So often these days you register that moment when your interlocutor believes he or she has sized you up and dismisses your argument with a punchy phrase: "I know where you're coming from." They know your theory, and they know your life's work. Everything is illuminated. Time-tested arguments sizzle out like a flash in a pan.
Perhaps they are right. There is a burning desire to classify every mental and moral aberration these days. Perhaps your position, however idiosyncratic, has been accounted for or reduced to some class prejudice or clandestine drive.
In a world glossed with theory, strange taste in movies, music and literature becomes increasingly important to establish oneself as an individual. Not that these categories aren't further subdivided: wordsmiths pen new boundaries all the time. Rather, a certain artistic sensibility can withstand contradiction and still project an external coherence. I can be a film critic who adores Fellini, Sam Peckinpah and Tommy Wiseau if I choose. Our choices of consumer items can still establish an illusory sense of irreducible subjectivity, of personality, of soul.
That being said, I've decided to descend from the high and mighty pedestal from which critics can be seen and laughed at. I shall stand before you naked in all of my guilty indulgences as a film connoisseur. By the end of a few short paragraphs, maybe you'll know where I'm coming from.
My addiction started with single films. Time, nationality and director were of secondary importance. I still remember slicing open the Criterion College edition of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" DVD. Fresh DVD cases have a pleasant, distinct odor. Any adventurous consumer has probably taken a whiff or even a little nibble at the plastic rim. A strange phenomenon occurs with most DVDs when operated—a small skip in the middle, usually a jump in the DVD that causes you to roll your eyes and expect more telltale signs of scratches.
My first run-in with Sam Peckinpah, The Great American Revisionist Western Film Auteur, was surprisingly on tape. The painfully lyrical "Pat Garret and Billy the Kid" roped me in via Peckinpah's Michelangelo eye for his setting—albeit filtered through the sepia of whiskey grains. To fall in love with a director is to fall in love with the cadence of an eye. No matter the story, we return for desire of the style.
Years later, I'd constructed a compendium: a gallery of thin plastic disks summoning to mind a kaleidoscope of images and sounds all inducing a mild state of schizophrenia. This is not the bibliophile's experience. The presence of books invites the collector to unfold in a variety of narratives: the personal history of a volume or the story contained within it. They appeal to a linear and auditory sense of orientation.
The DVD on the other hand invites itself in. Simply laying eyes on a title jarringly forces us to recognize a calculus of associations much like lived experience. Images flash before our eyes in broken visual synapses we are yet outside of; they stimulate emotional reactions suspiciously ready-made. We do not recall arguments, perceive distances, or argue proofs of authenticity, but are confronted with an immediacy of emotional familiarity. Perhaps long term exposure to film instills a prescient nostalgia. An out of control déjà vu.
Collections require distinctions, categorizations, refinement. I begin to attack the oeuvres of choice directors. Seeing all of a director's work too quickly usually results in a degree of disillusionment—a caveat for the rapacious out there. There is also that grim prospect of watching the last of your current favorite's films: a beautifully distinct grim sense of completion.
What? Have you expected me to indulge in all my "dirty" secrets, to list the films one finds to be entertaining but not proud to bring up in respectable conversation? One can't afford to have many of these secrets in this day of age, when artistic difference is responsible for so great a portion of a personality. Then again, I don't believe one should count them dirty little secrets at all. So what if, for an entire summer, I obsessively watched Oliver Stone's "JFK" at least two times daily? Or so what that I'd the power to sit through Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" three times in a row? Of these moments, I am proud. I can't afford not to be.
A second glance over this column has honed me into an unexpected theme. My exposure to film has been specifically shaped and enhanced by an exposure to film technology. Let this article be my swan song to the DVD, another in a long line of plastic-inducing memories. Our parents snuck into the back of the theater or stood in awe before a flickering projector. We taste, sniff and pirate the fantastic DVD... Enough self-indulgence. Back to reviews next week, folks.