Changing Perspectives

I can't believe Bloodsport used to be my favorite movie. It was 1988, my nascent years of movie collecting. At that time, I owned only a handful of movies. Another was Real Genius starring a young and hilarious Val Kilmer. I even owned the poster and had it plastered on my wall next to my desk. Adjacent to my desk lay my brand new Commodore 128 computer replete with floppy disk drive and orange-colored monitor. The computer was a conundrum to me. You see, after watching Wargames with Matthew Broderick (still one of my favorite films), witnessing him break into NORAD with his sleek IMSAI computer, I thought I could emulate his actions with my little beauty. How naive I was! The most I could do with it was to type inane code in for hours-the result being a little fireworks display. Talk about an anticlimax! It was my first real awareness of the glaring disparity between fiction and reality. Next to my computer was my bed, the place for many hours of supine comtemplation and intense comic book reading. Proudly placed above my bed on the wall was my prestigious Conan art print collection by Bart Sears. Just at the foot of my bed was my raison d'etre-my comic book collection. Thousands of books by glorious writers and artists neatly ensconsed within my acid-free oblong white boxes. That was my mythology growing up, the heroes and artists were my gods. The sweat I shed feverishly reading those books were my libations to them, water shed in deep admiration for the glory of their efforts. And Stan Lee was Zeus, his soapbox Mount Olympus. He was a benign god and one fecund with creativity and wisdom. He loved his devotees; he even made sure to address them in his monthly column without fail.
Alas, he was soon to be usurped by the God of Cinema, a redoubtable foe more frightening than anything witnessed in the Titanomachy! Ah, the vagaries of youth, the wonder and simple joys of youth...

I digressed. Sorry. Back to Bloodsport. I don't know why I liked this film. Watching it now makes me squirm. What the hell was I thinking? The simple answer is: I wasn't. My critical thinking faculty at the time was still bald and morphous in shape, like a growing foetus. It hadn't fully matured yet. Movies to me then were purely escapism. Transcendence didn't come until my first viewing of Amadeus (for more on that, check my earlier entry,"The Genesis"). This evolution in my cinematic tastes reminded me of our lesson this week in Expository Writing, about changing perpsectives through time and intellectual growth. What once semed to me an engrossing piece of celluloid seems inane and lugubrious to me now. It does even rank as a guilty pleasure like John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China from 1986.

I think my connecting to films, albeit mainstream or esoteric, stems from a need to connect emotionally with universal themes and emotions. I never really was an exigent person, so I allowed the actors/charaters in the movies to be so for me. They were articulating, to a frighteningly precise degree, what I felt deep down. It justified what I thought were aberrant, socially undesired emotions inside of me. From film, I segued into painting, music, and literature. I found the arts to be the panacea for all my ills, a conduit for my repressed emotions and intellectual proclivities. For example, I am a lover of anything pastoral. But I can't really share that with the average coworker or fellow student. So, I turn to Constable, turn to Hardy and Eliot, turn to George Meredith and Wordsworth, to Theocritus and Virgil, even a film by Herzog, and my longings, my desires, are satiated. I feel that I am not alone in the world, and that my passion is shared and appreciated by others much more acutely sensitve than myself. I can only hope to aspire one day to reach their level of "heightened awareness" (a true Wordsworthian concept).

Incidentally, my new favorite film is La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, also my favorite filmmaker of all time. I'm convinced this man was born with a camera attached to him at birth, perhaps stitched into his thigh like Dionysus to Zeus. His films elate me, make me feel proud of my Italian heritage, and assure me that it is okay to rise into the ether supported only by my fantastical dreams and ecstatic visions. His camera movements feel organic, his directing is so natural, so faultless and his overall vision is crystalline. Fellini's inner world resembles that of Dali, but the main difference is that the emotions painted on Fellini's canvas are more blatant, more ecstatic, not nebulous and elusive as in Dali's aesthetic.

I will, as I previously promised, delve into Fellini (and other foreign filmmakers) more in my next column. My exhortations on that man will be estimable, I assure you.