It has taken me a while, but I am finally ready to say that we are living in an important era for movies. Not necessarily a great era, but rather, an interesting one.
It is not the quality of the films that has made the last few years so exceptional. With the exception of "25th Hour," "In Good Company," "Insomnia," "The 40-Year-Old-Virgin" and the films of David Gordon Greene, there has been a real paucity of populist masterpieces, which is always how I think great eras for movies should be judged. What made 1939 (the year of "The Wizard of Oz," "Gone With The Wind," "Stagecoach," "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" and "Gunga Din"), 1974 ("The Godfather II," "Chinatown," "Blazing Saddles" and "The Conversation") and, to a lesser extent, 1994 ("Pulp Fiction," "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Forrest Gump") is that the movies during these years appealed to a broad audience when they were first released and continued to be embraced by new generations for years afterward. They were entertainment for the masses, to be sure, but were so finely crafted that they appealed to film snobs just as much.
That's not happening any more.
The gap between what most people think is good and what is actually good has never been greater. This schism has been well documented in the past, and I really hate talking about it, since I have never bought into the idea of this "Deep Division" within our society. It seems like whenever something mildly strange happens — whether it's the cancellation of "Arrested Development," the stunning success of a bunch of crappy books by Mitch Albom or the re-election of the worst president since Ulysses Grant — well-meaning people with newspaper columns will cluck about how America is a "divided society." I have never understood why this is considered a noteworthy observation. I have no doubt America is divided on certain key issues in the late days of 2006, especially with regard to gay rights and whether or not "Studio 60" is a good show.
To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a time in any civilization when people agreed on everything all of the time. People always talk about America's arrogance, usually in the context of behaving badly on a trip to Versailles or not fully thinking through the invasion of a medium-sized, oil-rich Arab nation — but to me, the most arrogant thing about America is that we genuinely think that we are currently living in the only time in the history of humanity when people actually disagreed about stuff.
The indirect result of America's newfound love of hearing people scream at each other, besides the perpetuation of Chris Matthews' career, is that we seem to have totally forgotten about Big Issues, which are really the only things in life worth actually disagreeing about. When I say Big Issues, I'm not talking about America's relationship with China, reproductive rights or any of the other things we as a society have deemed "really important." In the end, those things don't matter that much, not in the grand scheme of things. As a race, it seems like we have completely forgotten about questioning where we stand in the universe. Life, love, death and reality — we just don't seem all that curious about these things anymore. I guess we'd rather talk about how reality television makes us stupid.
All of this brings me to a story I'd like to recount that, upon first connection, doesn't seem to have much to do with anything, but at the same time manages to be at least peripherally related to an overarching thesis about film and life in general (not unlike a good Hal Ashby movie). I think this story matters, although I could not tell you why.
Several weeks ago I was attending a party in a house I may or may not have ever been to before, surrounded by people I may or may not have ever met before. The discomfort produced by these two social factors led me to start wandering aimlessly from room to room, in search of a life that did not so closely resemble the one I have come to know as my own. Anyway, because I am an idiot, I ended up stumbling into a bedroom, thinking it was a bathroom. And it is at this point in our story that The Most Beautiful Girl in the World makes her first appearance.
She is sitting on a bed, which I presume is not hers, drinking what looks to be a boilermaker, which somehow makes her even more attractive, even though this is a drink usually reserved for corrupt union leaders circa 1948 and embittered supporters of the Boston Celtics. She's tall, raven-haired and pale, making her look not unlike one of the Deschanel sisters.
I am immediately flustered and start to leave, only to have her say, "Where are you going, stranger?" a phrase that intrigues me to no end, since it makes her sound like a character in a lesser Raymond Carver story.
I stumble through an introduction and endeavor to explain how I ended up in this room. I could ask her a similar question, but I do not and she does not volunteer any reasons why she is sitting alone in this room listening to the B-Side of Joni Mitchell's "Blue." Instead, she asks me to play Risk with her, and I accept because I am not in the habit of turning down a game of Risk with The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.
As we begin our simulated battle for world domination, we begin to talk, and it rapidly becomes obvious to me that this conversation is not going to follow the rules of any of the other human interactions I have engaged in over the course of my life. Within 20 minutes, she asks me whether Limbo still exists. I have no good answer. Five minutes later, as she is about to seize the Ukraine, she grabs my hand and asks me, "What is reality to you?" These are not the questions I find myself thinking about on a daily basis, and as I struggle for an answer, I only have two things in my head: 1) I am completely in love with this girl, and 2) I will never see this person again in my life.
Now, what does this encounter have to do with anything? Nothing, but also everything. This was the first conversation I've ever had in my life about Big Ideas, and while I found myself without an answer a lot of the time, the fact these questions were even being asked made me feel like something was happening.
For the first time, we are living in an era where our movies are proposing the same kind of big ideas. In the past, humans used to have their belief systems challenged by authors, or bearded, bespectacled philosophers. These were the people who challenged reality and how it affects love and death and loss. Now, our moviemakers are doing it. Charlie Kaufman has built an entire career out of asking what we are willing to do for love (a lot, as it turns out: Humans are willing to erase their brains and allow their lover to become John Malkovich for a day). Even the question The Most Beautiful Woman posed to me — "What is reality?" — is a direct quote from Cameron Crowe's 2001 film "Vanilla Sky," a movie that is pretty much universally considered "average at best."
And this, I think, is what makes our modern era so interesting: Our movies are trying to be about something. In the end, they may not add up to much, the same way my encounter with The Most Beautiful Woman in the World did not add up to much. But the mere fact that these movies exist should give us all reason to be happy that we still live in a world that honors curiosity — even if it all is just a dream.
Ray Gustini is a sophomore majoring in English and journalism. Want to talk movies with him? E-mail him at [email protected].
