‘Just someone who’s lost’: From Out of Sight to Up in the Air

(Caution: contains spoilers. I.e. it’s probably not a good idea to read this if you haven’t seen either of the two films referenced in the title. Or Solaris. Or Rocky III.)

I have been trying to imagine George Clooney in a boxing movie. Something like Rocky or Cinderella Man. Or Raging Bull. To imagine him breaking his hands upon a jail cell wall.

I have been trying to fit him into those bar basement scenes in Fight Club. To see him with his face bruised and bloodied against the concrete in the same way that Edward Norton’s gets. In the same way that Brad Pitt’s gets.

I can’t.

Perhaps it’s because my imagination doesn’t really have much to work with. After all (and please correct me if I’m wrong), Clooney just doesn’t seem to get too physically messed up in films. Stallone, Crowe, De Niro, Norton, they all get messed up plenty. In their harder films, they all seem to affect a stance that demonstrates allegiance to the maxim Stallone himself professes as Rocky Balboa in the 6^th and final film in that series: ‘It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.’ With Clooney, it has always seemed as though it’s more about avoiding being hit (observe, for instance, the scene in Ocean’s Eleven where he and a tough-guy acquaintance fake his beating/interrogation). This is not to suggest that he plays cowardly types, more that he generally plays characters who rely on their cunning, on their charm. His casting as Mr. Fox in the recent Roald Dahl adaptation fits this persona perfectly.

That the role finds him as a voice actor is also oddly fitting. The more I consider that fact, the notion of Clooney as voice, the more it becomes apparent why I’m struggling to put him into the great big black and white boxing ring inside my head. He is a talker, not a fighter. Even when he takes roles in action movies, it always seems like other people take larger parts in the action than him. Consider Three Kings, and the Mexican standoff that develops in the small Iraqi town which Clooney’s Archie Gates and fellow soldiers believe to hold a bunker full of gold bullion (‘No, not the little cubes you put in soup’). Instead of attempting to instigate a gunfight, he tries to explain to his men exactly what happens to the body as a result of gunshot wounds. He is a negotiator. He is the referee, the man in the middle, not one of the men in the corner. He is always looking to make sure that it’s a good, clean fight.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident in one of his characters than it is in Up in the Air’s Ryan Bingham. Even though his job is essentially to inform others that they have lost theirs, he has honed the craft of doing this with minimum damage to a very fine art. We are both shown this and told about it every time he talks about his work. He knows people don’t like what he does, but he feels it is necessary, and so justifies his position by demonstrating just how good he is at it. Talking, that is. Because, of course, the other facet of Bingham’s (professional) life is that he is a motivational speaker. One of those people who goes around trying to convince other people to improve themselves and their lifestyles. One of those people who goes around trying to help people keep on moving forward without getting hit. Again, he has this down to a fine art. He rolls out the same speech at each conference event he gets invited to, and gets the same response from his audience – muted hope tinged with subdued despair. The longer the film continues, the more the audience realises that this is pretty much how he feels too. He gets back from these speaking engagements exactly what he puts in. They are not made to seem like the important part of the endeavour. They are not, in themselves, the ultimate goal.

It is the same with actual heist in Ocean’s Eleven. It is not the taking of the money that really matters, or that’s even really the difficult part – it’s the getting away with it that counts. The heist may be the showy part, the aesthetic triumph, for all parties concerned: director, actors, characters, story, but it means almost nothing without the big payoff.

And yet, at the heart of a lot of Clooney’s films is the implicit acceptance that such a payoff will be short-lived. In Ocean’s Eleven there are only about 10 minutes of film after the completion of the heist, compared to about 100 minutes before. The way the shot of the fountain jutters and fades just before the final scene suggests an odd kind of emptiness, an impermanence to everything that’s gone before and which is coming after. It says, simply, that all good things come to an end.

Perhaps this is why I still can’t place him in a boxing ring. I get the sense that he, or, rather, the characters he plays, simply don’t see the point in fighting just to win, because they have already thought about it too much and they know that victory won’t last so it doesn’t seem worth working for. It is not necessarily a defeatist attitude, but it is a defensive one, a self-protecting one. And his characters generally stick to it, unless, of course, there is another incentive, another source of happiness to get him through even if the other things he’s working for go sour.

Usually, these other incentives are women.

In Ocean’s Eleven, Clooney’s Danny Ocean is ostensibly going after the money, but really just wants his ex-wife back. Similarly, in Up in the Air, as soon as he begins to feel the inevitability of his career completely changing shape, he invests more effort and time in trying to make things work with Alex, a female fellow traveller he has met with occasionally on the road. He even invites her to accompany him to a family wedding. Throughout both films he is absolutely on top of his game when it comes to charm. This is due in no small part to the excellent scripts with which he’s provided, especially in the latter, but it is also very much due to his undeniable natural talent for negotiation. He gives the impression that what he’s saying is exactly what he’d say even if it hadn’t been scripted. He sells it completely. He understands that the audience has to believe him in order for us to believe that the woman in question would believe him, or at least be willing to go along with him even if they didn’t. For instance, the dialogue in the scene where Ryan Bingham first meets Alex sounds so spot-on that it’s entirely plausible that their evening should end up the way it does.

In the wider body of Clooney’s work, however, it’s also entirely plausible that their relationship should end up how it does as well.

In Out of Sight he plays a bank robber, Jack Foley, pursued by Jennifer Lopez’s Karen Sisco, a US Marshall following his escape from the Glades Correctional Facility. Their first meeting occurs immediately upon the event of this escape, when he bundles her into the boot of her car and jumps in beside her, whilst his partner Buddy drives them away. About 3 minutes after this is the moment when it becomes apparent that they are attracted to each other, or rather, that she is attracted to him. He is attracted to her from the get-go. They are talking, and he quotes a film, Network, with such childlike glee that she can’t help but smile. He has his hand on her hip and she doesn’t move it off. This is not because she is scared to do so. After all, unbeknownst to him, she keeps a gun in the boot. When the car stops, she has a chance to shoot him and Buddy, but she doesn’t. Not then.

But later, near the end, she shoots him. In the leg, but she still shoots him. She has to take him back to the correctional facility. Both of them knew it was coming. Especially Foley.

Something did happen in between that first meeting and that (almost) last, however. Something key to explaining how Clooney’s characters get by, even if they think the odds are ultimately against them. Foley tracks down Sisco to her hotel in Detroit, and approaches her as she sits alone at a table near the bar. Earlier, in the car boot, he’d mused about how things might be different between them if they were two different people, if they were strangers who had no idea about what the other did for a living, and so it is that he proceeds to act this theory out. He gives his name as Gary. She gives hers as Celeste. He asks what she does for a living, starts the small-talk, gives compliments as though this is the first time he’s seen her and thought those things. Then she asks him what he does, and he immediately punctures the fantasy, explaining that ‘I don’t think it works if we’re somebody else.’ And he’s right, because this has to be their escape, their personal getaway, not Gary’s, not Celeste’s. All they have to do is put their ‘professional’ lives aside, and focus on that sense of the personal. Nothing exists outside of them and the rooms in which they find themselves. It is a mutual arrangement, and it suits them fine, until morning.

At that point, their professional lifestyle choices bleed back in, and they both debate whether they actually did what they did because of the thrill of breaking the rules dictated by their position, or because of some genuine feeling. It is Foley who concludes the discussion in favour of the latter point, because it is perhaps him who needs to believe that the most. It is absolutely crucial to his survival that he was not just a bank robber when he was with her, but that he was himself.

It is the same in Up in the Air, and the way Ryan interacts with Alex. He needs their time together more and more to be something that exists outside of his professional life, and his career choice, because, quite simply, that professional life seems to be coming apart. He embraces a fantasy that states that the two states of being can exist outside of each other’s sphere of influence. As such, he decides to go to his sister’s wedding, and to take Alex there with him, not because it is a more personal thing to him, at first, but because it feels like it should be, and because there is no group that has been more isolated from him by his work practices and his constant travelling than his family. Everything goes surprisingly well. He feels good, even though he’s soon going to relinquish a big part of the lifestyle he has come to love, and to depend on. He doesn’t mind that one good thing is ending, because another is beginning.

And this is, in view of the philosophy by which his characters often seem to live, that which suggests that the best anyone can hope for are small victories here and there to lessen the pain, where his character makes a mistake that ends up costing him dearly. If it was a boxing movie, this would be the ringing of the bell to signal the start of the last round before he gets KO’d. He has started to believe that not only is winning possible, but that he is bound to do it.

Or perhaps he has just given in to the fantasy, given up on anything else. After all, when the moment finally comes that he achieves his target amount of air-miles, it feels, to both him and the audience, like an anti-climax. Even if it does involve Sam Elliot, longtime owner of cinema’s greatest moustache. He has, to quote an old proverb, put all his eggs in one basket, and he will have nothing left if that basket gets dropped. He is starting to depend upon the fantasy as much as it depends on him to keep it going.

There is one clear parallel with this in Clooney’s career, though it is one which takes the notion of such a fantasy even further by involving it in science fiction. This is Solaris. Again directed by Soderbergh, this is a remarkable departure in terms of tone, composition and conversation from both Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight, and yet the essential outsider/underdog aspect of Clooney’s character remains. The plot, on a basic level, concerns Clooney, as a psychologist, Chris Kelvin, being taken to a research station orbiting the titular planet, following a distress call from an old friend. Upon arriving there, he discovers that this friend is dead and the other crew members are living in fear of physical manifestations of people from their memories – unwanted avatars of their repressed subconscious, as it were. These, apparently, are being caused by the planet, the magnetic fields of which are steadily expanding. The apparition (I term it this, though it seems far more bodily than the average cinematic ghost) which appears to Kelvin takes the form of a woman we first discover he fell in love with, then later find out he married. Before flashbacks confirm this, we infer, from his shock upon realising her being there is not just a dream, that it is no longer possible (or shouldn’t be) for her to be anywhere outside of his head. She is dead.

However, as is often the case with such things, she is recurring now, in this faraway place, because of some unfinished business, because of some lingering problem within Kelvin’s mind that goes beyond the simple, harsh fact of his losing her. It was the manner in which this loss took place that disturbs him, that will not allow her to quit his conscious mind. It is here, in this film perhaps most of all, that we see Clooney’s charm and conversational talent failing, that we see the wires in his head beginning to short from being stripped back just a little too much. And it is very much his failure to talk his wife into submission during an argument that leads to the tragedy by which all else in his life comes to be measured – she has been distant for a while before this argument, and yet he has not taken the time to find out why, he has not listened, he has not asked, and, when this explodes into an argument, he leaves without hearing the last words that she says. He cannot know, at that moment, that she is going to kill herself. But he should.

And so, more than the other remaining crew members, he, after the initial panic has died down, is eager to understand this new manifestation of her. He is intent on knowing more about her than he does. He wants to make amends, to salvage something before she throws in the towel once again. And yet he cannot. Not really.

Such a pattern occurs in numerous other Clooney films as well. In fact, it is surprising, given his stature and reputation, just how seldom his characters actually end up with the girl when the final credits roll. Unlike in Solaris, this is usually because of circumstances slightly beyond his control – in Out of Sight, Karen Sisco is on the other side of the law, and so there isn’t much hope and both know it; in Up in the Air, Alex turns out to have a husband and kids. However, just like in Solaris, in both of those films things go downhill and end how they do because he starts wanting to know more, to break himself and the women out of the limited roles of which it seems to have been pre-dictated that their relationships should comprise. In the former, that effort does lead to Jack Foley and Karen Sisco spending the night together, but it also leads to Jack doing what he knows, having come that far, he must – returning to the gun he stole from her, which she later shoots him with, and accepting that, whether they want them to or not, their professions define them much more than their personal desires do. In the latter, this involves Ryan Bingham using some of his air-miles to go to Alex’s home, with the intention of surprising her with some romantic notion, of bringing her into the life of ‘freedom’ he has created and subsisted on for so long, and yet it is there, at her front door, that he is himself surprised by a rather definitive denial, and turned away.

In both cases, the problem is caused by the difference between what his character wants to believe and what it actually the case, especially regarding Alex. He wants, perhaps needs, to think that she is a female version of him, his direct and perfectly-tailored counterpart, possibly even the elusive ‘soul mate’ – indeed, she fuels this fantasy by telling him at one point that ‘I’m just like you, but with a vagina’. Of course, she isn’t, and he knows this, in retrospect, piecing events and conversations together in his head. We can tell this, even though it is only implicit in the film. We can tell this because we know how this plays out, from retrospective analyses of our own.

And this is where Solaris comes in, dancing nimbly and unsettlingly on that line between fantasy and memory. Kelvin wants this (re)incarnation of the woman he loved to be more open and readable to him, to be more fully understandable in both her words and her actions. This is why, after the first time such an apparition enters his room, he is reluctant to destroy it or banish it into space. But, because she is a composite from his memories and his memories alone, she winds up acting and being exactly as distant as before – he still cannot know her. He still cannot know anyone beyond what he thinks he knows about them. Furthermore, he is less and less sure that he knows himself. Standard existential crisis fare then. If only it were standard.

By the end, as the planet grows to the point where it threatens the ship, complicated scientific and/or psychological explanations are unnecessary. What it comes down to is a simple choice between survival in a reality where he is forever aware that he did not really know his wife, where he forever feels guilt for not being able to help her, and submersion into the world that produced this (limited) remodelling of her. It seems, upon closing, that he has taken the latter, that he will exist there in a kind of shallow, undemanding happiness, but it is not certain. It is perhaps the closest equivalent in Clooney’s oeuvre to the Rocky III freeze-frame ending.

If this were a boxing movie, one might ask, would you put money on him to win?

Or has he, in giving up his torment, already lost sight of a vital piece of his humanity, of the ragged essence that clings on, inevitably, at the centre of a person’s being?

Maybe Solaris, then, is the main reason I cannot place him in a boxing movie. Because it, arguably, ends in him quitting, throwing in the towel, and no good boxer, no really good boxer, ever quits in the movies. They can lose, and lose badly, but they shouldn’t quit.

But maybe Solaris’ anomalous nature within his filmography means that I’ve got things slightly wrong. Maybe Solaris is the exception that proves the rule. The rule being, in this instance, that just because Clooney doesn’t box doesn’t mean that he doesn’t fight. Maybe it just usually means that he doesn’t fight too well.

Because the fact is that, onscreen, George Clooney is a loser. In fact, he may just be the ultimate loser for our time, for now. History and society simply appears to have made him too aware of the inevitability of failure, of the bastards grinding him down, of being beaten and left out cold on the canvas. It is there in way he throws his tie down after being refused a better job than security guard at an old-acquaintance’s firm in Out of Sight. It is there in the way he talks to Julia Roberts the first time we see them together in Ocean’s Eleven. It is even there when he tries to give advice to his onscreen daughter in One Fine Day about how to behave towards men when she’s older. And yet, with every new film, he still gets back in the ring, trying to find the perfect way to dodge all the punches, even if he knows deep down that that perfect way does not exist. He still ends up taking the hits, one way or another, but the main thing is that he keeps moving forward. Because, well, as his Ryan Bingham says, ‘moving is living’. Make no mistake.

'Hollywood on Holiday', or 'Conversation as a Foreign Concept'

What fascinates me most about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is not the faultless Sergio Leone homage with which it opens, nor the riotous and Bowie-driven bonfire with which it reaches its climax, nor even the reasoning behind the introduction of a character as incredibly interesting as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz only to do next to nothing with him. It is, as with a lot of Tarantino’s best work, the conversations.

Consider, if you will, Pulp Fiction, minus the sublime exchange between Vincent and Mia interrogating the nature of the small-talk in which they are engaged. Showy and self-conscious, sure…but central to the reasons why the film works the way it does.

Also, if you’ve seen it, think about Jackie Brown, and then take away the discussion that Jackie holds with her bail bondsman, Max Cherry, the morning that he comes around to collect his gun. Not only would the film’s plot no longer make full sense, but we wouldn’t understand either character as much as we need to. Neither, perhaps, would we care about them.

How about the conversation about Sonny Chiba martial arts films, and Elvis Presley, which opens True Romance? If it wasn’t there, would you miss it?

The film would.

Ditto for the coffee-table discussion of Madonna in Reservoir Dogs.

However, there is one particular conversation in Inglourious Basterds which is even more unmissable. It is the one which forms the basis of the film’s fourth chapter, ‘Operation Kino’, and takes places within La Louisiane tavern. To suggest it is a tour de force is to perhaps affix the most appropriate cliché there can be for such a conversation, both as it occurs on the pages of a screenplay and on screen, chiefly because the assimilation of that French phrase into common English vernacular is something akin to what Tarantino appears to be attempting by allowing the inter-bleeding of three languages (German, English and French), here. What he engages in, and subsequently engages the viewer in, is not merely a power-play between the proponents of these languages, and an analysis of intricacies of dialect within those languages, but rather a demonstration of the power of conversation, in any language.

Even though the very fact that different languages are spoken may suggest that those differences are indeed the point of the conversation, that’s quite possibly only because audiences in Britain and America are exposed to them so rarely in mainstream cinema. Germans usually talk English in German accents. Ditto for the French. And the Russians. Subtitles, outside of actual ‘foreign’ cinema, appear to be frowned upon. Twenty-minute scenes almost entirely composed of them certainly are. Yet they don’t matter. Such is Tarantino’s pride and obvious enjoyment of his own writing that it doesn’t even need to be spoken in a language common to the audience for them to appreciate it. For them to hear the rhythms in another tongue and to read it on the screen is enough. Because, without wishing to fawn over this all too much, the dialogue simply works. It translates from screen to audience, and that is all that is needed. Watching that scene, I was practically rapturous at the way he plays with the positions of the participants, even at the same time as he flaunts his love of the very thing he’s doing. It is what a great conversation should be, as scripted and acted out in a film. It entertained, it told me a great deal about the characters of all involved, and it made me think. It conveyed a point which should have been previously clear to me (the King Kong as metaphor bit) without making me feel stupid, even as it made the character speaking it (and, by extension, Tarantino) look smart.

That, however, is the problem that (long) conversations seem to encounter when placed into movies. Car chases, explosions, gunfights, fistfights, catfights…none of those things necessarily trigger the ‘Hey, we’re watching something that somebody’s written’-reaction; they don’t have the same potential to instigate an awareness that jolts one out of the escapist mode that is, in many ways, essential to the cinematic experience. Perhaps arguing about the point in relation to Tarantino films (with the possible exception of Jackie Brown) is, well, pointless, given the self-aware postmodern approach he takes to the cinema, and his conversations are often used, as in Inglourious Basterds, to generate excitement, to really work the audience into feeling the same joy in those lines of dialogue that he feels. In other films, by other directors, however, the issue may just come up.

Perhaps it has something to do (in a broad sense) with a mainstream allergy to in-depth character development. Oftentimes, all that is used, and needed, to establish characters that exist within plots, are a few lines of dialogue (e.g. ‘My wife just left me’, ‘I’m just gonna have one more drink’). That is it. It brings the character in question into the viewer’s focus. They have a fact to work with and a trait to watch out for in future scenes. They have been included in that character’s life. In fact, it is more likely that latter point which hints more clearly at a reason why audiences may not be as likely to look for conversation in films as a buying-point.

Afterall, if a character has a voiceover, which helps to flesh out his back story, his opinions and convictions, well, that’s fine. Because that is a conversation that character is holding with the audience. They are being included in that character’s part of the story much more deeply.

Yet, if a character is sat down revealing that same information to another character, all at the same time, rather than in a voiceover’s fragmented bursts, there is the possibility that the viewer will feel too much like exactly that, a viewer. A voyeur. Cinema audiences are inherently voyeuristic, but not too many people really like being made to feel like that’s the case, too much. There is the possibility that the viewer will start to feel alienated, rather than drawn in, as if not enough attention is being paid to the fact that this film they’re watching is meant to be about entertaining them, not about one character desperately trying to entertain another, or to seduce them, or to confuse them.

A case in point may be The Big Chill, which I watched for the first time this evening. It consists of a group of old college friends reconvening after the death of one of their other friends. And that is about as much ‘plot’ as there is. The rest is just those friends catching up with each other, sitting/standing/running around talking. None of them really go anywhere. Much. So, if two hours of talking isn’t your thing, avoid it. But then, a big part of the point of this film is that it’s pretty much everybody’s thing. We all have friends we like to talk to, and can talk to about things all night, and all day, and just generally exist around. And if we don’t anymore, we all wish we did. All conversation is connection. And this film is about stimulating those connections, about trying to keep hold of them when all kinds of pressures seem to be intent on breaking them down or pushing them apart. It’s about the pure magnetic trust and comfort and honesty that makes for the best and most lasting friendships. And, whilst that is a different use of conversation than usually used by Tarantino, it is still aimed at entertaining the audience, even if it’s knocking on a different door. Yes, you may become aware that these people are all just acting these parts, if the conversation goes on long enough, but hopefully in that case you’ll feel a greater need to immerse yourself in conversations with friends that aren’t acted. There is a plus side to every negative review.

Personally, I enjoyed immersing myself in these characters and their (hi)stories and relationships, even as I sought and picked out things within those relationships to remind me of my own, and of the way I feel about certain people I know. It made me feel that I miss them, and, even though I saw two of them this past weekend, I could happily see them for as long a time again right now. Again, this is me trying to bring something to the table, trying to include myself into a situation where I have been invited but not necessarily dragged to the table and made to sit down in the spare chair. I am involving myself. I am making it my business to know these people/characters better, because they are there and I am near them. If I didn’t, then I would feel alone, and all the more lonely for the fact that they are not. In enjoying the fact that they have company, I find I can enjoy theirs, and also my own.

I like to listen, I think, to the things that people say. It is not simply an impulse towards eavesdropping, towards being in the loop, but more a desire to just understand my species, the way our minds work when we are with other people. Advanced and intricate communication skills are one of the most complete and brilliant benefits of our evolution, and it is no small pleasure to encounter them and to hear them in an environment where those benefits are understood, and where their delights are so freely on display. And so the experience of conversation on film, between two people, however simulated, feels, in some way, completely honest.

One of the most beautiful instances of this honesty occurs, for me, in the relationship and interaction between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s Jesse and Celine in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Their conversation feels fun, challenging, occasionally uncomfortable, and there are moments where they just stop talking. In other words, it feels natural. I don’t feel lonely when I watch it, in any sense, but I do afterwards – firstly because I miss that conversation as soon as it is over, and secondly because I’m instantly and instinctively in the mood to talk to someone, and yet it’s the kind of film I only seem to watch when I’m alone. It instils in me a deep longing to be part of something, and to keep being part of it’s own something. Not since my constant re-watchings of action films in the testosterone-fuelled days of my (younger) youth have I felt such an urge and desire to re-view films upon the very instant of their ending as I do recently.

It is the same with Lost in Translation. And indeed, that is somewhere near where I was initially intending to direct this piece – towards the suggestion and consequent consideration of the observation that good conversation seems to find a much larger audience in films when those films are set somewhere off home-ground. When there is further distance for those words to travel (hence the title). But maybe that theory isn’t so important right now. What matters is that there’s still something worth saying and worth hearing being said anywhere at all. That evolution’s prizes are not being entirely wasted, and that all the thoughts we keep having are put to at least one potentially-wonderful use.

Watching Gilbert Grape

I find myself laughing a lot at good films lately; at films which are reputed to be good and which I find to be so. Not all of these films are funny. In fact, most of them aren’t, at least not for much of their length.

But I laugh. Or maybe I don’t. Rather, I think that more often than not it’s just a smile I can’t stop. Which, on paper (or screen) might read ridiculously. Say it aloud and it probably sounds ridiculous too. Yet I don’t think there’s a better way I can say it. I suppose that it’s similar to how I feel when I’m falling for someone, but I really don’t want to digress.

Having said that, however, it seems that love is probably the most appropriate word for how I feel about film, about what film can achieve. It’s certainly how I feel about film when I see movies that don’t amaze me simply because of what I want to believe about them, but instead because of what they make me believe. Indeed, having somehow avoided watching Citizen Kane for the first 23 years of my life, I wasn’t sure what I expected from it, upon finally sitting down to watch a copy I was bought for my last birthday. Perhaps some part of me actually wanted to be disappointed by it, to achieve some special and peculiar sense of gratification from being one of the few people I’d heard talk about it who didn’t hold it in such high reverence. I don’t know quite why this should have been (to witness Orson Welles’ face upon his entrance in The Third Man is to know that what it projected wasn’t just acting – it was the face of a man in complete control of his every intention), and, sure enough, upon Kane’s ending, I had no clearer idea as to why I’d entertained thoughts of disapproval. There is no target at which that film aims that it even comes close to missing. It is as perfectly realised exploration of an idea as I’ve ever seen. Judging by such rampant hyperbole, stirred within me by this viewing, I was once again sure that film and the cinema was clearly the object of my deepest artistic affections.

And yet, that I had to be reminded of such a thing is indicative of the fact that I had taken some time off from fully indulging certain of my mind’s passions, that I had taken the very things that I had turned to so often, for help and entertainment, for granted, without giving anything back. In all those shadowy conversations with cinema screens and TV sets and computer monitors, I had been a silent partner. It might have seemed like I was just being a good listener, but the only way you can be sure of that is if the listener talks back to you about the things you’ve said. I didn’t. It is the same with books, and music, and paintings, and sculpture. Good or bad, they are designed not merely to entertain, but to engage the reader/listener/viewer. They are a part of the artist that they have chosen to shout out into the world, and if all that comes back is an echo, than it has furthered neither them nor the world any for them to do so.

One of the aftershocks that has persisted as a consequence/reward for finally viewing Welles’ first masterpiece, is that I have been thinking a lot more about the ways in which film moves me, and why. I have been trying to further understand myself, to comprehend the mechanisms by which I am most deeply touched and entertained by art; not to disprove or question them, but to embrace them, and to marvel. This may sounds like too romantic a viewpoint to take on such issues, and perhaps it is, but it suits the way I am right now.

Indeed, after watching a film the other night (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), I got to thinking about the first time I was sure I was enamoured so completely with cinema and everything that came with it. Perhaps it was a subconscious rendering of my attempts to patch the distance between that time and now, to fix the wounds and the spaces left inside my head from disregarding it. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that occasionally slides into my mind when I’m content.

That first time, though…that moment has been preserved with rare and mythic clarity. It is an oddly pristine specimen in those dust-gathering museum halls behind my eyes. It happened during the last time I watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, about 3 years ago. Aside from the pratfall that leads into the last section of the film, that scene is not outwardly too comedic (although, admittedly, there are healthy doses of Leone’s mordant wit throughout), but I felt the laughter building in my body as I watched. The shot that begins that scene, leading from Eli Wallach’s clown-like tumble away from a cannonball’s impact, is, again, perfect. Indeed, whilst I wouldn’t wholly agree with Tarantino’s assertion that the film is the best directed in history (in fact, I’d suggest that Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is more consistent…), I do not think I have seen anything more astounding on any screen, small or big, that fully compares with the wonder of that shot, the way the camera spins and tracks Wallach through the avenues of that dusty graveyard with a manic, poetic intensity matched only by Ennio Morricone’s accompanying score. It encapsulates the view that the true fullness of life is to be found in the quests and journeys that we take on our way through it, and, dizzying as some may find it, that shot is a joy to me. That everything preceding it is nearly as good and most things that follow are better is testament to the genius of the work and those who made it. I have seen Brando toying with the shadows in Apocalypse Now, Walken playing with a revolver in The Deer Hunter, and De Niro throwing punches at the air in the flawless black and white of Raging Bull, and yet I still don’t think I’ve seen anything to quite match the way that seemed to me that day.

But, even if nothing ever beats that moment when I first started falling, I know this feeling is going to last, because, as I said, I’m laughing and smiling at films more than ever of late. I recently caught Up in the Air, and, for a good half hour section of that film, couldn’t contain my grin. Last weekend, I watched Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and a simple camera movement nearly made me laugh and cry at once, just because of the colours and the sly curve of the line along which the lens shifted. Everything that follows the conversation that forms the centrepiece of Godard’s Breathless felt like the lead-up to a gut-punch, even as it drew a smile across my face.

And that’s what this love of film is to me. It is topsy-turvy and upside down and direct and straight-shooting. I laugh sometimes at lines that are more touching than funny, and I cannot stop weeping as I watch certain scenes in certain films - whether it is with joy or distress doesn’t matter so much some nights, it only matters that the film has reached me, seen who and how I am, and shown me something glorious in return. The smiles and the tears and the laughter are simply my part of the conversation that these films and I hold in the dark, and some of this writing is what happens when the credits roll and I don’t want to stop talking back.