“I'm afraid of people who claim their experience of
themselves & the world isn't fractured & fragmentary, when it clearly
is; but I'm even more afraid of people who genuinely don't experience things
that way.” M John Harrison
April to November
was lost to depression, an accompanying anxiety and some middling (for me)
self-destructive behaviours. I call it depression but more accurately it has
been about grief and despair. It felt like all my usual safety valves were
missing and I was unable to look away. Some of this was about myself –
approaching middle age and unable to imagine a way forward, a way to live and
thrive - and some to do with my family – I’ll let you off that part.
But the personal
stuff is intimately connected to the much larger grief of the social and political
– homeless people everywhere, refugees treated like criminals, the people of Syria
and Yemen left to die, the hourly violence directed at people of colour and
women, the daily inequality and injustice, the rise of the right and of
fascism, the extraordinary stupidity and venality of politicians and of course,
more than anything, the accelerating environmental crisis. I have been unable
to shut it out. Often the horror of a present and a future I can clearly see
has eclipsed any sense of daily pleasure, wonder or satisfaction.
I suspect I am not
alone in this.
I have largely been
unable to read – the readers amongst you will know how painful that is. Fiction
has felt pointless. I hate that I’ve felt that way. Movies, a constant source
of emotional stability, sustenance and inspiration since I was young, have felt
pointless too, though I have, almost on muscle memory, still managed to visit
the cinema occasionally.
The current mini
project of posting images on Facebook – I’ve posted an image a day for 10 days
of movies that had an impact on me aged 6 to 11 – has thus been a small way to
reengage with myself and with memory and what is important. A bit of therapy
perhaps. Though I need to go back to the £60 a week variety!
The movies I choose, in the order I saw them, were:
·
Watership Down (1978)
·
West Side Story (1961)
·
North by Northwest (1959)
·
Singing in the Rain (1952)
·
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
·
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
·
Planet of the Apes (1968)
·
Some Like it Hot (1959)
·
Elmer Gantry (1960)
·
All the Presidents Men (1976)
Already you start
to see the main influences. Westerns, musicals and SF were part of the family
geography that remain lifelong loves – little islands of stability and meaning
in a household that was becoming increasingly dysfunctional (or maybe I was
just becoming more aware of the disfunction). More than that I was already
watching lots of films by myself – hundreds of westerns certainly, but also
Hollywood films of all kinds from the 40s, 50s and 60s that were a constant on the
nation’s 3 channels back then and increasingly the political cinema of the 70s.
My love of movie stars, of glamour and beauty, of romance, of melancholy, of
screen violence are all there too. All have remained, and for a socialist and
critical thinker, it is hard to admit that some of those superficial elements
are still central to my dreams and desires. I am still beguiled by beautiful
charismatic men and women. If they can sing and dance too…
My memory is
terrible but I can remember the feeling of watching all those films for the
first time – the wonder and the weirdness, the joy and excitement and, more
than anything, a huge and complicated world being revealed to me. The yearning
to connect and to escape my loneliness is ever present but on most days of my
47 years if you’d offered me the choice of a good film or the chance to go out
and meet people there would have only been one answer.
There are 5 films
that didn’t make it though they were probably just as influential:
·
Star Wars – obviously perhaps. Growing up in the
late 70s the new blockbusters would have a huge impact on many of us.
·
Superman 1 and 2 – Christopher Reeve and Margot
Kidder!!! Duh!?
·
True Grit – I watched all the John Wayne films
again and again. This is still a brilliant, beautiful film. And it has Glen
Campbell!
·
The Jazz Singer – what can I say? Neil Diamond
was big in our house.
·
Grease - a rare trip to the cinema with the
women of my family: my mum, sister, auntie and cousin.
I’m going to continue with the project and hope that I can
start writing a little. I have started lists for my teen years and for my adult
years. Already I don’t how I can cut numbers down and how I will avoid
editorializing. What have I forgotten? What don’t I want to admit? What has
changed? How can I place things in order when my memory is so hazy? How do I separate
out the moments that formed me from the ones that didn’t? How does one avoid it
becoming an exercise in nostalgia? Luckily, more than ever I don’t care what
people might think. Woody Allen, Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood and various
other divisive figures will all feature. Better the truth – as near as I can
get to it – than a definite lie.
For anyone out there going through a difficult time I hope
you get through it. I’m 6 weeks without hitting self-destruct and 2 weeks back
at the gym. Baby steps. And just about able to engage with some of the things I
love. People? They are still a way off.
