Thursday, May 15, 2008

When the cows come home...

Continuing this whole "defining" movie thing, I wanted to respond to some of the comments on the initial blog. A couple of people mentioned Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. I have to admit that while I enjoy the movie very much, I don't love it as much as many of my friends do. But a recent viewing at a "movie night" at my apartment recently made me realize how the film is a good example of how movies (and books and stories of all kinds) hold our imagination--and, by extension, how these movies come to color our own personality, our own personal cultural history (which is of course the whole point of this little experiment I'm trying to conduct).

Most of my friends can quote the film ad nauseam and the humor and fantasy elements I think are what hold it in the high esteem of a lot of the people I know. But what I find particularly interesting about The Princess Bride is its framing story. With all the swashbuckling and throwaway one-liners, it's easy to forget that The Princess Bride is not about Westley, or the Dread Pirate Roberts, or Inigo Montoya, or even Princess Buttercup. Really, it's about the story of these characters. It's about "Columbo" telling the story to his grandson--you know, the one who'd go on to date Winnie Cooper. And throughout the film, the child stops his grandfather from telling the story, redirects it, and makes him skip the bad parts.

Isn't that what we do with all the movies we love anyway? We relive them in our heads and we make our ideal of them fit our particular psyche; we rewrite these movies in our memory. How many times have you talked about or thought about a movie you loved when you were a kid only to watch it again and not feel the same way about it?

It's a fact of nature (unfortunate perhaps) that once a work of art--a movie, a novel, a pop song--hits the world, it ceases to become the property of the artist and instead becomes the property of its audience. Each of us brings a bit of our own emotional history to the work, our own personal experience, and that can't help but color our own reaction to it. As a result, we are in an ongoing dialogue with the film, an intellectual back-and-forth between our mind and the screen--a give-and-take that continues, theoretically, for the rest of our lives. Or at least for as long as we continue to watch a particular film over and over again.

And that brings me to the next film on my list.

The first time I saw Federico Fellini's 1953 film, I Vitelloni, I was a young idealist, a 19-year-old college student. The five "vitelloni" (literally, "big calves" or more loosely, "big children"), though almost a decade older than me at the time, were people I looked down upon. "How could men of their age act like such boys?" I thought. Of course at the time I didn't get the irony of my own arrogance. Here I was an adult (technically) still with the mentality of a child, still a dependent, still unaware of what was out there beyond the scope of the existence I knew my entire life. I believed I was more mature than these adolescents trapped in men's bodies; I believed Fellini was pointing the finger at them, castigating them for their insouciance. I watched it that first time with an emotional distance I didn't quite earn.

Cut to four years later at the 2004 Florida Film Festival, where the film had a special screening. I was now 23, graduated from college for two years and the movie held an entirely different meaning to me. Instead of looking at the characters with superiority, I began to see myself in them. Four years later, the movie had not changed one bit, but I did. And I realized that Fellini was now pointing the finger at me. It was a complete slap in the face. "How did I get here?" I wondered. "How did I turn into one of the 'vitelloni'?" More than that, I began to see specifically how I was like some of them: the laziness of Fausto, as well as his simultaneous selfishness and ambivalence towards the opposite sex; the artist Leopoldo, who in some ways is more worried about playing the part of a writer than actually being one; the sad clown, Alberto.

Toward the end there is a character who gets on a train and finally leaves this scene of ineffectualness. He looks back in sadness down the railroad tracks, sure, but it's the right move for him. The only move really.

It's now another four years later and I haven't seen the movie since then. I wonder what the movie will mean to me now. In a way I feel like I'm at a particular crossroads in my life (for more than one reason). But unlike the character in the train, this time I hope I'm looking forward, instead of looking back.

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Does anyone have a movie or movies that have drastically changed for you in this way?

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the initial list of movies from some of you. And you know who you are.

4 comments:

MSB said...

I can't say that any have drastically changed, but I did hear my whole life from my mOm how scary Rosemary's Baby was. When I was in my late 20's I watched it at home, alone, in the dark one night, and thought my Mom had fed me a lot of crap. It didn't scare me at all, and I had avoided it my whole life!
Now, stop yelling at me, Jason.

Jason said...

I really hate to admit this, but I've never seen Rosemary's Baby (sorry, Mr. Polanski).

On the same note, I always thought I'd be more scared at The Exorcist, but wasn't at all. I'm shocked to hear people I know who were completely freaked out at it. (To be clear, I do think it is a good movie, just wasn't scared watching it.)

screamingamanda said...

I think the telling of the story is the part I remember most. It's kind of what I do when I read. If I am reading a book and I feel it is getting sad then I will either skim the pages and move on, skip the pages, or maybe even stop reading the book. I have a tendency to read the ending before I read the book. If it ends okay then I read it, if it doesn't then I usually don't. Does this take something away from the story? Maybe. Does it take away the feeling I get from it? No, not really. Am I crazy? Yes, I do believe so. I think the grandfather and grandson add a pure sweetness to the story that's coming from someone who didn't experience that so maybe it's not as nice as it seems.

VT said...

Hey, I gave you an initial list, yes? I am in the clear?

A movie that comes to mind for me is Jerry Maguire. I remember watching it in high school (with some other band nerds) and thinking it was alright, but just your basic boy meets girl flick.

A few years later (can't pinpoint the viewing) I watched it again and noticed the sincere and underlying sadness - and not something put there to give the story an arc. Sometimes you get together with another person for the wrong reasons or you pretended something was there that wasn't. It takes a lot to admit your mistake.

I'm not saying that I absolutely believe in the "you complete me" ending. But I think, behind the cute kid and the catchphrases and Cruise, there's a kernel of authenticity I missed the first time through.

Writing this, I want to re-watch Singles, a film I loved in my early teens for its Seattle grunge and cameos by said locals. I wonder what I'd take from it 15 years later? Ditto with Vanilla Sky, which I embraced without hesitation, though it's been too long for me to really remember why.