American Beauty

Kristi’s out for the evening; her dad’s in Wisconsin on business, and so she’s covering his class over at Modesto Junior College tonight. I have some client work to catch up on, so while she’s gone I’m plopped down on the couch with the laptop, watching American Beauty. It’s a wonderful film, in my opinion one of the best ever made. I haven’t seen it in a long time and lately I’ve been in the mood for it.

The ending wrecks me every time. As I get older, I just appreciate it on more and more levels.

I’ve got a serious movie addiction, I admit it; maybe it’s my own form of narcissistic vice. That was one of the very early personality conflicts Kristi and I discovered shortly after I moved in. I hadn’t watched TV in years; I watched movies. My collection now sits somewhere around 750 movies, some on DVD and some in DivX files. Kristi, on the other hand, is a TV watcher and will be the first to tell you that she has a one-hour attention span (I think it comes from years and years of living and working in 55 minute chunks), so right around that point in a movie she starts getting restless. I learned to shift my movie watching to daytime while we worked out a TV show routine that we could both enjoy. I also sneak them in while she’s out for an evening.

It’s frustrating for me sometimes because there are so many films that I want to introduce to Kristi, great movies that she’s never seen. Like American Beauty. It’s become almost a running joke around the house – got a great movie, darlin’, you gotta see this one, okay, that’s number 54 on the list and we’ll get to it eventually. Hey, I figure, I can’t help it that there have been so many good stories told in the two-hour celluloid format.

Up until this point, I’ve told her the story that most people get, the basically true but superficial account of how I got the monkey on my back. Back in ’99 I began working weekend shifts at Verizon and would spend 13-hour stints alone at my desk, without much to do until a server caught on fire. I was also making more money than I knew how to spend. I bought one of the first portable DVD players (for $700) and every weekend would pick up three or four DVDs. I’d spend every weekend just running movie marathons until the alarms would go off. I’ve been watching movies while working ever since.

But it actually goes deeper than that. Maybe a bit more pathetic, but sometimes that’s life. Truth is, those days came on the back end of a pretty bad period in my life that left me fairly emotionally exhausted in a lot of ways. Bad relationships, bad scenes, a bad life. By that point, I didn’t really feel much of anything about anything; when I left for Tampa to take the Verizon job, it was at least as much to get away from all that as it was to move forward into something good. Looking back now, I can see that those years working weekend shifts alone at Verizon was my time to isolate myself, think things out and regroup. In a significant way, for me watching good movies gave me the private arena I needed to start feeling things again, to start feeling like a person again.

That’s why we tell stories, I discovered. And why we listen to them and pass them on. They connect us with the human experience and remind us that we’re all part of something that goes back a very long way, and will continue on for a very long time. A comforting continuity that assures us that we’re not alone, that everything has happened before and that human nature is as it always has been. When you understand the role that story plays in life, in many ways you finally understand life.

So that’s why I still obsess over movies like American Beauty. And No Country For Old Men. And Fearless. And even Bubba Hotep. Because they each tap into something deeply emotionally penetrating and they do it in a way that we can talk about later. That form our cultural memory. First we had oral tradition, then we had books, and now we have movies. They’re where the best stories are being told today.

In twenty years, who knows – maybe we’ll tell our stories in interactive holographic recordings piped directly into our brains. Or maybe we’ll be back to oral tradition. You never know. But any way the stories happen, we’ll still be telling them until the last of us turns off the lights.