Screen Time, Take 5: A Blast From The Past
My college girlfriend asked me to watch Fellini’s La Strada with her one night. A professor from the theater department had assigned it for a class I’m sure was spent forcing students to walk across the room pretending to be tigers or as if moving through Jell-O before discussing a Samuel Beckett play they all had skimmed that week. I agreed to watch the movie. Of course, I owned a two-disc DVD copy of the La Strada and, of course, in the two years since I bought it, had failed to watch it. My Fellini phase started at 16 because Roger Ebert said I had to like La Dolce Vita (I saw it, hated it, pretended to like it for years), and solidified when a cool, attractive person I never ended up dating told me her favorite movie was 8 1/2, a movie that rewired my brain so that I only liked that movie and no other movie for about 5 months. Certainly, La Strada would be somewhere in the middle?
It isn’t. But that didn’t stop my girlfriend and I from popping in the second disc after we’d muscled our way through it to see a special feature with Martin Scorsese saying “this movie is good” for 40 minutes over clips of the movie we had finished watching five minutes prior.
“I don’t like how it’s dubbed.” I said.
“It’s the commedia dell’arte,” she said as I brewed a giant travel mug’s worth of coffee at my dorm room desk. This was before K Cups. I had a big tub of grounds and a machine that made one travel mug’s worth of coffee in my room so that I could wake up five minutes before class, and be caffeinated by the end of my morning power walk to Olin Hall. I also found that I needed caffeine in the evenings to get through any movie screening or exhausting conversations with other Bard students.
“OK. Yes. I get that.” I put the disk in the DVD player and sat back down in the maroon Dorito-dust-covered papasan. I poured powdered creamer into the mug and hit the button on the remote to hear what Scorsese had to say.
“La Strada is about commedia dell’arte.” he said to the documentarian.
“Hmm.” My girlfriend looked at me and then wrote ‘commedia dell’arte’ in her notebook. I rolled my eyes. She had recently learned about a subject, told me about it, heard the subject mentioned back to her, and wanted to make sure I heard that she was right about the thing that she said because now a professional director was saying it back to us from a screen. She often gave this affected performance of making sure I heard something she’d said before repeated by a friend at a party or a professor. It irked me but it was far from her most annoying habit (the incessant cheating).
There are several ways I would have reacted differently now. First, I would have remembered to bring my travel mug to the cafeteria so I could bring better coffee back to the dorm that evening. Second, I wouldn’t have scoffed at a person who knew a fact, heard the fact repeated, and took pleasure in acknowledging “Yes. I know that fact.” This moment of satisfaction is one of the rare pleasures a smart person gets to have.
Who doesn’t love already knowing stuff? It feels great. At a party “yes, anding” someone who said a fact you also know from a Bill Bryson book you both read? Or hearing someone repeat a snippet from RadioLab and finishing their sentence? That’s a true nerdy connection. It’s the same feeling I get when I read a history book and see an event I memorized the name of in high school and finally gain a real understanding of said event now that I have the patience to read and comprehend a modicum of historical context. Is there a word for that? For seeing something you’re familiar with in passing and then retracing your steps to find out more information, or even information you already knew? Not self-satisfied smugness, like someone who says “hmm” after your boyfriend’s hero repeats a phrase on a DVD extra. Not confirmation bias exactly. I mean the joy of watching a Ken Burns documentary and when the narrator mentions The Teapot Dome Scandal, your brain lights up and says “The Teapot Dome Scandal. We know about The Teapot Dome scandal. Hmm. Yes.” I swear, this feeling must have a name. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
I consumed two rewarding pieces of media this week: I read Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an introspective and relatable book of essays on what to do with the art of men who behave badly. I also rewatched The Usual Suspects (1995). After reading a book that hems and haws about the ethics of consuming media by bad people, especially people who are still alive and benefit monetarily in some way, I am still not sure how I feel about a movie directed by a man accused of rape, starring a man who was also accused of multiple sexual assaults. I had not yet finished Dederer’s book when I sat down to watch what can be aptly described as a “guilty pleasure” so I did not know that a major takeaway of her criticism is that personal consumption is not paramount when toppling systems that enable powerful people to do bad shit with impunity (including oil companies that are actively destroying the planet). Your choices matter, but in the grand scheme, well… do they? Like any great book of essays, the answer can’t be whittled down into a bite-sized thesis. I’m still reckoning with my knee-jerk male reaction to the author praising a woman who shot Andy Warhol and wrote a manifesto about killing all men to make a more just society. If I may? Please don’t do that. But I also agree with another of Dederer’s points that loving a piece of art or hating a piece of art does not make you a good or bad person. That onus falls on whether or not you chew with your mouth open, or publicly praise Elon Musk on the website he owns.
I knew people attached a moral feeling to the art they consume before I read the passage in Dederer’s book because Leon Botstein already told me and sixteen other hungover 19-year-olds in a first-year seminar class at Bard. He told us there existed “a type of person who goes to a movie and cries at the right parts and thinks they are a good person because of it” while explaining the importance of understanding Kant’s categorical imperative. Being moved by art, no matter how many times you insist you are an “empath,” is not an ethical practice. It’s neutral. You just liked the movie and felt something. Picking apart a deed in a vacuum, deciding it’s a good thing to do, then doing it, makes you a good person. Be kind. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Dederer also cites the heavenly joy inherent in sharing art, how much she relishes seeing a movie, and then reading another critic’s takeaways from the movie she saw. It’s a cerebral retracing of that which you already know, a picking apart of something you loved by another person who can enunciate why they loved it, and your brain can say “yes, hmm. That is why I loved that.” Hopefully, this is what any good essay or (dare I say it!) stand-up act promises: a telling of a personal truth you already sort of know but maybe never put into words. I agree with Dederer on the pleasure of recapping as I agree with most of her taste in movies by monsters. Sadly, that does mean when an intelligent woman extolled the specific virtues of Annie Hall, my brain, having only recently consumed a recap of the evils committed by Woody Allen, said only “Yes. I love Annie Hall.”
I barely thought about the terrible people involved in making The Usual Suspects, and instead used my college-honed powers of observation to think thoughts like “damn, you could smoke in hospitals in the 90s?” and “Hey, that’s the bad guy from The Mask!” All of this is to say, when I watched The Usual Suspects, I was genuinely trying to enjoy myself. I wasn’t thinking about the bad men involved. I was attempting to judge a work by its own merits, something Dederer dismisses as all but impossible. Dederer posits that what we’re saying is “I love this work and would like to forget the bad thing that happened so I can continue to enjoy it, please don’t yell at me.” In a nutshell, your cerebral appreciation for “an objective work of genius” is in reality an emotional love for a piece of art that, by its nature of being a piece of art, is subjective.
I didn’t love watching The Usual Suspects this time around. Honestly, it’s a movie that depends more heavily on the actors’ performances than anything else. Those performances were hit-and-miss. I love Benicio Del Toro’s line delivery. Kevin Pollack makes me laugh. I’m being careful not to say “perfect” here or “the best” when my opinion is subjective. The movie is good and bad at the same time. Kevin Spacey’s performance is over-the-top. Pete Postlethwaite’s is too understated. Everyone else comes off like a cartoon character, including the police. I found the movie unsubtle, the worst assessment there is for a movie that seemed at the time extremely cool. To discover a movie or book you used to love as feeling “obvious” and semi-theatrical is to deem it corny. Have you tried watching “Make Em Laugh” from Singing In The Rain? It’s rough.
What’s important to me about this mediocre movie made by monsters isn’t how well it holds up, but the fond memories I have of seeing it for the first time: in the theater. With my dad and brother. On a school night. When I was in 5th Grade.
The rule we had in our house when it came to rated-R movies or watching MTV or stand-up comedy (lol) was “no, never” unless my parents saw it first and thought it was good. My parents took the “viewer discretion advised” disclaimer seriously, but not seriously enough to keep us away from an Oscar contender! These kids need culture! My parents reviewed all of a film’s content ahead of time (swearing, fine; nudity, sometimes; violence, must be tasteful; jokes about sex, if they’re funny; a scene where men talk explicitly about sex in a locker room setting, verboten). At home, my dad would fast forward the Betamax (!) tape through any scene that might damage us psychologically like he was quickly turning the volume up and down on a stereo when a song with dirty lyrics played. It was still important that we understand the vibe of the art, even if we weren’t allowed to see it in its entirety. His own version of how TNT would edit Die Hard (a movie I was allowed to watch if Dad was in the room and we skipped Mr. Takagi’s head blowing off.) Of course, my brother and I stayed glued to the screen during these awkward fast forwarding delays, trying to discern the adult world from behind two staticky horizontal lines cutting across an exposed nipple or blood.
This prepared us well for the afternoons spent with our friends trying to see pornography on cable channels my family did not pay for. Rather than fully blackout these channels, the cable company made the video appear scrambled and discolored, the audio-only tantalizingly clear once every minute or so as if we could adjust a satellite dish or tune a dial somewhere and finally be in business. It’s hard to explain why we, kids who could probably find porn on tape somewhere if we tried hard enough, spent so much time watching the weirdest version of it. You simply had to be there.
I thought my dad, like David Sedaris’ father forcing his kids to play instruments together, screened these movies because he wanted to make little artists out of me and my brother. I always thought my father wanted to expose us to great adult movies at an impressionable age so that we too could be like Fosse tap dancing at the Burlesque club, earnestly working on our art in the face of temptation. I’ve been invited to do enough comedy shows that also feature stripping to know this movie did prepare me for that fate. Ironically, that’s the scene my dad always skipped when we watched it together.
When I wrote to him asking if the goal was our edification as artists, he said no. It was merely to avoid the “G-rated dreck” they were pushing on America in the 80s and 90s. My dad would rather rewatch a great movie with a few well-timed edits than ever have to be stuck watching Kazaam or Mac and Me again. The only adult/children’s movie mix I can remember him enjoying was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but it’s the exception that proves the rule. Adults were not anticipating Disney movies the way they are now. They were taking their kids to Back to the Future or Wayne’s World and hoping the questionable content didn’t emotionally scar anyone.
Every Tuesday night, my mother worked late. My dad was in charge of us and, much to our delight, rarely wanted to cook right after work. The Tuesday night tradition included a Simpson’s rerun, pizza, or a trip to the movies, complete with Arby’s sandwiches hidden under my coat for the three of us to eat in the theater.
The night we saw The Usual Suspects, I had stayed home sick from school. Now, here I was in the dark, eating fast food and Reese’s Pieces that were certain to make me sick the next day, watching a rated-R movie! I was in heaven.
During a scene where all the criminals stand by a pool table and argue, my dad suddenly stepped into the aisle and waved for us to follow him. We walked out of the theater into the lobby. I looked at the red carpeting, the enticing video games screeching on the other side of the room, blinking “insert coin.” I felt the urge to go put a quarter into Primal Rage, a fighting game featuring dinosaurs and apes gushing spurts of blood a la Mortal Kombat that my mom forbade me to play after her five-second review of the images on the screen.
My dad stood by the door and explained in a monotone voice: “They explain in the movie that Keyser Söze is with his family when some bad guys show up and rape his wife and say they’re going to kill the kids. Rather than give the bad guys what they want, Keyser Söze shoots his family first and then kills the bad guys to show he can’t be threatened.”
My dad, at this point, had never given us The Talk. Not the “never get involved with the Hungarian mafia talk.” The other one. He never did give us that talk. We learned from public school Sex Ed and the aforementioned squiggle vision.
Imagine how intense I thought that scene was, displayed in that other room, too intense for my prying little 5th-grade eyes, unfit for polite society’s consumption. Now imagine how funny it is every time I rewatch the movie and get to the scene where almost no violence is shown on screen as Verbal Kint explains what Keyser Söze does to his family in almost the same way my dad did! It’s mostly told through narration! Nothing is traumatizing at all! Way worse to see your dad nervously explain something going on in the other room so awful, that it might make me old before my time. My dad brought us back into the theater so we could see the end, complete with every character save one getting shot or blown up.
What a joy it is to watch the movie now, knowing every scene by heart, and not knowing if I love the movie based on its own artistic merits or because of a memory of my dad earnestly wanting to share art he enjoyed with his sons.
I relate this memory to you now because I know my smart but cautious parents wanted me to be a smart person too. I enjoy retracing my steps when it comes to movies, books, and music they shared with me. Even if the movies, books, and music were created by bad people. It feels good. The joy of revisiting these cultural artifacts has not lost its flavor.
There is another inherited joy that I’m glad my parents took an unnecessarily long time to expose me to: Idioms.
Before I’d had an adult conversation, before I’d read any book on my own (sad but true, the first one was Michael Crichton’s Sphere. Finished Thanksgiving Day, age 12, only after I had seen the movie. It helped to picture Dustin Hoffman saying all the stuff I read on paper. Whatever works, I guess.), my parents helped my brother and me list as many idioms as they could think of off the top of their heads.
This list was an assignment for Ray Warofka’s 6th Grade class. My brother had had Mr. Warofka three years before I did, and had done the assignment first. In the Wilbur family lore, Sean was seated at his desk, hand in the air like his fellow classmates, assuming everyone had the same parents he did. When Mr. Warofka said “keep your hands raised if you came up with ten idioms? Fifteen? Twenty?” With each number, a few more hands went down until Sean, who had a piece of notebook paper with 215 idioms on it, was the last man standing. By the time I got the same assignment, I had a veritable laundry list of phrases.
An idiom, mind you, is not a simple turn of phrase. An idiom is a grouping of words that uses literal imagery to express something figurative, usually by putting words together that don’t make sense out of context, especially if the phrase is not in your native language. I feel the definition of idiom has been watered down over time and has come to mean “a phrase people use.” Blind as a bat is a simile. Bats aren’t blind and usually, the person saying it isn’t either. It’s an exaggeration using the word “as.” On the other hand, Bats in the belfry (my mom’s favorite) is an idiom. Maybe you disagree with this strict definition of “idiom,” but let’s at least agree “it is what it is,” while being idiomatic, is not an idiom.
The idiom assignment in 1994 was a tough nut to crack, as it were. We probably could have checked the internet — ahem, “gone on AOL” — to look up a few, but for an assignment like this one, you sat around the table thinking hard about stuff you already knew. My parents still laugh recounting the salesman who happened to be sitting at our dining room table as we worked on the assignment. He was there to sell them on renting a walk-in meat freezer (???) and kept offering “cold as a witch’s tit” which, though it delighted me to hear repeatedly, is a simile when you say it that way. It would be fun to make it an idiom and hear a weather person some morning say “Be careful. It is witch tit cold out there.” I knew the phrase already because it’s featured in the opening of All That Jazz where a guy says one of the dancers is “uglier than a witch’s tit” and must be corrected. I must have seen that movie ten times by that age, and we never fast-forwarded past that line. Nevertheless, it was a thrill to hear a grown man in real life say “colder than a well digger’s ass!” in my house. I guess the man had freezers on the brain.
My parents eventually invented their own idiom “don’t kick the moose,” based on a story about a wife who wanted a picture with her husband next to a sleeping moose, decided the moose wasn’t interesting enough, and asked him to kick it. The drowsy moose stood and killed the husband. “Don’t kick the moose” is akin to “don’t piss off the bears” meaning one should not unnecessarily enrage an authority figure, an instinct my brother and I both had problems tamping down. What separates the invented idiom of “don’t kick the moose” is that it’s also tinged with the warning you should not let anyone, even your beloved spouse, convince you to do something stupid. I’ve carried this idiom around with me like a portmanteau, employing both sides of its meaning as needed.
Knowing a lot of idioms yields one of two results: you either become the type of human being whose brain is on auto-pilot because you rely too heavily on these inherited expressions, repeating them like the character in a Robert Frost poem who insists unthinkingly that “good fences make good neighbors” when the poet can’t tell what they’re walling in or walling out. Or…you become a person who stays up until 3 AM, unable to hit the sack, asking Chat GPT to list “foreign idioms that are hard to translate into English” for the sheer thrill of novelty. Honestly, I don’t know which is better.
The idioms, the movies, the books, the advice, my dad’s adage to “always know what you want when you walk into a room” (based on a long story about having political leverage as a young man and not using it when someone in a powerful position asked him “what do you want?” and he gave some boilerplate answer about “integrity” instead of asking for money or career opportunities), all eventually popped up in my adult life. Instead of living by “you only know what you know when you know it,” I’ve been gifted with a sixth sense, a second sight. Having nerdy parents, reading a lot of biographies, and knowing a lot of things that feel useless now but magically pay off later is like seeing those photos from The Omen, or like Odysseus knowing he should take the wineskin with him into Polyphemus’s cave. I’m not saying it makes you a total clairvoyant, but it helps you feel prepared. Like you know the prophecy of adulthood and have some verbal heuristics to guide you. Knowing how the world works through idioms or by seeing adult movies at a young age doesn’t save you from heartbreak or losing money on The Browns. Phrases like “there are plenty of fish in the sea” and “don’t cry over spilled milk” can help you out after the fact though. Plus, you’ll understand Fellini’s 8 1/2 the first time you see it if you’ve watched a movie it directly influenced like All That Jazz a few hundred times.
Maybe you were aware of everything I’ve written here, and I’m beating a dead horse or as the Chinese say drawing legs on a snake (adding needless detail to something finished). For that, I apologize. Unless, like me, you enjoy reading something you already know.
If you can think of an idiom that means the joy of relearning something or the good feeling of revisiting something you’ve seen, please let me know. The ball is in your court.
This had me noticing idioms all day.