On a spring afternoon in 1989 at the ripe age of eleven, I begged my parents for some money. This monetary exchange wasn’t for my typical pilgrimage to the baseball card shop or the liquor store for bubble gum cigarettes. Oh, no, my friends.
My next-door neighbor, Adam, and I had a more serious mission. A life altering mission. A mission I’d look back on and see as pivotal for my growing attention-collection of film, books, the arts, and anything creative. Did I mention Adam had a water bed? I digress.
The bartering, begging, and pleading for the five bucks from my parents was for none other than a trip to the Lakewood Mall to see the official release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. May 24th, 1989, would be my Ebenezer, a memorial to the gifts and graces of film. My life would never be the same.
My neighbor Adam, who slept on a waterbed, as did his other family members (remember those?), would be my copilot. We arrived at the theater to witness a line around the building. Our mission would not be thwarted. Despite getting some of the last tickets, sitting front row, and craning our necks as we watched tucked in the right corner. The next two hours would open a portal of movie goodness I'd never recover from.
I’d seen many-a-movie before my eleven years on the planet. How about a double feature of Top Gun and Karate Kid at a drive-in across the street from our house? I remember eating Domino's Pizza in the back seat of our 78’ Toyota Celica and falling asleep. Talk about a masterpiece of 80s pop culture. Doesn’t get much better than Tom Cruise and Ralph Macchio at the heights of their powers.
But on the precipice of becoming a preteen watching Indiana Jones do Indy things, something shifted in me. Call it prepubescent hormones? Angsty preteen know-it-all-ism? I’m not sure.
But what I encountered in that crowded theater those many years ago was a revelation. A word that more is going on in this place.
Movies entered my life at a young age and have never left. I don’t have the time I once did to devour films at a consistent clip, but my taste for them has not changed. They are magic.
I use the word magic because movies are hard to describe in what they do to me. The dictionary defines it this way:
“a quality of being beautiful and delightful in a way that seems remote from daily life.”
There it is. Beautiful, delightful, and seems remote from daily life. Films take us somewhere. Places we believe are unreachable in our everyday lives. The best ones always do.
In my search to describe the "magic" of movies, I ran across a quote from the film critic Pauline Kael. She was a big deal from the 60s into the 90s. I found this on Alan Jacobs blog and is quoted from Harper’s Magazine (you have to subscribe to read the full article):
“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theaters in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.”
Movies take us out of our funks. Offer something outside the normal grind of life. Dare we say films offer hints of hope?
Movies tell stories whether real, fantasy, silly, or subversive to remind us there is more going on here. The good ones remind us our stories matter, your story matters, and the stories of humanity are wrapped up in a much bigger Story.
A great film shakes us loose into a world of possibilities.
Like what happened to me in Lakewood, California, with Adam the water bed kid, and Indiana Jones and his whip.
There is more going on here. May we have eyes to see?
What was your first memorable movie experience? Leave in the comments.