Take 2
on why I watch movies
I take a break from scrolling through the libraries of the Criterion Channel, Tubi, & Kanopy. How much time have I wasted hunting for something that grabs my attention? Certainly I’ve scrolled longer than the runtime of any of the options; in fact, I’m certain I could have entertained myself, to varying degrees, with several dozen of the options by now. This is a metaphor and it’s true.
Ironically, I came up with the new name for this newsletter many months ago, before deciding on a new focus. Over the last year-plus of my absence from Substack (well, not total absence), I searched for something to spur me into sharing essays again, much to no avail. Without checking my blog for confirmation, I’m certain I made several promises for new content, new directions that never materialized, new writing from me. I planned essays about the task of the American artist, about art amidst world historical catastrophe, about fame and Kanye West. Changing the name of the newsletter was supposed to, somehow, inspire a new approach and a renewed commitment to putting out writing at the pace I did when I first started here, nearly five years ago. That, clearly, did not work.
Meanwhile, Substack itself has changed substantially. People for whom I have little respect have garnered respectable audiences. Bravolebrities, established writers, and Gavin Newsom all publish through this platform. The site’s become just another place like everywhere else on the internet, where the already popular grow more popular, everyone is looking to go “viral” with as little effort as possible, there’s a quippy Notes feature for vapid twittering, and people are making a lot more money than I am. As I failed to gain traction myself, ultimately giving up on writing here at all, I lost all confidence that I had anything worth saying, and started to believe that I never had much to say to begin with.
It’s hard to write nowadays. Harder still to feel like sharing what I write on the internet isn’t just adding to the toxic emissions that are suffocating us all in an increasingly inhospitable environment.
However, it’s become glaringly obvious to me that hoping for the perfect idea to present itself in neon lights against the scroll of interchangeable bullshit that clutters my mind only reinforces my belief that I’m out of ideas. By denying the possibility that an idea will slowly make itself known through deliberate effort, holding out hope that it will strike me with the force of pure inspiration, I remain mired in a feedback loop of self-recrimination and doubt. The longer I go without thinking on the page, in physical reality, the harder it is to feel capable of thinking deeply or incisively at all. Of late I have withdrawn from the radical engagement I believed I achieved through the act of writing. Chalk it up to a fear that the world is no longer capable of being wrangled by the written word. Maybe it’s just easier to busy myself with my day job. That’s certainly more comfortable than dwelling on what responsibilities I might have in a fractured media landscape buttressed by ongoing, compounding atrocities, or trying via whatever means possible to represent my experience in an ever less comprehensible world.
If I haven’t been frank to this point, let me be: things haven’t been going well in my intellectual life. I feel duller, less hungry. The days of my youthful vigor are rapidly dwindling. Any ideas I have, I quickly dismiss as trite, limp or impossible. Periods of manic self-assurance are separated by longer and longer periods of depressive disinterest and laziness. Lest you think this is a reaction to the horrors parading daily on every form of mass media, allow me to disabuse you of that sympathy: I have not been paying much attention to the news, and I no longer have any active social media accounts besides on Letterboxd.
Notice how difficult it is for me to break out of the guilt I feel over this narcissistic abdication of writerly responsibility, a total refusal to look out on the world and demonstrate intellectual piety through questioning. I set out in this essay to announce a grand statement of purpose, or a passionate examination of the subject at hand. But as anyone who thinks by writing will tell you, grand statements and passionate examinations don’t often announce themselves fully formed before you set to the humble task of digging for them one word after another. So indulge me this extended throat clearing. It would have been dishonest to not start at the cowardly, small place from which I’m trying to emerge.
Surely, part of why ideas and expression are hard to come by for me is the monotony that defines the majority of my life now. As much as it’s important that I stop waiting for ideas and instead go searching for them behind the veil of the blank page, it’s still necessary to start with some wrinkle of difference through which a point of entry might reveal itself. But working mostly alone, in a quiet library, 40 hours a week, effectively irons out the texture of my experience. As the routine of adult life becomes habitual, encounters with novelty envelop me less often than they once did. The cliché that time seems to speed up as we grow older is a function of this; when we’re young, so much of what we experience is new, and newness and difference tend to dilate time, kick our perception into high definition. But when each day is shaped by a kind of drudgery, especially as dictated by the confines of wage labor, living takes on the quality of short-hand. Add to this the habit of lazily reaching for distractions that aid in whiling away the hours that I’m condemned to spend at a job in order to afford to live—is it any wonder I’ve struggled to see distinct shapes through the gauzy haze that’s condensed around me?
Like Henry David Thoreau said, desperately trying to stop himself from living a life of quiet desperation: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
I wanted to make an argument for the idea that art generally, and movies specifically, offer instructions on what life might be like if one were to pay closer attention to one’s experiences. Because the problem for me is two-fold: yes it would be preferable if my mundane existence involved more dynamism in it, more people, greater drama, a compelling context, irresistible passions. But even if alluring strangers were constantly beckoning me on adventures erotic, political, and aesthetic, it would still be necessary to pay closer attention to what happens. Art is the means by which we can be clued into the telluric currents of meaning beneath our experiences. I earnestly believe that watching films and reading novels teach us what reality is, and how to act within it, by underlining the sensuous artificiality of human affairs. Engage with art, hone your attention, embrace risk, and the world will unfurl as an intricate tapestry through which your life is a thread delicately woven.
This is how I’ve justified, beyond a deep love for the medium, immersing myself in cinema over the past year. Movies most closely approximate the sensation of being attuned to the esoteric forces shaping reality, so much so that movies have become, over the past 130 years, the primary factory of reality. Movies are, in a sense, more real than reality. Some other time I’ll pull out Baudrillard and Deleuze and Žižek and Debord and elaborate what I mean by that; for now the point I’m making is that I love movies because they, like novels, are powerful tools for learning what a life radically lived might look (and sound) like.
But as I’ve written this (and isn’t that the point, realizing what I couldn’t without writing about it?) it’s clear that I’ve opted out of life in order to sit in the dark, often alone, in front of flashing lights and recorded sounds. This instead of either seeking out a greater intensity of experience, or interrogating my experience through the hard work of writing. Movies offer easy glimpses of a world where every moment is meaningful, where brief encounters inspire swooning passion, where figures in the shadows struggle for advantage on Mulholland Dr and Sunset Boulevard, where we’re promised there will be blood. All this from the comfort of air conditioned darkness near a well-stocked snack bar. So, as much as I want movies to elevate my life into higher and higher pitches of feeling, I was not doing the Don Quixote thing of being driven to action by the stories I’ve heard, not even the much darker Emma Bovary thing. Just buckets of popcorn and legs stiff from sitting too long.
Nonetheless, movies aren’t a bad place to start. (Better than fucking TV, that’s for sure.) If I reorient myself towards the proper destination, then there’s nothing wrong with using crutches until I can walk on my own strength. I want to understand this medium that really inspired me to pursue art more than anything else—I wanted to direct before I ever wanted to write—even if I’m pretty far away from making films. So while I work at other writing, away from the internet—despite what I said above, I have been writing all this time—this will be where I work out a new skillset: film theory and criticism.
This is Hell’s Zoetrope.
