Movies that Draw a Line
Yesterday was family day. Around 3:30 in the afternoon, as Nat and Anna’s laundry was in full swing; Ruby was planning a “bear wedding” (between two of my stuffed bears); Dave was busy preparing dinner; and the rest of us (Lea and Karma included) were visiting, we began channel surfing. We discovered the Academy Awards were beginning at 5:30. None of us even knew they were scheduled for yesterday. I remember March as the month of Oscar. Either the date was moved up, or my memory is shot. Since, we know my memory is shot, I’m going with they moved up the date.
For those two hours, I imagined what it would be like, watching the Academy Awards without Owen. He had always popped in and out of the living room during the show, sitting with us just long enough to watch the highlights, then off to his room to play guitar or read. He didn’t have much patience for all the “fill” - he just wanted to know what movies were winning awards.
Movies were such a huge part of our family’s time together (and since I grew up in the greater Los Angeles area, I’d known plenty of people who had either been a part of the industry, or had spent the vast majority of their lives trying to be a part of it), “Oscar” was always a big annual event in our household.
Nat’s and Owen’s father, Michael, is a movie buff from way back. He can tell you what movie was named Best Motion Picture - and from what year, who was best actor and actress, and often, some of the technical awards of a given year. It’s rather amazing. The boys caught the bug early, and could recite lines from their favorite movies from the time they were little kids.
This year’s broadcast was disturbing for me. I watched and listened to the show, but more importantly, I watched and listened to our extended family talking about the show - Nat keeping pace with Jon Stewart, but with a different perspective, more sharp and jaded. No small wonder. I don’t know if anyone else in the room was as aware of Owen’s absence as I was, but I’m guessing it crossed their minds off and on. I was obsessed with his absence. Again, no small wonder - I often am.
Owen’s jobs in the three movie theaters, were some of the best days of his adult life. He loved the movies, he loved making a paycheck, and he loved knowing the consumer end of the industry.
Last year, at this time, Owen began looking for a film school. The Academy of Art in San Francisco has a film program, and he had just begun his research into the requirements, and received the catalogue and other collateral materials to make his decision. He received the first of the mailings only a few weeks before he went missing. He was working at the Boulevard Cinemas, while making his plans. We all thought it was a match.
The last movie Dave and I went to see at Boulevard was “The Number 23″ with Jim Carrey. Owen was working that night, and we all met in the lobby at the end of the show. We talked about the movie (Owen had already seen it), and we waited for his shift to end, and drove home together. I loved the movie, as did Owen, and Dave took it in stride.
Watching the Awards last night was a 3 hour and 20 minute reminder of everything movie-and-Owen-related because that year, 2007, was the year when Owen watched his last movies. Every new movie that came out after he died was a reminder (for me) of all the movies he would not get to see with us or friends.
The movies have drawn a line, three lines, really - Before Owen, Owen, and After Owen. As each award was presented, I saw my mind’s 2007 calendar, a calendar rooted not only in time, but in movies. I will never watch that 3rd “Pirates of the Carribean” movie that Owen saw on the last night of his life. Yet, there were clips from the movie, right there on the television last night, and I kept wondering at what exact moment Owen decided he was bored, and got up to leave. And, why. Considering the movie was just more of the same, I can imagine he thought he could spend his time elsewhere, having more fun. More fun is definitely not what he found.
I can’t walk into the Boulevard Cinemas to see a movie now. I have a hard time going to any movie theater. I’ve done it twice since Owen died, at the Roxy Theater in Santa Rosa ( where he filled in when someone was on vacation, or didn’t show up for a shift) - on Christmas Day with Dave, and once with my friend’s daughter, because they both needed a break.
We watch movies to escape, to dream, to live vicariously, and for some of us…to delineate time. I know what movie Owen last watched in a theater, and every movie after that one, is part of my description of “life after Owen”.
At the end of last night, I was quite wrecked. Memories flooded in; famous and not-so-famous lines reminded me of hilarious laughter in living rooms and movie theaters when the boys spent their time enjoying the magic; and every movie that won awards last night, prompted me to acknowledge that movies will go on, but our time with Owen won’t.
“Sometimes, Joel, you just got to say, “What the fuck”.
Video for the night: Risky Business Car Sinking, “Risky Business” (one of the great movie scenes from Nat’s and Owen’s youth - I was going to post the “Sex on a Train” scene, which was one of Nat’s and Owen’s favorite movie scenes, but, my friend, Karma, said it was inappropriate for a mother to post…and, she’s right, but, Dave would really like to see it again, and again, and again, as he’s standing here over my shoulder, making me write this disclaimer, because Rebecca De Mornay is…well, just is, so…)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REuxiHO6bMs
emmitt-owen-riley
linda-siniard
can’t wait to see all those movies!
That’s awfully tricky. Because if Owen loved cinema, then perhaps he wouldn’t ever want you to lose that release.
But life just serves up this endless string of anguish through all these first times right now.
Not to diminish your present pain in the slightest, then at least the next Oscars will be the second time, and that’s all it will be.
WTF do I know (exactly nothing) but rather contrarily perhaps I somehow wonder if that movie just might not one day have a different kind of hold over you.
I couldn’t bear hearing ‘Missing’ by Everything But The Girl’ for an eternally long time. It was one of the miserable songs which every British radio station so thoughtfully offered us for the entire week after Princess Diana died in the late summer of 1997.
The song made me want to puke then, at the sheer charade of public ‘grief’ assigned to a remote (and slightly barmy) woman. And all these wailing and sobbing people had never even met her.
Yet now, that song is special to me in a way which I can’t very easily describe.
That song defines a moment in a lifetime so sharply and so vividly, that hearing it now I am transported momentarily back into an intense feeling of loss, with a different sense of affirmation, through knowing that the moment did eventually pass.
Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the passing of such desperately bad times as well as the good? Possibly, but there are limits to anything.
Because even an entire lifetime’s wailing and gnashing of teeth couldn’t ever bring me to forgive Celine Dion for ‘The Heart Will Go On.’
Frigging bagpipes. Honestly, I ask you.
I hardly ever seem to go out to the cinema. Once we had our son and babysitters were hard to find, we rarely went out. We have a sitter we can use, but just don’t seem to do so often. Usually, it’s NetFlix.
This weekend we watched No Reservations. I cried because I can’t stand to see the little girl having lost her mom in a car crash, even though they don’t show the crash. But such loss is heart-breaking. Do you find movies like this insufferable or cathartic now?
Dear Roads, my friend, my blogpal,
I love that you think so clearly about things I write about Owen and our lives in his absence, and paint your thoughts on a larger canvass. Thank you. You make me laugh and cry. What better gift, eh?
As for Celine Dion’s “The Heart Will Go On”…and the bagpipes…if you are born American, with an Irish heritage, it is quite possible that bagpipes and the idea of “love in youth” is unmistakably a craving that one can’t dismiss. When Owen and I went to the cinema to see that movie (Titanic), he was transported to a time and place of immense and dreamy romance. We listened to that song over and over, because he was still a kid, longing for the growing-up experience of love ever-lasting. It was a time of sweetness and the ever-present magical thinking of adolescence.
All the “firsts” in the aftermath of Owen’s passing, are, indeed, overwhelming. We live through them in the only ways possible - True Grit - oh, another movie I’m unlikely to ever watch again. I sometimes don’t realize how difficult the “firsts” will be until I’m faced with them. I’m sure you remember your firsts, too.
I’m not familiar with “Missing” but feel compelled to find it, as I stayed up all night watching the televised news about Princess Diana’s demise. I don’t know why I was so mesmerized by that story, but I do recall Owen waking up in the middle of the nght, and asking me why I was so interested in that tragedy. All I remember about that conversation, is that I couldn’t fully explain my interest, but could share my experience of loss. And, I did. Our family always talked openly about the loss of family and friends.
I know what you mean, though, about the passing of time, allowing one to feel loss that seemed overblown, even repugnant in the media frenzy, and with the passage of time, offers us our sentiments in retrospect. (BTW, what does “barmy” mean in the English vernacular?) I can only relate to that public display of grief when I recall John Lennon’s passing. I was devastated. Had I ever met him? No. Did I love his music? Yes. Princess Diana? I never met her, I couldn’t relate to her life or that of the Prince, or their sons. But, I DID stay up all night to watch their wedding - along with my brother. Were we just desperate for the fairy tale? Probably. But, it was a great freaking fairy tale - romance, betrayal, children, death, betrayal, children, the other woman, blah, blah, blah.
I “get it” that someday I may want to watch the 3rd Pirates of the Carribean, but it’s too early to imagine. After tonight’s visit to the River with my friends, and talking with kids on the waterfront, I simply can’t fathom a day when I’ll listen/watch with anything other than anguish.
Frigging bagpipes. Yep.
L.
Dear writinggb,
In answer to your question: both. Pretty much everything of note, is insufferable AND cathartic. I’ve always seen and admired both sides of the coin, no matter who held the bright, shiny metal. I saw and admired Owen’s light and dark sides. Nat is so open to showing us his duality. I will always admire my kids’ internal and external contrasts. Movies offer us a vehicle for exploration. I’m grateful.
L.
Good, and I’m glad you don’t take me too seriously.
Barmy = (eccentrically) mad. One digestive short of a biscuit barrel, if ever so well-intending. To me, Diana seemed to have a lot to put up with, having been emotionally and mentally compromised for some time as a result, although she seemed well on the way to recovery by the time of her death.
But not to put too fine a point on it, before she died, many people (probably a majority, in truth) and much of the popular press were exceedingly critical of Diana for being erratic, unstable, and even marginally bonkers before she died. She was certainly widely seen as behaving manipulatively in that famous TVinterview with Martin Bashir, however good her reasons for doing so. But of course that was all before She Became A Saint.
The whole Diana thing in London - I think perhaps you had to be there to appreciate the scale of the excesses. 200 acres of flowers laid around Kensington Palace. Every sports event in the country cancelled on the day of the funeral. People crying in the parks in their millions. Intelligent grown-ups saying, you know, I never cried when my mother died, but now I can. Simply unbelievable.
Perhaps it was really a massive displacement exercise towards relieving our stifled British emotions. It changed us, though, and probably for the good.
Yes, it’s too early to go and see that film, and I’m just hinting at another way of looking at it which may (or may not) one day emerge.
As for that Titanic song - it was played on the radio endlessly, endlessly, and here more than any other in September 2007. Probably 200 times a day. In those circumstances, no sane person could ever willingly listen to it again any more than Elton John’s ‘English Rose.’