I was driving to see the cinema’s latest love story and stopped at a red light. On an empty street, on a cloudless night, I found myself making a U-turn. It wasn’t just that I sensed the indie I was going to was factory-made. It wasn’t that it would be digital instead of film or that the projector at the theater often had unchecked issues — going dim here and there, with seemingly no one at the wheel. It actually wasn’t dread at all that had me turn around on the road that night. It was relief. I was finally free from the hook.
These are strange times for moviegoers. Venerable filmmakers are relegated to streaming. Theaters are disappearing. VFX superheroes dominate the remaining big screens. As TV battered the radio, so it seems computer technology has mortally wounded motion pictures. TikTok took over, squeezing our attention spans, and the communal aspect of film has largely been degraded to a herd mentality tap on an empty heart icon.
A committed cinephile told me recently that she had trouble with new flicks because they usually felt like they were made by a cast and crew checking their Instagram in between takes. What was the point, she wondered, of the unions striking against AI if everyone had already given their minds over to their iPhone anyway? What was the point if the algorithm, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style, was now in our veins?
But every now and then, a film comes out and movie lovers declare that cinema is alive and well! It happened with the Top Gun sequel, lauded for its lack of digital deception more than anything else (geez, that really is Tom Cruise flying a jet). Martin Scorsese, the patron saint of preservationists, made two three-and-a-half-hour movies in a row and film buffs lionized his defiance. At the Venice Film Festival, the exceptionally ambitious Brady Corbet offered a 70 mm film, also over three hours long, and The Brutalist received a 13-minute standing ovation. We seem to equate true cinema with whatever is the opposite of a texted GIF popping up on our smartphone. It’s what reminds us of Lawrence of Arabia. Three-dimensional characters on big canvases, with time to tell their consequential stories. Those beautifully-lit faces towering up there on the gigantic screen, backed by orchestras, kissing in the pouring rain, inside a story built to break our heart. The seduction was over before it even started. Most of us never had the ghost of a chance to see through Bogart’s smoke or Bergman’s tears.
Today, motion pictures come to us unromantically. We catch them in the line at Starbucks, over a shoulder on someone’s pocket-sized screen — is that a new Clint Eastwood? When did that come out? Movies sit on grimy tables, in pale sunlight, hoping that someone, or maybe no one, will notice them. It’s the morning after a drunken debauching and the suspension of disbelief has evaporated in the sun. Everything that seemed so glamorous in the dark is now revealed to be decaying, forlorn, and prone to the ruthlessness of time. We find ourselves lying next to an Egyptian Sphinx with no face, and a marble Roman sex god with pulverized genitalia.
In the past, the water was deep enough to hide the skeletons at the bottom of the pool. A tantalizing mystique emerged from all that was unknown. Katharine Hepburn in a bathing cap with her model of a schooner. Cary Grant in the pool house, holding a glass of orange juice. What is it that bewitches us? One can’t pin anything down, it all just floats. But now fame itself stands shivering and desperate in the shallow end. We know how it works. The lighting, the obscuring, the dramatic effect. The promoting, the baiting and switching, the calculated nature of influence. Once we see through the mystery of movies, we can enter into the even greater mystery of our ordinary life. We don’t need the drama. The curtain lifts. What seemed grey and mundane suddenly bursts with color. The Wizard of Oz is no one but us. For all his showman techniques, Howard Hughes never came close to producing the depths of a simple everyday walk around the block. We turn the corner. And our little dog, too.
We bought our ticket to get lost in the suspense, to ride the emotional roller coaster, to be caught up in the trick of the light. Becoming disillusioned with movies, especially in their presently weakened condition, is disloyal sacrilege (at least according to the industry that sells them.) Still, if we learned anything from Disney fairytales, it’s that one needs to be disenchanted in order to break free from a spell.
Like a painted portrait in a haunted house, the picture watches us now. We know that we are the subject of a mind control experiment. Just as we sometimes resent the person who texts us or emails us because it brings us back into the experiment, so do we now feel something other than admiration for the performers who appear on our laptops. They continue to act out dramas, tell stories of on-set hijinks, smile on the red carpet… as if nothing has changed. The teeth become whiter, the spotlight gets smaller. We can almost see the beads of sweat on the ingenue’s doll-like skin as she walks up the velvet stairs and turns to the crowd to blow one more kiss off her glove. Perhaps the best acting happening anywhere these days is the pretending that the party’s not over.
Cinephiles are passionate. De Palma is mad about The Red Shoes. William Friedkin was obsessed with The Leopard Man. Tarantino spazzes out about Rio Bravo. If we aren’t in the grips of the movie, if we absorb it simply as light and sound coming and going, we become dispassionate. Rather than thinking of dispassion as the fading away of a flame, or as indifference, we might see it as a kind of liberation. Like encountering an ex-lover, and free of burning desire, finally meeting them for the first time.
Though movies are only projections, there seem to be actual people there, and we might get attached to them. Terry Malloy. Mabel Longhetti. Antoine Doinel. Annie Hall. Ennis Del Mar. Chauncey Gardiner. Debby Marsh. Jake Gittes. Jake Shuttlesworth. Elisabet Vogler. Lloyd Dobler. Oscar Jaffe. George Bailey. Fast Eddie Felson. Andrei Rublev. Lola Lola. Lulu Hankel. Harry Lime. Harry Caul. Henry Chinaski. Cabiria. Viridiana. Kikuchiyo. Bluto Blutarsky. Ninotchka. We identify with them. Sometimes we even try to become like the characters after the movie ends. Or maybe we see an evil-doer on the screen and try to distance ourselves from them, attribute their character onto people in our lives that we clash with (when I’m in a foul mood, my neighbor is Norman Bates.)
Movies, when taken as real, protect our ego. Not unexpectedly, then, movies can be very difficult to let go of. Imagine sitting alone in the dark, in a huge theater, without anything on the screen. For hours. With no intermission. We might become afraid of the emptiness of the theater, the lack of company, the absence of light or shadow. There would be nothing on the screen to relate to. Nothing to reflect us, or assure us that our identity was still well intact. It could become terrifying. In all of that darkness and space, we might lose our self.
The motto of the Criterion Closet is “No one leaves empty-handed.” An actor wanders in and packs his bag with exquisitely packaged, newly restored Ozu Blu-rays. Cut to Ozu’s gravestone, which doesn’t have his name on it, only the character “Mu.” Mu is often the first koan a Zen student receives. A koan cannot be understood by intellect, logic, or reasoning. To see mu, one must become mu itself, returning to our original nature — before craving and aversion, before brainwashing, before our parents were born. When we perceive the triumphs and tragedies of the world as a dream, we begin to wake up. If we realize mu, the dualistic delusions of self and other, light and shadow, here and there… all vanish. We recognize the material world as only a chiaroscuro cloud castle, without essence. Death is no more real than an actor dying on the screen.
Francis Ford Coppola predicted the digital revolution and the democratization of filmmaking: “Suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder.” But he didn’t prophesize that Hollywood studio-level cameras would be placed inside our mobile phones (with editing tools and score and effects, too.) Or that corporations would incessantly program us to make a movie out of our every waking moment and broadcast it onto the Internet. Warhol’s 15 Minutes had a baby with Orwell’s Big Brother and it sucked away the power of pictures. Yes, anyone can make anything now — and they do. But who is left to see it? Movies have become our main form of communication, and it’s a one-sided conversation. They are declarations of existence. The SOS messages of millions and millions of movie-makers.
It’s natural to want to be understood, to be seen. But inevitably we are mistaken for another and taken the wrong way. Finally, we don’t need to correct anyone, or strive to be accurately depicted. Maybe our existence itself is the big misunderstanding. Could be we are somewhere in between existence and non-existence, and the impulse to present and preserve our story is based on a misapprehension. Like clinging to a phantasm.
Is there a way to unlearn our indoctrination? Could we retrace our steps? Down the escalator, through the streets, up the highway, into the forest stream with the cool mossy rocks, outside the hermit’s cave. It’s difficult to understand how a human being in solitude might impact the universe more than James Cameron’s Titanic. Or maybe it isn’t that difficult. Maybe it’s right under our nose.
As the world gets hotter and it becomes increasingly obvious that our situation is impermanent, we might get nervous and start to look for something to latch onto. Words like iconic, legendary, and legacy have become ubiquitous. The higher the fire bursts into flames, the stronger our denial grows. Movies are still the most tangible path when it comes to our aspiration for immortality. Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio are often quoted as saying that “movies are forever.” So we champion Top Gun: Maverick and Killers of the Flower Moon. If they live on, maybe so can we. However, from another perspective, the pursuit of permanence is actually the root of all our suffering. Everything is always changing and in flux, and nothing lasts forever. Except maybe eternity, which doesn’t need to be recorded, and can never truly be captured.
Over 90% of American silent films are lost forever. Because the material world is transient, we can count on 100% of all movies eventually, in the long run, disappearing. The Library of Congress cares for reels of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but those swing buddies are still locked in an ephemeral dance. Much like when we hold our sweetheart: just this, just this moment, just this one last tango. Soon, we’ll be without the moon, hummin’ a different tune. There may be teardrops to shed. So while there’s moonlight, music, and love, and romance — let’s face the music and dance.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, our stars came down from the clouds. Divine beings such as Tyrone Power were replaced by imperfect mortals like Dustin Hoffman. Instead of Lana Turner, we had Karen Black. There was no more Vaseline on the lens. Traditionalists complained that movies had lost their luster, but an awakening was taking place. The unraveling of our conditioning meant you had a better shot of seeing beauty for yourself, instead of what some elaborate commercial told you beauty was. You could go beyond propaganda and directly touch the heart of the matter. And so, now that movies have fallen once again — all the way down from the big screen and onto the subway tracks — we have another opportunity to wake up. To wriggle out of the rope of our own fear and desire.
We can mourn our crumbled movie churches and cathedrals. We can long for a time when there was more space — both mental and physical— for cinema to affect our lives. And we can even try to reverse the hands of the clock, make epics again, bring roaring crowds back to the theater. Yet the wonder of our heroes fading away is that simultaneously our villains fade away, too. We are left without projection. That ravishing rider on his horse, galloping down sand dunes, sun setting, God’s face in the clouds, the devil waiting down below — it’s only a mirage after all.
When we see Eyes Wide Shut, City Lights, Close-Up, Blow-Up, Murnau’s Sunrise — we are met with the power of our own mind. When we watch Citizen Kane, An American in Paris, Ugetsu, A Man Escaped, Meshes of the Afternoon, Spirited Away, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Night of the Hunter, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Ace in the Hole, In a Lonely Place… we are reminded of our own depths. These films are merely indicators, mirrors, signals. If we neurotically embalm them, put them behind thick bulletproof glass like Mona Lisa at the Louvre, we have missed their point. Of course, the ego uses everything it can to make sure its prized creation — the self — is supremely safeguarded. A movie might help us open up and be vulnerable, but our ego then uses that same movie to reaffirm our delusion of separateness. We rate the film, glorify it, attach to it, consecrate it, and put other movies down with it. We build our identity around the motion picture that just a moment ago helped us forget our self. We go back to that same ignorant way of thinking — everything inside this skin-bag is me, and everything outside is the rest of the universe. However, if we let go of the movie, then we are free to dissolve into the greatest masterpiece of them all. This masterpiece isn’t on a big screen or laptop or iPhone. We can’t buy a ticket to go see it, can’t download it, and there’s no DVD or print. We can’t collect it, keep it, or leave it behind. There’s no poster for it, no credits, no beginning or ending. The only place it’s streaming is everywhere. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.
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