Lives Impacted by Film, Part II

 

A problem like Maria

Julie Andrews in Sound of Music

Film Friday

Last Friday I reported that Julia and I were on our way to a dinner with our film group and that we had an assignment: to come up with 3-5 films and explain how they had impacted our lives. The evening was a smashing success, and I recommend the idea to others.

That’s because explaining why this or that film has been meaningful is a way of sharing confidences. We’ve been meeting as a group for many years now, but we learned new things at Friday’s dinner. I share some of our stories, not because you know these people—most of this website’s readers do not—but to give you a sense of what is possible.

I believe we saw most of the films when they came out. We are all in our 50’s and 60’s (one just turned 70).

To Kill a Mockingbird showed up on five lists, making it the runaway favorite. For all of us it spoke to our desires for social justice, but it had other attractions as well.  Some of us had lived through segregation or been raised in the south. Some of us wanted Atticus as our father.

Often the films we saw as children had the most visceral impact. David, a psychologist, talked about being traumatized by The House on Haunted Hill when he saw it at age nine. Filmmaker and film teacher Dave said that his mother accidentally took him to see Bonnie and Clyde at too young an age so that, to this day, images from the movie are seared in his brain.

This is not entirely a bad thing. Dave grew up in rural Virginia, and images of the rural south, including houses such as those appearing in the Arthur Penn film, pervade his experimental films.

Sometimes the films are important because of who watches them with us.  Jim, a former dentist, remembers laughing with his father at Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety shortly before his father died. It is a memory he treasures to this day. Chris, who teaches at the Machinists Union School of Labor Studies, saw Yellow Submarine with his father, who was a tool and dye maker that worked hard and seldom went to films. For Chris as for Jim, the moment of togetherness with a man who has passed on is a precious memory.

As a union organizer, Chris went on to fall in love with such movies as John Sayles’ Matewan and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A. His concern for the downtrodden also explains his love of To Kill a Mockingbird.

My wife, the Education Facilitator at our college, found herself as a teenager using two films to negotiate the complex issues of that period of life. Coming from a conservative Iowa farm family, she had fantasies of being a nun—not unusual for that age since it’s a way to opt out of troubled feelings about sexuality—and so Sound of Music made an impact. (How do you solve a problem like Maria?  That is the $64,000 for teenagers and the parents of teenagers.) She saw Camelot through the same lens: a woman’s sexuality enters an otherwise ideal Camelot world and all hell breaks loose. No wonder Guinivere enters a convent at the end.

Julia also liked The King and I, with its images (a lot like those in Sound of Music) of breaking free of a constricted reality, even while simultaneously remaining proper. Then, however, she went to Carleton College and met me. Together we saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, with Russian peasants caught up in tempestuous sexual passions in a mystical world, as well as the short film that preceded it, Dream of Wild Horses—again about wildness running free and, in one memorable scene, plunging through a burning marsh fire. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what her response reveals about our love life at the time.

Lois, our Education Department chair who is a wonderfully thoughtful woman, also liked Camelot but saw it differently than Julia. For her, it was a chance to explore difficult human relationships. The film Tender Mercies spoke to her as well for similar reasons.

Bill, a Washington lawyer, saw Rebel without a Cause as a boy and identified with the outcasts, even though he lived on the “proper” side of the tracks. He remembers according the greasers at his school a new respect following the film. A little later, after having endured the commotion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he saw Dr. Strangelove and remembers feeling relieved that he could now laugh at the whole affair.

Barbara, our College’s arts coordinator, grew up in Akron, Ohio and imagined escaping to a magical world of music and dance through the musicals she watched with her friends (especially West Side Story). Given that longing, I found it interesting that she was later drawn to Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, about a housewife who develops amnesia and comes to think of herself as a hip drifter (played by Madonna).

Jim saw his anger at the military captured in Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter (1978). Jim was drafted into the Vietnam War and although, as a dentist, he didn’t end up in Vietnam, nevertheless he still resents the military hoops he had to jump through.  In the film, of course, men are ripped from their Pittsburgh community and plunged into a foreign environment.

Laraine, a free-spirited psychologist, talked about her love of Disney’s Cinderella when she was young and then, later, Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Both movies are about women who break through the shackles binding them. She encountered a less positive vision of adult sexuality in Virgin Spring, a grim Ingmar Bergman film about rape in medieval times. Laraine says that, after seeing it with a teenage friend, the two of them walked out of a Manhattan repertory theater (the Thalia I think) unable to say a word.

And finally, there were the favorite films of our host Jill, who loves the substantive issues that such films as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Accused, and the Japanese film Departures bring up.

Sometimes films understand us deeply.  In such instances, sharing our viewing experiences is to share ourselves.

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