ABOUT ME
L
I talk about movies. We all do really. My generation can't communicate without them though. I was born in 1973. By the time I was 4, an age that neurologically speaking cements "who you are", my parents had brought me to the local Fox Theater where I stared in awe and wonder at a young farm boy who ventured into space and blew up a Death Star. I was a young farm boy. I wanted adventure. Maybe I could blow up evil. Maybe I, if I believed and had faith, could use the Force. I believed like I believed in God. That theater was church and I had what many priests, poets, and philosophers call an epiphany. A manifestation of the divine. I witnessed a supernatural event and was changed. The Force was with me.
I grew up in a small farm town in Central California, just 3 hours south of where George Lucas grew up. My friends were defined by one trait. Can you and will you talk about and play Star Wars. That was the glue. My best friend had Star Wars sheets and the Kenner Death Star play set. We had wide ranging arguments over what the red button on Darth Vader's chest monitor enacted if pushed. Was the Force a belief one could learn or were you born with it. These arguments were deeper than we realized at the time. I must note that the majority of boys who ended up in college from my town loved Star Wars. Everyone else was into Smokey and the Bandit. Not a judgement just an observation.
In all fairness college was a lot more like Smokey and the Bandit
This was the era of the pop top VCR. Movies came into our homes. You could walk into the downtown video rental store and the "special" was a two night rental of a VCR machine and three movies. So Friday night was pizza and movies night with the family. Saturday night you had friends over. Kids were defined by what movies they got to watch. There were the horror movie kids whose parents didn't seem to mind. There were the kids who got to see Mel Brooks' History of the World Part 1 and Richard Pryor films. My brother fixated on Darby O'Gill and the Little People and swore if you chanted the incantation from Bedknobs and Broomsticks you could fly. He believed like a true believer that E.T. lived in our father's cornfield. I wore out Video Plus's only copy of Time Bandits to the point that the tracking dial couldn't fix it. 90% of our conversations revolved around the world we watched when that lid popped shut on that magical silver box. 48 hour video rentals turned us into the first binge watchers.
Boom! Metaphor!
Sometime during puberty I discovered Raising Arizona. It was 1986 or so. In a world where the Miami Vice Theme Song was something you practiced in band class for the Christmas Musical, the Coen Brothers' bizarre take on middle class America in the 80's seemed both incongruent and beautiful. It spoke to me in the howling jangle of banjo chords and whistling. The friend who argued Star Wars with me moved away. The new friends I made during this period of my life somehow centered on the fact that if you could quote The Coen Brother's Raising Arizona you were my friend. In fact, all my friend's friends also held the uncanny ability to quote the film. It became our coded language. Any situation or circumstance could be discussed by using lines from Raising Arizona. A new observation was met with "Hey! Do they blow up in funny shapes and all?" The answer was always the same.
Non sequitur dialogue and free association conversations were at times all we had between us as friends. When a subject could not be discussed on any serious level - which was always- Raising Arizona provided, once again, the glue. As we moved away from our small town and entered college it was our self referential world that kept us connected and when we met as time sped by we always started with Raising Arizona. Not "How are you" or "What's up" but "I don't know, they had Yoda's 'n shit on them."
Better hurry it up, son. I'm in dutch with the wife.
But it was after literally hundreds of viewings of this film that my critical and metaphorical thinking began to emerge. Why I fixated on the film has long since been forgotten to me. Perhaps it kept me connected in spirit with my friends. Perhaps the witty dialogue delivered with an understated lack of irony along with an unconscious wit drew me in initially. The otherwordly physics of the film denoted a higher power was watching over H.I. and his retired police officer wife and it echoed of the Force. Over time I began to connect metaphors in the film and I appreciated its artistry. Whatever linguistic voodoo first attracted me and my friends to this film began to morph into exploring the metaphors and messages bubbling in between the lines. The film led me to discover its influences in Hitchcock, Kubrick and Capra. I became a Coen brother's fan first and a cinephile next. Like an outsider trying to decode our exclusive language I delved into the coded cine-speak of the Coens and sought clarity in their sources.
You're a flower, you are. Just a little desert flower.
This was the inception of my meta adventure into the films that first sparked my imagination in that darkened Fox theater when I was once so young. Now H.I.'s chase for Huggies ending in the supermarket wasn't just epically hilarious but also a nod to Roger Altman's The Long Goodbye.
It's not just that both heroes look for just one thing in a super market but that both films have the movie's respective theme songs being piped in via muzak on the store speakers.
Now I could place artistic influences. Kurosawa begot Lucas and Spielberg. Dostoyevsky, Fritz Lang and John Ford begot Kurosawa. Everyone was borrowing. Everyone was stealing. Cross pollination was perhaps both intentional and incidental. Like a late night conversation with friends no one could really say what was original and what was mimicry. We riffed off each other and so did our films. A film reference carried weight in meaning because it spoke to so much layered inferences. An idea or emotion was best expressed in a line.
I'm older now. I have to talk to adults. I have kids. They stream stuff. They watch Youtube. Recently, my son attended RTX in Austin. I am on the outside looking in and my son and his friends have their own language. Occasionally I introduce something to him and there's a spark of "Oh, that's where that came from". And then we talk.
Narrative binds us all. It's the glue. Our modern language is cinema. Now everyone has a top 10 list of films and that list says something about who you are. When I discovered that Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright listed Raising Arizona in his top 10 list I knew my generation had arrived. His films speak to me and I know where he's coming from. I watch his Baby Driver and respond "Well, okay then."
I saved Latin. What did you ever do?
So I've made this blog. For no other reason than to talk movies. I will deconstruct a few things, note some references and generally celebrate my cinephelia. I hope some of you speak my language. Maybe we can meet somewhere in the middle and share in this cinespeak that flows through us and binds us. May the Force be with us.
Tags: