Cinema Paradiso

The last time I saw Joey was Memorial Day weekend of 2010. We spent the weekend in Asheville, NC, the two of us and our girlfriends. We walked and drove around. We ate and drank. We met up with a couple of friends of mine who lived in the area. It was a good trip, pleasant in the way that long weekends are supposed to be, but nothing extraordinary: just one in a series of meetings we'd had (and, we assumed, would continue to have) at different spots around the globe, and by no means the most exotic. One day I'll write down the details of that weekend as I remember them, but that's not what I want to do today. I only mention it because today is also Memorial Day, and so it's got me remembering.

What I want to write about is how my brother helped me learn to love old movies. There's some irony here, because when we were young he was as fussy and narrow-minded about movies as a little kid can be. He'd storm and rage for days if ever we went to see something that he'd already decided he would hate. The Little Mermaid, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Benji the Hunted: his violent opposition to these films was legendary, even if it was, especially in the latter case, also somewhat justified. I suppose both of us could be pretty unpleasant when we didn't get our way, but when it came to movies it seemed to Joey that he got his way less often than I did, and this made him doubly angry. It wasn't just the movie, it was the injustice: sibling rivalry can be a zero-sum game in that way.

Despite the occasional battles, however, our tastes usually overlapped. Many of the films that are most deeply etched into my soul - Clue, Three Amigos, Back to the Future 1-3, Beetlejuice, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Ghostbusters, Spaceballs, Spies Like Us - were ones that we watched together as children, over and over and over. (We also watched, at Joey's insistence, hundreds of hours of Wrestlemania and New Kids on the Block videos, but that's a subject for another day.) Today the elves at Netflix look at my taste profile and recommend (and I quote) "critically-acclaimed gritty foreign dramas" - but in 1987 those same elves would have looked at our VHS shelves and decided that I liked "idiotic contemporary comedies starring former cast members of Saturday Night Live."

Happily people's tastes evolve as they grow older, but sometimes it takes a bit of a push. My push came from a confluence of circumstances involving my mother, my brother, and the American Film Institute. In the summer of 1998 I returned to Oklahoma after living for a year in Ireland. I had one year of college to go and many new ideas about my intellectual and cultural superiority to the rest of America, but before moving back to New Orleans for my senior year I spent one last summer living with my brother in the house in which we'd grown up. My mother had just married her second husband; they had bought a house several miles away but hadn't yet sold the old one, and so for three glorious months Joey (who turned seventeen that summer) and I (who turned twenty-one) were permitted to live on our own in the old house. Actually, we weren't quite on our own: midway through the summer our mother's brother, momentarily stranded between marriages, moved in with us. This angered Joey quite a bit, not because he had anything against our uncle (they got along wonderfully) or because it limited our freedom in any way (our uncle was, and is, much more likely to get the cops called than either of us), but simply because he hadn't been consulted. In his eyes, such a major decision affecting his life (those are almost his exact words) shouldn't have been made without his input. He ranted and raved about this for a couple of days until it became clear that our uncle wasn't going to interfere with our freedom in the least - and, indeed, might end up corrupting us more than we would have corrupted ourselves - and then he calmed down.

So what did we do during this summer of freedom? Did we host cocaine parties? Did we set the carpet on fire? Did we fill the fireplace with jello? We did not. Mostly we worked at our summer jobs: I'm not sure where Joey was working that summer (probably he was waiting tables), but I know I was working the overnight shift at a loading dock, driving a forklift and paying my Teamsters dues in the one job I've ever done that actually qualifies as "work" in the sense that my great-great-grandparents would define that term. During the day I slept (or tried to sleep), and each evening I phoned the warehouse to see if they needed me to come in. If they didn't, I had to find a way to fill the nighttime hours. Many nights I drove out to the Kettle, a sort of downmarket Denny's (I know!), to play spades and drink coffee with friends. Most nights Joey would hang out with his own friends - doing what, I don't know - and sometimes I would see him and his friends at the Kettle. Our friend groups overlapped like that. We were almost all male, and, like young educated men in small towns all over this country, we mostly sat around on those long summer nights trying to make each other laugh. If I'm funny today, it's largely because of those nights I spent at the Kettle trying to one-up those friends of ours who remain among the sharpest wits I've ever known.

Some nights, though, neither Joey nor I felt like going to the Kettle. This, after all, was the year that the American Film Institute (an organization with which neither of us had been familiar) released its "100 Years, 100 Movies" list, which purported to rank the hundred greatest films of all time. That might not seem like such a big deal these days, when approximately 65% of the internet is composed of such lists, but at the time this was a novel idea; indeed, I believe it was this list - and the debate it provoked - that was largely responsible for the endless lists of "greatest" whatevers with which we're beset today. I also believe it was this list that made Joey such a listophile (if I may coin a term): after that summer he was always finding and completing "best of" lists of one sort or another, although now that I think of it several of his youthful obsessions (learning facts about all of the Presidents, memorizing baseball statistics) do suggest a predisposition for this sort of thing. The nice thing about the AFI list, and others like it, is that it saves you time and effort: somebody else has already done the work of figuring out what the best movies (or albums, or books, or whatever) are, so all you have to do is track them down and watch them (or listen to them, or read them, or whatever). It means fewer dead ends and less precious time wasted. That's why I find such lists appealing, anyway, and I'm sure the same was true for Joey, only more so. He was always finding ways to avoid expending effort.

I forget how many of the AFI 100 I had seen when the list came out, but it couldn't have been more than 40. Joey and I had a printout of the list, or perhaps a magazine article about it, and we checked off the ones we'd seen - I, being four years older, had seen more than he, but not by much. And so without ever formally agreeing that this is what we were going to do, we began renting all the movies on the list that we hadn't yet seen. He would come home one night from Blockbuster with a copy of The African Queen (#17), or I would bring home Bonnie and Clyde (#27), and, if I didn't have to work and he didn't have plans with friends, we'd sit together in our childhood home and watch these old movies. We had both seen old movies before, of course, but we hadn't seen many, and what we had seen were mostly those interchangeable and interminable John Wayne movies that they were always showing on basic cable. Like most kids of the late twentieth century, we believed old movies (especially black and white movies) must be dull, earnest, and irrelevant. Neither of us expected to be roaring with laughter at Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (#51), helplessly charmed by Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty (#86), or humming along with Gene Kelly to Singin' in the Rain (#10). There were plenty of duds on that list, of course. I never have understood the appeal of Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun, #92) or why The Jazz Singer (#90) is considered "great" rather than just "significant," but for us the list's benefits certainly outweighed its costs.

Many of the movies that we devoured that summer have never left me. They're as much a part of me as my nose. This was when I first spent time with Woody Allen (Annie Hall, #31), the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, #85), and Charlie Chaplin (The Gold Rush, #74; City Lights, #76; Modern Times, #81). This was when I first paid serious attention to Hitchcock (Psycho, #18; North By Northwest, #40; Rear Window, #42; Vertigo, #61). This was when I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca, #2) and Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment, #93). It was when I learned to love musicals, or at least some of them (An American in Paris, #68). I appropriated the nameless dread that infused Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (#50) and ran with it for most of my twenties. I began reading detective novels after watching and loving The Maltese Falcon (#23) and Double Indemnity (#38). Over the following years I let the list guide me to other movies that weren't on it: more Hitchcock, more Ingrid (and then, why not?, Ingmar) Bergman, more Woody Allen, more Bogart. In the summer of 1999 I moved to Boston for grad school, and during the first few lonely years I haunted my local Tower Records like a ghost, looking for more old movies, foreign and domestic, until I'd exhausted their supply.

Our summer of movies made me ravenous; it liberated me from the tyranny of the multiplexes and whatever new swill the studios were trying to get me to swallow. I learned that there were hundreds, even thousands of movies that had already been made that were much more funny, touching, erotic, and surprising than the mainstream commercial films we'd been force-fed as kids. This realization was, and remains, exhilarating. I would undoubtedly have had it eventually, of course, but to have had it in this way - in a single summer, with my brother, in what I knew would be our last time in our childhood home - made it uniquely powerful. Quite apart from the impact on our own individual tastes, that summer helped Joey and me understand how to relate to one another as adults. We'd grown apart a bit as teenagers, and once I went to college the distance became greater. But now we had a new set of words to add to our old private language and a new shared outlook by which to judge the rest of the world. What began with movies soon spread to music and books: our tastes converged, our conversations became longer, and we began to experience the world, once again, with one another's help and through one another's eyes.

A few days ago I decided that I would put all the winners of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, going all the way back to 1939, into my Netflix queue. I've seen a few of the recent ones, but most of them I've never heard of. Many of them (weirdly) turn out not to be available on DVD, but many of them are. Some of them are three hours long, and nearly all of them are in foreign languages. Fifteen years ago it would never have occurred to me to do such a thing, and not only because there was no Netflix back then. Long foreign films whose chief distinction was that they had won some fancy award in France, of all places? Pish.

These days, thanks to Joey, my plan seems like the most sensible thing in the world. Farewell My Concubine, anyone?