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Page 2 of 2 On the other hand it was a shock I remember the first time a girlfriend said to me “Man, you know a lot about movies.” I had never thought about it before. I realized she was right. I even knew a lot about movies I had never seen and artists whose work I didn’t know. I was hungry for Fritz Lang, Charles Burnett, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Magnani. I remember a friend interrupting my railing against a particular movie with “well, I don’t care about all that Bobby I just want to be entertained.” It caught me off guard but not so off guard I didn’t have a response: “Well, I can’t be entertained by having my intelligence insulted.” There was another instance when another friend told me about this “strange movie with a fucked up title. You would like it” (the movie was A Clockwork Orange and he was right…at the time). I remember my parents taking me to see Raging Bull which deeply affected me with its power and beauty. Afterwards my Dad said, “They have to give [Robert DeNiro] the [Academy] award just because he put on all of that weight.” (At the time, no one else had done that in a mainstream Hollywood movie and it was a big deal.) I thought to myself, “that’s not enough. If someone gets fat but can’t act, then all they did was get fat.” These separate instances told me early on that my relationship to film was not the same as everyone else’s. I needed more than others needed from movies, wanted more, demanded more. I wasn’t just a fan, just a movie-goer, just a consumer…I had become a votary of an art form.
Most telling of all at some point I realized that I had fallen in love with movies in the womb. My mother loves movies. She had a difficult life growing up: a poor, Mexican-American girl from the wrong side of town. A romantic dreamer at heart, movies had been her escape, her meditation, her salvation. Mom’s favorite movie star is Humphrey Bogart but as a youngster she was also a huge fan of Marlon Brando when he appeared on the scene (and Cassius Clay and Otis Redding and James Brown…my mother has impeccable taste in celebrities). When we lived overseas and there were no DVDs, video, cable or even TV my mom would thrill me with stories from her favorite movies: The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Thing (from Another World) and Imitation of Life among others. My father (the African-American career Air Force man who rescued her) would sit down with me and watch the ones Mom couldn’t handle: Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Rodan, Godzilla vs. the Thing, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster and our all-time favorite Ghidra the Three Headed Monster -- who fought Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra – the Thing. My cousin Lydia, like my mother, grew up loving movies. She owned every single James Bond movie made at the time on video disc (remember those?). Her one-eyed dachshund was named Bogie and her cat was Miss Moneypenny. Make no mistake my cine-philia was born before I was. | Everything that is alive, that matters, I have seen in women. I have seen everything that is unknown to me, the questions still asked of me, in movies. I do not know why the two are forever linked in my id but they are. I go to movies for the same reasons I fall in love: to discover. Every movie I’ve ever loved, from An American Werewolf in London to When We Were Kings, from The Spook Who Sat by the Door to The Crying Game has shown me something of myself I did not know before. Every woman I have ever known has made me a different man than I was before I met her. Every time I sit in a darkened theatre and the lights go down I am again innocent… like falling in love over and over again. |  |
 | Movies are experienced as carnal stimulus. A movie enters a film-goer through the eyes, the ears, the mind, the heart. This unique transcendence offers enlightenment and excitement, perspective and purpose, a way of seeing and experiencing not just the world but the human condition. It is a secular spirituality, not a destination but a journey. Decades later I am still not jaded, still not over it. I still walk into a movie theatre waiting to be dazzled and as often as not, I am. As with women, one movie always comes along and changes everything that I thought I knew before. It’s about understanding and celebrating all that this romance teaches you about the world around you, yourself and being open to the next experience on its own terms. Film is the preeminent art form of this age. It is of our era in a way that even music is not. Film is of the moment, this moment. It couldn’t have existed before and it won’t be around for ever. One day the machines will be gone and movies will be as well, because they are essentially, only ghosts, captured memories. But Life goes on. Knowing this we treasure movies now, we give ourselves to them now, we learn what we can from then now, because despite the illusion of substance they are ethereal. They are dreams, our dreams -- my dream. The human spirit is courageous and noble, petty and ugly, ribald and sensual, terrified and terrifying, funny and brilliant…and so are our films. True love, like religion, is about laying a path for the spirit. In the twenty-first century movies are our vision of God…a vision I first saw through the eye on Margiana’s hand. |
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