The first movie I ever saw on the big screen was Lady and the Tramp. What added to the allure of this family affair, which reflected a spontaneous outing with my parents, my brother, my aunt, uncle and cousins to a since closed downtown Winnipeg movie theater, is the fact that we were expressly told that we wer not to tell my grandparents about our afternoon out on the town. This was to be our secret.
You see, at the time my grandparents looked at the theater as being “of the devil.” That place where all manners of temptations coexisted and cohabitated, threatening to lure us away from God.
Funny how it ultimatley became a place where I have rediscovered and met God over my life time.
From that very first experience with the lights and the sounds and the people and the magic, all packed away in the safety of my childhood memories, my imagination was captured. Here was moving picture telling a story using an artform wholly unfamiliar to me in the moment, beckoning me into the mystery. Giving me a way to make sense of the world I was existing within.
It sounds cliche. It sounds hyperbolic and melodramatic. And maybe its all those things. But it’s also true.
While books remain my first love, this was something categorically different. Rather than sending me inside my own head this brought me out of it. Yes, even as a young child encountering this classic animated tale I was enchanted. Some might say this was still in the glory days of Disney storytelling.
What I have found myself thinking about over the last number of days is why that is. What is it about this moment that reshaped how I conceptualized the power of story? What is it about the express power of film to evoke this in me the way that it did.
I’ve been thinking about this while sitting in the aftershocks of the recent headlines regarding Netflix’s aquistion of Warner Brothers. If you aren’t familiar, or just want a good conversation and anaylsis of the situaiton and the broader issues at hand, I highly recommend listening to the latest episode of Next Best Picture (Episode 469). It’s marked, so you don’t need to listen to all three hours, you can fast forward to near the end. Suffice to say however that this has felt like a singular moment which has robbed me of nearly 50 years of this love of the movies. Conjuring up memories of visiting WB sturdios in the late 90’s when it was still a part of that vibrant era.
To be sure, this is just a feeling. Although what is reason but feelings being expressed. But it is this awarness of how quickly the world we know can be pulled out from under us at the blink of an eye. Where the innocence of wonder and hope and faith and trust starts to give away. Of how the world I’ve occupied and been formed by and that handed me my sense of place and identity starts to feel strange and foreign and false, something seemingly not my own.
And how all of that translates as loss.
This isn’t a singular moment either. I’ve been feeling this in many aspects of my life as of late. Loss that evokes grief in a social media landscape that not only fails to recognize it as grief but leaves no space for it. Ridicules it. Calls it irrational.
I know for me, and for many of the stories I’m seeing that bea similar feelings and sentiments, this particular moment is bigger than just a transaction. It’s more than the popular and abused rhetoric such as “things change” and “adapt or die” would imply, phrases that fail to recognize the simple truth that change is never benign. It matters because so much of me is bound up in this stuff. Thus why something that can seem and feel insignficant on the surface can awaken these feelings of being left lost and alone in this increasinbly foreign world. A cast off of this cruel thing we call life. A forgotten relic of an age that pretended life was significant and yet revealed itself to have always been about adaptation. Making our lives just a necessary step towards this thing that gets romanticized as illusions of progress.
Strong feelings to pull from this, I know. But as I often say, every conversation matters because life matters, and this is all the stuff of life. When you have spent so much of your life carving out space for this thing called cinema and everything that surrounds it, when this as been such a massive part of your daily routines and community dialogue and anticipation. This becomes a very real part of who a person is.
It’s interesting that this moment, this first encounter with the sights and sounds of the moving picture, was birthed from a small act of rebellion. And not even one of my own. An act of rebellion by my parents as they were navigating the very real changes of their own time. They were the ones saying, once upon a time, maybe the ways in which we experience this world should look a little different than yours. All while quietly navigating the carefully crafted parameters of their decision to bring their imagined world into existence through us, their children.
I wonder if this is what all acts of rebellion utlimately look like. In some ways the world we inherit as kids is the world our parents reimagined for us. Until of course we reach the point of our own rebellion, as all grown up children inevitably do. And then we start that cycle all over again from our own vantage point.
That’s one side of the equation. But what about the other? What about the world of my grandparents? What about the world they were losing? It’s funny how that’s the world that I found myself most compelled to uncover and understand as I got older. And the older I get the closer I seem to come to feeling a kind of affinity with the other side of the equation. And yet they aren’t here for me to share that space with. Which perhaps is what can make this process feel so alone.
There is something that seemed to strike me in fleshing that out though. That’s the simple notion that what seems to get deconstructed in this process is any notion that this cycle is about heading somewhere particular or better. At least in terms of the world we are building. This might be what drives us in our acts of rebellion, this innate belief in the illusion of this promise of progress, but what its actually about is our ability to make sense of the spaces we occupy in the here and now, in the present, in light of our past. Our here and now will always be met with an act of rebellion, but that rebellion isn’t working to disqualify it in terms of bringing about a superior future. Rather, this brings us to a greater awareness of that thing that draws all of history foward at the same stim- Truth. The things we build in this world will always change, Truth does not. And if this affords me any comfort, any sense of coherency, it is that the potential (and in truth, its been happening now for a while already) dismantling of the space that I held to be sacred is not synonymous with the Truth these spaces allowed me to seek.
If this love of cinema was shaped first by an act of rebellion, the other facet that lingers in these recent ruminations for me is its connection to that space that ultimately became sacred- the theater. There can be many spaces one holds to be sacred, but one of the most beautiful things for me about my relationship to the movies was that it was caught up in this movement. This intentional act of of displaceing myself, of going from one space to another in an expectation of encountering the transcendent. This was the investment.
All this said, there are still moments to be found. There are still filmmakers making art. There are still experiences there to cherish. For me Chloe Zhao is one of those filmmakers with the rare ability to remind me of why I love cinema, a truism that held fast in my recent viewing of Hamnet.
I experience that love all the time, but to be reminded that it’s there is what makes her work transcendent
I fell in love with the novel. In the early going I confess I was wrestling with how the internal dialogue that shapes those early sections was translating to a quick moving plot on screen. Not necessarily in a bad way, simply in a way that left me trying to unpack the nature of this adaptation. It’s when we come to the initial big moments though that the subtle threads she was weaving start to come together, and the final 45 minutes truly soar to some exceptional heights, not least of which comes on the shoulders of Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal and its captivating score.
This is a story about the ways art can make sense of life’s tragedies. Similarly, it is about how such experiences give life to our art. This is a deeply hopeful film about faith conquering doubt and life conquering death, but it’s also a film about the things that bind us. The things that enslave us.
Perhaps it’s this present moment and it’s especially charged emotions, but there was a moment in which I found myself in tears, and suddenly it hit me that I was sitting in a company of tears, all of us impacted by this story at the same time from the vantage point of our own stories. And I realized that in this moment that this was a metaphor for all the ways I was grieving this latest news about Netflix and WB, and that feeling of having 50 years of this love for the form stolen right out from under me. To begin to see the years ahead inevitably shaped by this sense of loss was met with a reminder that this moment matters.
And so I cried some more, remembering why I cherish this space and this experience. Being once again made aware of the Truth this space is unveiling in my need to learn how to see the unchanging nature of God more clearly.
The Stories of my Life 