remoteness gave my mind room to wander. It could, of course, be a case of 25th Hour simply being a better film, but it was odd to react much more strongly to a movie whose characters I identified with much less.
It's the last line, in particular, that really brings it all together. I've seen this in a few essays, where a good, but not great, piece of work is suddenly elevated by a closing thought that recasts everything before with a sharper, more powerful meaning. In 25th Hour, the end, "How close this life came to never happening," is delivered by Norton's father in the middle of a hypothetical scenario — layers away from the "real" experience in K&S — yet I find it ten times more relevant to my day-to-day interaction with the world. I thought about that line a lot in the days after I first saw the movie, kicking it around in my head, trying it on various situations I found myself in. When I saw the movie again, I found it more compelling, because the struggle of this tragically flawed hero (I don't think that's an overstatement in this case) extends way, way beyond our daily flimflam. We have Norton's character, who is basically a good man, but one without scruples, one who is able to detach himself from the consequences of the drugs he sells. The conflicts he goes through with himself, with his intimate relationships, with his family, and with the cultural landscape of where he lives (all before entering a period of great doubt and possibly great harm in prison) work as a striking allegory to the post-Sept. 11 New York Spike Lee has set them against. The conflicts produce in Norton anger, fear, and distrust — of himself and of everyone around him — because he has to realize that he is responsible for the world that created him. And I think that's what's so poignant: through one man so far removed from any of our ordinary experiences, we see the internal struggle of a country that was wounded by both destructive, uncontrollable outside forces and by the results of our own actions. I don't know that we've ever admitted, as Norton did, our culpability.
So tonight I found a stronger trace of something universal in a movie about a white drug dealer living with a stunning Puerto Rican girl than I did in a movie about college guys who have trouble getting laid. I guess we're all a little more open to fantasy.
---
Sidenotes:
1. I just saw an add on dictionary.com for Wallace & Grommit, which reminds me: Justin, do you still have my DVD?
2. Against my will, I think I'm starting to like that new No Doubt cover of "It's My Life" or whatever. Man, I'm a pooner.
posted by Matt at 3:21 AM
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