Apples and trees, my friends.
My mother is such a devoted cineaste that she used the commercial breaks of the Acadamy Awards as opportunities to share movie trivia with us, often from a giant tome of film history she kept on the coffee table. Wearing flannel nightgowns and sipping Shirley Temples, my sister and I always absorbed these scraps of information with interest; our respect for an actor like Sissy Spacek would grow when we'd learn that Loretta Lynn had handpicked her for the lead in Coalminer's Daughter. And just how, we wanted to know, had Christoper Walken eaten nothing but rice and bananas to achieve his look in The Deer Hunter? To us, it seemed as legitimate and interesting as anything we were learning in school.
Possibly more so.
Gradually, the Oscars became a full-fledged holiday in our household, one right up there with Christmas and—in my mom's eyes—one just as deserving of decorations. Ten years ago she decided that a mere family gathering wasn't enough to celebrate the occasion, so she began throwing annual Oscar parties which proceeded to grow in size and scope with each passing year. A few years ago, these parties were written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer as a human interest piece about my mother's passion for cinema and the lengths to which she'll go for it. And I do mean "go for it." In the photo, she's pictured sitting in front of a floor-to-ceiling collage of movie stills.
So needless to say, I've seen a few films in my life. At first it was largely an extension of my mom's interests, but later expanded into a genuine mania of my very own.
(Parents are better at passing those onto their children than I thought.)
To wit: my dad's own pop culture obsession. Like my mom, he came of age in the mid-to-late 1960's in a town about 40 miles from Detroit, Michigan where Motown Records was going full tilt. He kept right on buying records after college, and a several years after I arrived on the scene, graciously allowed me to dive into this magnificent collection.
Tipper Gore's forehead vein would have throbbed to see such a small child listening to albums like Surrealistic Pillow or Let's Get It On, but dad never tried to stop me, and I firmly believe that I'm a better person for it. As the poet Laura Kasischke once wrote, "My afternoons were made of time and vinyl." On Sundays, my mom would try to get us to go to church, but we'd usually end up parked in front of the stereo instead, joyously singing along to Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Smokey Robinson, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick... I'll admit I sang those songs with greater wonder and delight than I ever managed for a Methodist hymn.
To my mother's occasional and not very energetic chagrin, my dad has continued to worship mostly at the altar of rock instead of the Protestant kind. He regularly took us to live shows. He owned a copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magik before I did. He saw 8 Mile before I did too. Within one three month period in 2005, he saw the live shows of The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, and—from the third row—David Bowie. Last year, he and my mom made a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He called me just after leaving the building, and he was crying. That was his youth in there, he said.
I was ten years old when MTV made its cable television debut, and while I'm sure I must have gone outside and/or to school at some point during the seven years that followed, in my memory it feels like I didn't once move from the navy blue corduroy love seat in our living room. It didn't seem to matter whether MTV was playing 120 Minutes, Headbanger's Ball, Yo! MTV Raps, or anything else. I loved every minute of every video, no matter what kind. I loved it when Robert Smith got eaten by the Freudian vagina-spider in The Cure's video for "Lullaby." I loved Salt and Pepa's sexy yet completely empowering dance moves in the video for "Push It." In the video for "Close My Eyes Forever, I loved the way the enormous blond manes of Lita Ford and Ozzy Osbourne would fill up 80 percent of the screen. And when the 20 minute version of Julien Temple's high concept video for David Bowie's "Blue Jean" made its world premiere on MTV, I remember being excited to the point of catatonia. By then, MTV's spell over me was complete. I was riveted.
In a way, I still am.
For me, the experience of watching all those music videos is eternally bound up in the way I experience film to this day. The dreamland they created in my psyche is a big and highly charged place, so even now when a filmmaker is able to slip gracefully from a moment of dialog into one suffused with music, it is—for me—a very powerful and emotional thing.
My extended adolescent MTV jag is probably also why I'm most interested in directors who lean toward a "various artists" approach to music in their films. There are, of course, plenty of talented film composers out there, and that method will never not be an important one in the director's arsenal. However, it's clear to me that the vast majority of history's most memorable film-music moments simply do not belong to the original score. More on this later.
Much more, I'm afraid.
For now, let's just say that by 1989, my 18 year old self was ideally primed to experience Cameron Crowe's particular take on things, and that when I saw Lloyd Dobler standing under Diane Court's open window—resolutely holding up that boombox and playing Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" to her—I was transformed by it (it helped that I'd started dating a sweet, handsome Lloyd Dobler of my very own and that he was, like Lloyd, a musician obsessed with music). At the time, though, I couldn't say why I was so captivated. I just knew it was one of the most wonderful things I'd ever seen on film or anywhere. Since then, I've developed a few ideas about what may have made that moment—and others like it—so potent and memorable.
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