I have spent nearly eight years in Los Angeles surrounding my life with movies. Itâs something I always wanted. I see hundreds and hundreds every year. More with each passing month. Old and new. Every year since relocating, Iâve made this list and published it.** Gradually, I began to write about them for work. Then I started to make a podcast about them. Now I make several. Iâm attending festivals about them, more each year. And galumphing through awards events and premieres for them. Befriending a couple people who make them (and a lot of people who are obsessed by them). Iâm prognosticating and pontificating and moderating about them. Becoming a muckety-muck, basically. A not insignificant amount of my identity and my self-worth is wrapped up in them; what I think about them and what they provide: solace and doubt and wonder and frustration and ecstasy. I hope people want to hear what I have to say about them, and that I can better understand myself by expressing the keyhole-sized perspective I can bring to someone elseâs creation. Now, after a few years of this commitment, I see that it is becoming a defining aspect of my personality andâgross, but itâs trueâwhatever persona Iâve arrived at. I donât take it for granted. Iâm lucky; Iâm a âmovie guyâ now. Or, for now. But it has had strange and unnerving effects on my life. At Christmas dinner this year, I found that my dad was asking my opinion on new movies (âDid you see that Irishman? Good?â), something he never cared to hear about for the first 35 or so years of my life. He even listens to the podcasts, which, to me, is extraordinary. He seems proud. What a world. But that attention breeds something else: Expectation. My mom died earlier this year and the experience is exactly as disarming and painful as anyone who has lost a parent has ever communicated, only much worse and basically without resolution for thousands of hours, in seeming perpetuity. The goddamned regret, indeed. Itâs just terrible, an unsolvable sensation of loss that creeps and then lingers into your head at all the wrong times. My momâs death happened at a particularly busy time if you cover movies. While I was helping to coordinate the funeral arrangements, I got a text from a friend who didnât know about my mom. âYo. Did you change jobs?â The second part of the text was a link to a subreddit post wondering if Iâd been âpoachedâ from my job because Iâd disappeared from the internet during this particularly busy time in movie world. The post wondered why I wasnât responding to the news of the day and presumed I left my job, a job I love. This is a strange feeling. One, I had to break the news to my friend that my mom died, via text. Two, being the subject of a Reddit thread is a special kind of hell; avoid at all costs. Three, the expectation was so acute and absurd, and yet my internet-poisoned brain developed a mild sense of panic, that I wasnât present for something âimportantâ and thus failing at being a movie guy. This is stupid, I know. I knew then. Lifeâs rich pageant, etc. But the disorienting feeling gave way to a profound sense of resentment toward one of the only things that brings me joy. Was I thinking about this stuff too much? Had I helped create an inescapable machine that would encircle me forever? Was I overthinking good fortune in the face of awful circumstances? These are frivolous feelings, a way to subvert coping, I guess. But they bubble in times like this. In the aftermath, I spent the year throwing myself at movies more deeply and obsessively. Itâs keeping something at bay, or maybe just where I want to go, or both. I like the expectation! Itâs all meaningless but also a good way to pass the time. My momâs the one who put movies in my hand in the first place, the person whoâd slide a taped-off-TV copy of The Wizard of Oz into the VCR, the person who dragged me to a rep screening of Once Upon a Time in the West at Huntingtonâs Cinema Arts Centre (the literal best experience of my pre-teen life), the one who let me stay up to watch teen sex comedies and junk-genius action movies on HBO past 11pm. She dug what I was into and what I was getting up to at work and elsewhere. She knew implicitly, so itâs only right that itâs going this way. What she missed this year, man. When the lunar chase begins in Ad Astra, I can feel her excitement, mouth agape at that soaring moon buggy. When the wars of Marriage Story begin, I see glimmers of her life, her messed up marriage, her anger and pain. When Once Upon a Time ⌠in Hollywood zips down Sunset Blvd. with Neil Diamond and Bob Seger on the box, I can see her smiling, a â69 Woodstock princess beaming just like Margot Robbie in that theater. The Brooklyn schmuck-princes of Uncut Gems: her kinda guys! The Farewell, geez, sheâd have loved it. I can hear her Joker review: âWell done, but not for me. Heâs always so good though.â Gloria Bell? My mom was Gloria Bell! How can you watch Waves and not reckon with loss? How can you not escape it when you see 6 Underground? And The SouvenirâŚI can imagine watching it over the holidays with her and the rest of my family, everyone else bored to tears while we vacuum popcorn and candy for two stolid hours and then explain to the philistines in the Fennessey family what they missed. I wish she could have seen these movies. But in a way, she did.
** With apologies to Long Dayâs Journey Into Night, Daniel Isnât Real, Black Christmas, The Painted Bird, Tigers Are Not Afraid, Luz, Give Me Liberty, Black Mother, and The Quiet One, all of which I have not seen.
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