Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

A friend of mine with two children, ages three and six, won’t let them watch movies. She lives out in the country, on a heavenly rural estate with an organic garden, roaming peacocks, a buzzing apiary, a small pond. . and a lavish home movie theatre in the basement, tricked out with a five-by-nine-foot screen, an overhead projector, a digital-everything system, and a split-level viewing area of a dozen roomy Barcaloungers upholstered in rich celadon velvet. This state-of-the-art retreat was a concession to her husband, who likes to watch Charlie Chaplin pictures and documentaries on Winston Churchill in the wee hours of the night; I’m not sure her kids even know it’s there. The first time I ever saw it, I could feel my pupils dilate and the Pavlovian mouth-watering for popcorn and M&M’s kick in. Who wanted a tour of the arbor, or to visit the sheep, pick blueberries, swim in the pond? All I wanted was to curl up in sweatpants and all that plushy velvet and lock myself in that endless glowing pleasure dome of cinema for days.

I’m a child of the movies, a movie freak, a film junkie, a cineaste. It’s a lifelong addiction, the activity for which I happily forsake all else. I don’t believe it’s wholly a craving for escape — my passion for watching movies is more engaged than that. It is a proactive desire to enter into and inhabit other realities, other lives. To slip into someone else’s clothes, trod along in their shoes, try out their actions, accents, and attitudes. To imagine myself as an Other, and to layer that Other’s experience onto my own. It’s a desire for more layers — and a desire to learn from those layers, to figure out who I am and how to be in the world. Movies have gotten under my skin, formed my perceptions, influenced the choices I’ve made. I’ve learned how to live at the movies, from the movies; I am who I am because of movies, and, to some degree, all the other movie freaks out there are, too.

And for me, it’s not a very discriminating desire; I’ve never formally studied film or film history, and despite seven years working as a screenwriter, I rarely analyze a movie in which I’m wholly engrossed with an eye toward structure, technological achievement, character development, and so on. As a moviegoer, I want to be dazzled by the smoke and mirrors and enflamed roar of the Great Oz — I have no wish to pull aside the curtain and see the frantic machinations of humble Professor Marvel. There’s a time for examination, and a time for immersion. The lingering impact of a movie often has nothing to do with artistic merit; a forgettably wretched movie might sear one indelible image into my brain. If one scene set in contemporary Manhattan or nineteenth-century Venice, or a line of dialogue about the tender mercies of life, or a nonverbal moment of romantic love. . if any such moments get to me, they usually do so through some idiosyncratic and subjective portal in my consciousness. The images that hit a nerve for me this way might not be those that electrify someone else — and the movies I discuss, from the relatively obscure to the blockbuster hits, from multiple-Oscar winners to critical and commercial bombs, are not necessarily those on anyone else’s roster of personal film favorites. But all of us who love to watch movies experience those universal points of connection; we all have our own subjective, idiosyncratic collection of indelible cinematic moments.

And sometimes those remembered images aren’t even accurate; in revisiting some of the movies I discuss here, I’ve been surprised to realize that what I remember about a particular movie moment, the influential lesson that has stayed with me — how to kiss in the rain, what to say to my shell-shocked parents about their divorce, where in the linen closet to hide the liquor — sometimes doesn’t actually exist in the film. It’s a trick of memory, the mix of my emotional and intellectual state of being and the circumstances of my life when I first saw the movie. Or, looking back, I’ve realized my younger self’s misunderstanding of, or lack of appreciation for, certain subtleties of character or story or theme. But even so, at the time, the impression was made, the image formed, the lesson learned. Sometimes the mere mention of a movie title is my Proustian madeleine , hurtling me back to that memory-dimension like a time-machine traveler. In discussing these movies, I’m tapping back into that original moment of absorption and immersion, and not always or necessarily my perspective now, reflecting with a more analytical eye.

I especially love movies based on books. Sometimes I’ve read the book before rushing out to the movie; other times I’ve seen the movie first, then hurried to pick up the book. Either way, more layers. I’m a reader and a writer as well as a moviegoer, and books are as crucial to me as movies — but the book is not always better, not always more stimulating, engaging, formative. Whether I read the book or saw the movie first, and regardless of how powerful an impression the book may have made, in the case of adaptations I’m choosing here to stay within the experience and feeling of the film.

Going to the Movies has always been, as far back as I canremember, both an event and a way of life, the deliberate exit from my own mundane living room — with its twenty-inch TV screen, a mediocre seascape, and a macramé creeping charlie plant hanging over it, people’s quotidian grumblings interrupting the far-more-fascinating conversations on-screen — in order to fully enter some exotic Other World. You go to the movie theatre, you cross the threshold to a sacred space dedicated wholly to that experience, smelling of popcorn in hot oil, strangers and their unfamiliar toiletries, and dry, stale velvet. Your sneakers stick to the black floor as you grope your way among the pews to the unexpected feel of a flap-bottomed seat, and sit at full attention in the dark, before an expansive altar of flickering images that shows you intimacies of other people, accompanied by arousing lilts and swells of music and sounds. The experience demands you abandon your own body, exit your own mind, leave your real life and real self at the door, and give your willing, spongelike consciousness over to it, ready to both absorb and be absorbed.

The rites and rituals were so clear. As a kid you went with your mom or dad or sitter or older brother to animated Disney flicks and watched morality plays of romance, loyalty, and familial bonding featuring anthropomorphic singing animals. Or, if no sitter could be found, your parents (mine, at least) sometimes took you with them to entirely inappropriate R-rated fare and hoped or assumed you wouldn’t really pay attention. . where, squirming in your seat, you’d see the gross-out scenes from The Exorcist or perhaps some romantic sex romp that flashed a naked buttock or breast, bodily contortions both thrilling and terrifying. At eleven or twelve years old you convinced your parents to drop you and a friend off for an entire Saturday afternoon of freedom at a place like Theee Movies of Tarzana! — part cineplex and part arcade, loud, shiny, and plastic — where you loaded up on soda and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, played jittery games of Pong or Pac-Man , and sat through an eighty-minute movie starring bratty, precocious adolescents outsmarting dim adults. After that, if you were feeling lucky and bold, you’d try to slip past the usher and go all by yourselves into the R-rated movie playing down the hall, until someone’s mom swung by to pick you up outside.