Films Have Feelings Too

Below is a failed attempt to try to map my psychology with movie going memories. The films listed I do not especially deem like my influences, but perhaps the feelings surrounding them had more of an impact than I can recall. I’m not sure why anyone would find this interesting unless you were trying to figure out what kind of cognitive therapy to suggest to me or perhaps you are just an inanimate object. Alas, I am having trouble watching movies these days and have been leaning on deeper cut inspirations to remind me what I like or even what I don’t like because that inspires me too. Enjoy the joy, shame, fear, and dying love that accompanies movies like the live orchestra you never knew was playing til years later!

2003 IRREVERSIBLE (2002) is what we decided to watch. My camp crush and I hang out alone together. He is 14. I am 13. We have a long distance romance. He told me the song “Just Like A Woman” by Bob Dylan was written about me. “But she breaks like a little girl.” We spend hours on the phone everyday. His parents complain to him about the phone bill so we start instant messaging constantly. His screen name is RickySlade, after Vince Vaughn’s character in Made (2001) He is the person to get me into movies. He seems to know everything about every movie ever made with a special preference for dark stuff, badass shit. He tells me about the shit eating scene in Salo. I still have never seen it. We decide when we see each other to watch porn and Gaspar Noe’s  IRREVERSIBLE (2002). Our romance is a play of our shadows. Each time we talk, there’s a reaching into the darkness. Over AIM, he asks me to put a marker up my vagina. I say “I did it.” Even though I have not. I hadn’t even put a tampon up there yet.  We hang out on a sunny day in Maine. The water is sparkling with biblical blue skies  shining down at us, but we close the curtains and I put in the dvd of a porn he brought. I am aware that I am bending in front of the tv and my ass is somewhat out.  I wear a thong for the first time. We watch a 15 minute porn called “The Outfit”. It’s about a  blonde woman walking around a pool in assless chaps while a man films, mostly her ass. The DP is making pleasurable comments “fuck, look at that.” “ Shit, you’re so hot.” My crush and I agree that we wish he would stop narrating the whole thing. We sit without touching each other. I am turned on and scared and repulsed.  Then when it’s over, we put in IRREVERSIBLE. A man’s face is beaten in with a fire hydrant. Monica Bellucci’s character is raped in the subway for ten minutes with the camera locked off. I am wrecked and frozen, and I make my crush fast forward. He does, and I feel protected and special. We have dinner with my family afterwards but he gets sun poisoning immediately and starts vomiting in the lawn as we eat. I hang out with him three years later and we go see the movie Bobby (2006)  directed by Emilio Estevez. We make some promise about being together, but I can’t remember what it was and somehow he pukes again. 

1999 WILD WILD WEST comes out and I see it in the theaters with my parents and sister. I have a gigantic crush on Will Smith.  Bai Ling shows her ass and I am scandalized. My mom turns to me and whispers “Do you want to leave and sneak into Knotting Hill?” (The Hugh Grant/ Julia Roberts movie playing in the theater next door.) I look at her like she has finally lost her mind and shout whisper “NO WAY!”  It is my favorite movie for a few years. 

1997. Seven years old.  My dad is watching Thunder Ball the 1965 Sean Connery Bond movie. My dad is in the basement sitting on the couch near  the pool table that functioned as a “man cave” of sorts. He doesn’t realize I’m watching from the stairs.  A curvy, naked  silhouette of a Bond girl swimming in neon waters floats across the screen as the score blares in.  I feel uneasy, too nervous to watch anymore. I believe I am seeing something I shouldn’t be and a heavy resistance to Bond movies begins to grow in me for truly no reason at all.

1999. My family rents Audrey Rose (1977) from the video store. It becomes all I think about for awhile. It stars Anthony Hopkins as the father of a dead girl who believes is reincarnated as this other little girl who begins having nightmares of a violent car crash. The movie  veers into a court drama about reincarnation, but it’s very well acted even at times melodramatic. I am in love with Anthony Hopkins as a kid (and now since watching his current social media) and my past life obsession grows.

2010 CATHY (1977) a French porn starring Brigitte Lahai. My boyfriend and I decide to have a sleaze night in hopes that we will get horny enough to rekindle our sex life. Brigitte has incredible boobs. We rub our bodies together as we watch French people with huge bushes have funny threesomes. We both have put on a good amount of weight in our relationship. Lots of squishy sounds and uncomfortably full stomachs as we writhe around.

1996 MATILDA starring Mara Wilson is in the theaters. I watch it while spending an idyllic summer in Iowa at my grandparents house. My sister and my cousin and I get up and dance at the front of the screen as the credits roll. We are filled with joy.  I am six. We are understood. There is relief. Catharsis. Childhood alienation finally reflected back.

2010 A Reflection of Fear (1972) by William Fraker is playing at the Egyptian. My boyfriend and I go to a late night screening. We are in distant moods. We are no longer feeling each other romantically and bottle up conversations with different movies. This movie is creepy and sexy starring Sondra Locke, Robert Shaw, and Sally Kellerman for fucks sake. We’re both delighted by the print. No one else is there. We see it in the balcony feeling like the only people who care. 

2006 World Trade Center starring Nicholas Cage. My high school boyfriend and I get tickets to whatever movie is playing with the intention of hooking up the whole time. We are in NYC where we would go to finger each other rather publicly in Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. We don’t look up once during the 9/11 movie. I give him a blowjob in the backrow. We are aloof, sex obsessed teens. I believe myself to be evil on the train ride home.  I had horrible shame for years until I told my friend, Arthur, this story and he laughed really hard.

2004 My grandma, Gladys, dies of cancer at age 74. She remains the kindest and warmest woman I’ve ever known. She is up late cleaning, and up early cooking whenever I visit Iowa as a kid and she is making sure my cousins and I play in the garden and never utter her least favorite phrase. “I’m bored.” So instead we catch frogs and make terrible crafts that we then try to sell door to door in the neighborhood. The night of the funeral my cousins and I decide to sneak vodka and get hammered.  We are all brooding teens of varying ages. We watch Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) in my grandmothers office by the Chiodo brothers. I am smitten with it. The puppets are incredible and the theme song by The Dickies is suddenly the only thing I listen to. I even order a t- shirt.   Some of us are puking while the rest are laughing and enjoying themselves. Someone shits their pants and the party is over. Our grieving and disappointed parents wake up the next day to find we have trashed the house and our innocence is also dead.