What Are Movies For?

Irrationality and Sickness

I said a lot of different things in my post yesterday. Really, I was trying to be ready for anything. Perhaps I would write something scathing about a movie that gets me into hot water, or I would end up writing more about my personal experiences in Toronto and industry thoughts. Maybe I’d end up writing more about trends or consistent aesthetic choices among a variety of entries more than any one particular movie.

I wasn’t prepared at all, of course! What did I get? COVID-19, almost immediately after publishing yesterday’s post.

I’ve been pretty paranoid about COVID the entire pandemic. Consistently been masking indoors for three years. The past year I have been open to going to restaurants and bars without masking inside. Only this past summer did I take a crazy step: I didn’t wear a mask to Barbenheimer. Every other movie I’ve seen in a theater since 2020 has been masked.

Then, as every news-reading Zoomer found out, COVID was on the rise again, like it has done every summer. I thought maybe I’d been a bit too risk-taking, would need to be secure. I executive produced a feature in August and though wasn’t really on set much (or had much to do with the production outside of funding) I was trying to make sure COVID policies were followed. This is in part my desire to keep up Sweet Void’s reputation for consistently acting ahead of the CDC and other government agencies to keep crew members and patrons safe. This is in part a cynical financial move—our budget was tight and if we lost central crew members because of COVID, the entire production could fall under. I was pissed people weren’t following COVID orders on set, not masking, our COVID Compliance Officer wasn’t really pressuring people on set to do so, but there were mandatory tests every week. I was still nervous. Last year on the feature I directed, we had a much stricter and thought-through COVID protocol. We were mostly shooting in a two-story flat and tried to ensure there was good airflow through the building, new masks every day and specific directions crew members must walk through the apartment to limit people passing each other. Most departments (wardrobe, green room, makeup, etc) were in different rooms to limit contact. This became important as one of our two leads got sick. We limited infection—only three people total got sick, our other lead (who had contact with the actor through the green room) and the COVID Compliance Officer, forced within a certain distance by nature of the position. This was good in that there were twenty-five people on set and the sick person only had contact with two other people. We lost ten days, but because of our precautions were able to finish the movie on time. No such precautions were set up for this year’s production, so hearing that cases were rising once again (even with limited hospitalizations) made me nervous.

Thankfully, we had no cases on set this year. Somehow, though, I still got sick. I’m torn between two possibilities: either I got sick from some stranger on the street or I got it from the wrap party. Most likely the latter. That was this past Thursday, I felt sick starting Saturday. It’s the only thing that “makes sense,” and yet…

I have been sick twice else in my adult life.

Once was January of 2020. I got back from the gym one day (RIP my gym membership) and felt like a truck hit me. I was fine the next day.

The main time was in 2018. A year after my father died of pancreatic cancer, I was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had turned twenty-two just a few weeks prior. I quit a brief stint working at American Dream Home Improvement trying to get weather damaged suburbanites to claim disaster insurance for roof repairs (my boss kept racially profiling people and saying gross things about women). I had an interview at something that (in my foggy memory) seemed similar to canvassing, a job I had in college. I parked in the Walgreens parking lot by Belmont blue line and walked across the street. I kept looking out the window toward the parking lot, nervous of a tow truck. The interview went fine, I had a second one a week later suddenly. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the Walgreens, sat in my Ford Escape and got a call from my doctor explaining the diagnosis.

After a half hour of screaming and sobbing, I called my mother. I apologized to her, telling her it was my fault: “I’ve been a smoker for six years.” No, Hodgkin’s lymphoma has very little to do with tobacco, and yet…

Cancer has played a huge role shaping my world view. I did six months of chemotherapy and am painfully aware of how much it costs. I lost sixty pounds and some of my friends. Though I sympathize greatly with Phil Elverum who sang, “I don’t want to learn anything from this,” I wonder, did I? Did cancer teach me anything, or did chemotherapy? There is a difference—until its final moments, cancer itself is painless. I had lumps in my neck I could touch and move around. Chemotherapy is painful, it’s healing. After my first of twelve sessions, I didn’t realize what nausea was. I thought it was an existential condition Sartre wrote about in that one book I couldn’t finish. But it’s a real condition as I soon realized.

I thought it’d be good to see a play at the Goodman theater with my partner after my first experience with chemotherapy. “Treat yourself.” I left the anti-nausea medication in the car parked a block up from the theater at a high rise parking garage. I didn’t know I needed it.

The first act was fine, though I felt strange still. I talked outside with an actor who was immediately able to tell what region of Michigan I was from by listening to my accent for five minutes. I wanted to cast him in a Marxist adaptation of Crime and Punishment I was working on at the time. Marxist in terms of Karl and Groucho. He accepted my Facebook friend request and ignored my DMs.

Sometime in the second act I really lost my brain. I couldn’t concentrate on the play at all. My partner and I left and I remember thinking, “I need pineapple juice.” I read online somewhere that it helps with chemo. Not sure why I trusted that Quora poster but I did. We walked up to Wabash and down under the L. I had bleached my hair a few days prior, a friend who went to every chemo session with me suggested it as everyone knew I’d lose my hair soon anyways. Past hair covering my eyes I stared at passing cars as I staggered forward. I locked eyes with a guy riding shotgun in an SUV. He smiled and called me a faggot. This was the third time in just a few months I was called a faggot and I lost it. I wrote about this in an MFA application to Columbia University a year later, but I don’t really remember past this moment. I think I lied a bit in that personal essay. I know I went to a restaurant, got pineapple juice, thought nothing of it and called my mom. The nausea was terrible and only my mother understood. She went through the same sickness twice and she talked to me as I sobbed in the downtown alleyway.

Eventually, after all of this, my partner and I made it back to the car, I got my anti-nausea medication and I didn’t forget to take it as soon as I woke up after chemo for the rest of 2018.

Last year, four years after this, I shot from the twelfth floor of the same parking garage down toward the street for my second feature, Step Six. For me, it’s interesting to see how the same areas get recontextualized by different events. I went to the Goodman in 2017 for an Arthur Miller play with a man I don’t talk to anymore. I don’t really remember this, though, nor do I associate it with him or the play at all. I don’t remember the play I saw with my partner either, but I remember going and leaving very well.

The troubling thing about trauma is how little it has to teach. I learned nothing by experiencing nausea. But experiencing nausea informed my worldview. Experiencing chemotherapy shaped how I think. I have taken medicine over and over that destroys my body to save it. I paid for it and asked for more.

In the face of sickness and disease, what are movies for?

Yesterday I wrote, “I hope to make movies for the rest of my life,” and almost immediately after I regretted every decision I ever made. Why do I want to make movies?

I found movies to be helpful in certain situations. I wrote extensively about Cries and Whispers a few years ago. I focused on how the movie depicts a variety of perspectives of sickness—those that are sick, those who view the sick. I have been in both situations. I don’t know if it’s useful to be reminded of either. Seeing Liv Ullman’s disgust at her sister’s resurrection reminds me of having to leave a Colorado hospital room with my sister when my dad stopped being fed ice to be brought to the restroom. I was disgusted with him. I sat in the hallway and read Herzog on Herzog and laughed at his encounters with Harmony Korine. There, the movies, even when I wasn’t watching them, became an escape. Being reminded of this moment is no escape. Right now I type and wonder what I’m supposed to feel about my dad. I remember his voice, what he looked like, music he liked, and yet…

I don’t know what movies are for. They don’t heal people. They can hurt people. Through a Glass Darkly depicts a writer exploiting his daughter’s illness for clout. Is that what I’m doing with my own life?

Illness in general has made me suspicious of the personal. Factual art. There are some works that are factual and I have no place to critique (Rome Open City and In Vanda’s Room come to mind immediately). Then, works that forget about truth for fact, refusing to sensationalize or turn into fiction, “because it didn’t really happen like that.”

There’s no doubt art can change the world. Common Sense brought revolution and liberation to the minds of the New World. Birth of a Nation invigorated the second Klan. Is a political outcome the goal of an art-object? Is the art-object’s objective to transmit joy to the subject? Can there even be a goal of an object, wouldn’t that be turning it into a subject?

I’m sad to miss the vast majority of the Toronto International Film Festival. This might sound like hyperbole, but I was really counting on going. My mental health has been dog shit as of late and I thought I might get my company more on track by raising money for a feature for next year or selling distribution rights for the feature I directed last year. And this still might happen, but I’m deeply discouraged. I don’t feel as though I can do anything right. I’m good at watching movies and I’m competent enough at making them, but what is their purpose? It’s good knowing people still want to go to the theater, maybe for Asteroid City or some spooky thrills or Barbenheimer or the new Taylor Swift concert movie. But, I’m not sure what they’re after at the theater. I’m not sure what I want myself.

It’s hard to say what’s rational and what isn’t. The subject’s objective is artful in this irrational way. My mom yesterday told me that if there isn’t any policy stopping me from going I should go. My company might collapse if I don’t. I can’t tell if she’s right or not, but after several years of upholding very strict COVID policy in spaces I control and advocating for Zero COVID here in the States, it seems irrational to suddenly change my mind now that it’s inconvenient for me. I worry about endangering others, the people I work with, the elderly neighbor sitting next to me on the plane. What would that be for? Movies? Potential financial success?

Yesterday when describing “art” I defined it as the relationship between the art-object and the subject. Art is the line between the two. The more immediate the connection, the shorter the link, the more powerful the indent the the art-object makes upon the subject (greater immediacy). The farther apart, the less immediate. Sometimes the same art-object has greater or lesser immediacy upon the subject given circumstances. When I was in high school watching Irreversible for the first time, I had to pause the flick after the rape scene, I left the room for fifteen minutes and walked around. After the movie I was certain that meant “I loved it.” A year later when I saw it in college, I stopped after fifteen minutes because I didn’t want to experience it again. It could be said the first experience I had was very immediate, the second time less so. I didn’t want to meet it on its own level, nor have I had any desire to do so since.

Isn’t there something irrational about this? One day you watch a movie and call it a masterpiece. The next, it’s stale garbage.

Cries and Whispers is a movie I have a very intense relationship with. Yet, since I wrote about it for Film-Cred, I haven’t had any desire to rewatch it. Even without viewing it, I have a relationship with the movie that grows less immediate every day.

Let’s say I make a movie I’m in love with. Will that stay the same? Of course not. The first feature I directed in 2017, Old Advice from a Dead Friend (which I’m recutting and no, it hasn’t been released anywhere) I thought was emotional and worthwhile when I made it. A romance between a man who commits suicide and an actress trying to move on with her life. It was rejected from two or three festivals and I ended up sitting on it for several years. I rewatch it now and again. For awhile, I hated it more and more, partially because one of the leads I had a falling out with and I can’t stand to see on screen anymore. Partially because I exploited my own life without much care for fact or truth or worrying about what movies were for.

I found myself enjoying this same movie just a few months ago. With time I was able to look at characters I viewed as self-inserts with distance. The less immediate it felt, the more I could accept it for what it was. Perhaps the art became both more and less immediate at the same time. As a creator, less immediate. As a viewer, more so. I could point to a guy, laugh and say, “Fuck him! What a psychopath!” Those same lines years earlier feeling as if I drew blood from my veins for the sake of others. How selfish, how selfless.

Movies are deeply personal as all art is. Any relation between object and subject is personal, inherently. Still, I’m struggling to know why they exist. Perhaps finding utility for art is a wasted effort. Yet, if I care at all about finding the form’s essential qualities, this must be an important question.

Regardless, I hope I’m able to make it to the second half the festival. I will be missing the new Pedro Costa and Aggro Dr1ft, probably. Those will make it to theaters, I worry very little. The former is likely to play at the Chicago International Film Festival in October, they played Vitalina Varela and I’m sure they’ll do the Cinema Guild Water/Fire thing. Even if Aggro Dr1ft gets a limited release, there’s little doubt it’ll play in Chicago. The main reason I want to go to a festival outside the market side is to see work I wouldn’t know about otherwise. Last year, the movies that made the greatest impressions on me came from Jamaica, Nicaragua and Georgia and I haven’t heard anyone talk about any of them in any sort of context since. Sad to think of what work I won’t know that I’m missing.

I will be requesting dispatches from Jay and Lino who, as we speak, are boarding the plane at O’hare and will check into the airbnb I booked later tonight. I started this Substack with the goal of writing about every day of the festival and despite setbacks, I hope to do so.

For now, I’ll focus on some of these questions that may end up being answered as we move forward through time and life. Questions like the essential qualities of movies have answered themselves to me at unexpected times and perhaps focusing on them in this kind of written form will bring about answers naturally. If not, that’s fine, answers never helped anyone anyways. And yet…