At The Movies

The Pirate and I sat down to watch a movie last night, and here's what happened in the first ten minutes:

1. The very pregnant wife of the school music teacher tells him that the baby she's carrying isn't his.


2. The wife and child disappear and the music teacher is now a carpenter making furniture and lacking in personality.


3. The politician is asked whether, if the syndicate financially backs him for office, he can guarantee that he's “clean.” He lies and says yes.


4. The music teacher goes to the down antique store to buy a gold coin.


5. The politician gives his younger drunkard brother money to give to the heroin addict who's the mother of his baby. The one nobody knows about.


6. The music teacher goes home, drinks and entire bottle of tequila, then looks at his secret stash of gold coins amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gold.


7. The politician's brother takes the politician's car, goes to a roadhouse and gets drunk and stoned, then crashes the car into a tree, killing the girl he's with. He runs away from the scene.

At this point, the Pirate and I turn it off. We decide that not only is it one stereotype after another, but we're too damned old to want to watch anything that depressing – especially if we haven't been given a reason to care about anyone in the movie. And the fact that each of these scenes took about two minutes meant that we had no time to know any of these people well enough to care about them. I felt pretty curmudgeonly for having given it so little time to prove itself, but I'm getting used to it.

We started talking about our taste in movies. We both hated the first episode of Battlestar Galactica and have never watched the series for one reason: nobody has a sense of humor. If they have one later in the show, it's a late development because they're all positively grim in the first episode. I told the Pirate that I don't like shows where the villain is sexy and cool and the good guy is brooding and dark. I don't like them because shows like that can't have humor in them – humor would just show how ridiculous that entire setup is.

When I was in college, I dated an artist. This guy and I used to watch horrible, depressing art films and then drank too much and talked about how meaningful they were and what they said about the human condition (a term that makes me throw up a little just typing it). For a long time, ours was a long-distance relationship. We'd see each other every second or third weekend and the time we spent together was intense. By the time he'd gotten a scholarship to Otis Parsons School of Design and moved out to southern California where I was going to school, things were pretty much over. I hadn't exactly been faithful, and although he never said anything outright, I'm pretty sure he hadn't either.

More importantly, though, I realized that in the few years that we'd been together, I'd changed. All that pretension about art had morphed into a pragmatism about making a living and how I was going to get through school and support myself. I realized that art films were only interesting when you were young enough not to have had any life experiences of your own. Once you've had a few ugly relationships, spent a few sleepless nights, lost a few friends, it lost some of its luster. At the time we broke up, he was on the verge of being evicted for not paying his rent, all the while railing about how his landlord should understand that he was an artist. It was just too much for me to stomach (I was going to UCLA and working two jobs), and I spent years feeling embarrassed about it.

I stopped thinking that art was the be-all and end-all of existence. That romance was the same thing as love and affection. That just because someone in a movie was unhappy, the movie was dramatic. That all laughter was equivalent, even the kind that came at the expense of someone's dignity. That people I loved should be able to read my mind. I realized that I don't have time to participate in things that aren't affirming in some way. Laughter is affirming, as is recognizing the value in others and celebrating things that are beautiful. If that makes me a curmudgeon, like I said, I'm getting used to it.