My first summer in Los Angeles has been one without movies. It’s been an ironic turn of events for me, because I travelled here from the interior of the country with the specific intention of writing about them.
I grew up with the modest comforts of small city life. My two hometowns, each nestled against the panoramas of developing regions, were what locals affectionately called “on the up and up”– fairly urbanized settings in Kansas and Arkansas with growing populations and decent schools. They were lovely places in many ways, if not quite brimming with cinematic inspiration.
My family relocated to Bentonville, Arkansas, shortly before I started high school. Known as the birthplace of Walmart and not much else, the town boasts a family-friendly setting and reflects a classically predictable middle-American aesthetic. It’s a decent place to grow up, if not the most forward-thinking (less than a month ago, a notorious confederate statue was finally dethroned as the centerpiece of the downtown square). Four years later and 20 miles down the road, I attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, a slightly more progressive college town at the foot of the Ozark Mountains.
As I came of age against the conservative backdrop of the Midwest, I found myself somewhat bothered by my own complacency. I certainly didn’t subscribe to the intense degree of teen angst that plagued many of my peers: I got along with my family, enjoyed my friends, did well in school, and had fun on the weekends. Still, something lodged in me grew increasingly disconnected as I marched along.
Years of navigating the familiar spaces of the Midwest grew taxing. They were charming locales, but in some ways they felt frozen in time. I began to realize that I did too. Most people at my school looked like me, and I interacted with the same group of peers year after year. Aside from my close friends, I felt that I understood few of the people around me and that few of them understood me. I was rarely surprised or challenged by what I saw, much less exposed to stories of the wider world.
On the eve of my 9th grade year, I realized I was gay. It was a fairly anti-climactic moment, alone in my room, a moment of realization that’s somehow fuzzy in memory despite its far-reaching impact on the course of my life. My sexuality hadn’t often previously crossed my mind; the discussion of it hadn’t surfaced in a momentous or dramatic way. It was a question I hadn’t thought to ask myself, or didn’t know how.
For some amalgam of reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, I began weathering a vague sense of trepidation as time passed. I wasn’t unhappy, but I suffered from a lack of resolve that resembled, on some days, something like dread. I wasn’t sure what I should brace for, but I felt it steadily mounting in me as the years of my adolescence wore on.
The exception to, or perhaps relief from, my general feelings of aimlessness were the moments I spent at the movies.
One of the first films I remember loving as a child was called Matilda, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl book about a girl who uses telepathic powers to punish her abusive parents and teachers. It’s a fairly absurd premise, and watching it back I don’t remember exactly what enchanted me so much about the story, or at least not why I watched it so many times in a row as a kid. Still, there was something empowering about its farcical blend of fantasy, silliness and cynicism that delighted and encouraged me. I never knew how it felt to be mistreated by authority figures, much less to wreak telekinetic havoc on them in hopes of solving my problems. But I could relate to a milder sense of isolation in the main character, one that became clearer to me as I got older.
My cinematic repertoire hasn’t historically been overly refined. I would hardly have called myself a movie buff on account of my infatuation with Matilda (or the rest of my childhood catalog of films, which included DVDs of the widely reviled Cat in the Hat remake and Tim Burton’s creepified version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Nevertheless, over time, I became more aware of the ways that movies kept me from feeling lonely.
As a teenager, I started seeing movies in theaters on a weekly basis. Bentonville had no multiplex within city limits, so I drove to the next city over. There, a cinema populated largely by middle-aged women and young families became my sanctuary. Its outdated maroon carpeting and loveably tacky fountain display in the lobby became more familiar to me than my own room. The worn grooves of my experiences faded away each time the lights dimmed.
For those moments, I forgot myself, my familiar town, and the unanswered questions about what I wanted and who I was that had gradually become deafening. Sifting down from the projector’s beam of light along with the tiny specs of dust visible above my seat, new stories welcomed me into their worlds. My uncertainties and misgivings, for two hours or for three, were rendered anonymous and invisible.
Shortly after I began my freshman year of college, I began writing film reviews. There was no cinema studies program at my school, but if the paper would pay for my ticket to write about what I was surely going to watch anyway, that was good enough for me. I was enraptured each Friday night by films both bad and good, dragging with me anyone I could to the theater. I pored over film reviews and watched YouTube discussions after each movie as a kind of ceremony to compare my opinions with those from critics I trusted.
I wanted to learn as much as I could about this medium so dear to me for reasons I couldn’t always fathom or express.
This was not only because, as I came to realize, they were of artistic and intellectual value to me. But also, I discovered a strange magic in them that I couldn’t always harness in my everyday life.
Embedded in the compassionate work of directors Jean-Marc Vallée, Luca Guadanino, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, David Lowery, and Denis Villeneuve were stories so unlike mine and yet so distinctly true to me. Rooted in each movie I sat down to watch was the promise that I could soon understand the world better than I had before, and the overwhelming belief that I myself could be understood.
When I watched Wild, the vague feelings of detachment and fear I’d experienced at times were put to words. Cheryl Strayed screamed from the top of a mountain, hurling her hiking boot over the ledge with her last breath of energy, completely overcome by her own inability to reckon with the things inside of her, and I felt it in my chair. Far away, I felt the wind of it.
A Ghost Story and Manchester by the Sea sagely articulated the intimate link between healing and sorrow. I cried because I’d never before apprehended my own relationship with the passage of time or the inevitabilities and decisions I was looking in the eye.
Lady Bird validated my exasperation with the stagnancy of suburbia. Meanwhile, it revealed to me the restorative act of valuing the seemingly ordinary spaces I occupied.
If Beale Street Could Talk and Get Out illuminated privileges and biases I unknowingly had in me. They opened up conversations with myself and with family members that before seemed impossible. They gave me context.
Films like Call Me By Your Name and Moonlight and Love, Simon showed me how to better love myself and communicate my experiences. They emboldened me as I came out to my friends and sister, assuring me that my story was also worth telling.
Movies, for me, became a way to learn from others and care about myself. They curated an aperture for escapism while offering tools I needed to deal with my lived experiences. They are an artform through which I found ambition and created intellectual purpose.
I didn’t always know how to verbalize why I wasn’t satisfied with the small piece of the world I knew. By stepping away from the places that were familiar to me, I simultaneously became aware of how they were holding me back and learned to better appreciate them for what they were.
I live in Los Angeles now, in a time of widespread isolation and doubt. I haven’t been to a movie theater in six months. Somewhere, ironically, that little cinema in the next town over, the one I ventured to dozens of times, is playing films I now can’t see.
In many ways, the world seems like it’s holding its breath, waiting to see what happens next. The plight of movie lovers are the least of its worries, and rightly so.
Still, dwelling in a space barren to the communal experiences of storytelling that I grew up with, ones that helped me cope with the doubt and seclusion I once faced internally, I’m finding less to complain about than I ever have. I have less to complain about than most. As I await the (hopefully) inevitable return of moviegoing, I’m finding comfort in filling the gaps of my movie catalog and revisiting old favorites, like Matilda.