Calling It as They See It

Someday, I think, science will prove that “movie love” is physiological, not psychological, in origin. My guess is that there is something in the flicker of film, the shimmer and sheen of images on a screen, that works addictively on some eyeballs and brain pans, not on others.

Take me, for instance. Even if I didn’t have a job reviewing them, I’d still probably see something like the number I do (about 100 a year in theaters, compared with the half-dozen most Americans of my age take in). To be honest, if for some reason I haven’t seen a movie for a week or so, I start getting edgy, scanning the newspaper ads for something to rest my itchy eyes on: a revival, an obscure indie or foreign film I’ve missed, even a teen flick in which some critical colleague has found dubious distinction.

I don’t unconditionally “love” movies--most of them are awful--but I have sometimes used them as surely as another kind of addict resorts to his needle: to escape a reality suddenly too harsh to bear. The sheltering darkness of the theater, the vague communality of the audience, the lighted window of the screen into which we voyeuristically peer. Like any addict I usually have the munchies (which is why the popcorn business is the only reliable economic aspect of the movies) while watching. When I emerge--unless the movie has been so blatantly incompetent that it riles me up--I generally have the noddies; I’m calm and silent and lost in non-thought until, at some point, my critical engine coughs, sputters and kicks in.

It is that engine, I perhaps egocentrically think, that separates not just the critic from the fan but useful film comment from swamp gas. They may be a sedative, but movies are also a phenomenon: occasionally an art, less occasionally a refracting mirror in which we catch fleeting, dramatically distorted but instructive glimpses of ourselves and our world. They are worth thinking about analytically, in adult terms. Which is why people like Harry Knowles make some of us crazy.

He is, perhaps, the ultimate movie geek. A young man, barely past 30, he is the proprietor of www.aintitcool.com, a Web site devoted largely to gossip about forthcoming films. The site became famous when some of his spies sneaked into test screenings of Joel Schumacher’s “Batman and Robin” and posted disastrous reviews of that feckless, last-in-the-cycle enterprise. This caused great consternation at the studio--movies aren’t supposed to be reviewed until the powers-that-be deem them finished--and it also generated a certain amount of fear and loathing for Knowles in ever-antsy Hollywood. The mainstream press, naturally, began reprinting his choicer tidbits. He is now well-known enough for a publisher--that is another arm of the vast media conglomerate that financed Schumacher’s film--to bring forth his autobiography.

In it, he presents himself as an earnest, even prissy, guy. He resolutely refuses to traffic in gossip about sex and substance abuse among the rich and famous. His political sentiments are of an agreeable populist-liberal sort. He makes a number of not entirely misplaced but not entirely original criticisms about the way movies are made and marketed nowadays and about the supine ways the press covers them.

But I can’t think of a single reason to pay this child-man the slightest heed. He was born into a family of memorabilia collectors, that weird subset of fans who treasure and trade in movie detritus--posters, props, costumes--materials that have no intrinsic value. Their worth is imputed to them largely through the workings of nostalgia, and they tell us nothing about the texture or experience of a movie. Rather the opposite; they are icons, encouraging thoughtless veneration instead of thoughtful engagement with the objects they represent.

Knowles is more than entitled to use the movies as escapist vehicles. He suffered real trauma as a child--his account of them is authentically touching--and had every reason to retreat from reality into movie mania. Because he has built over the years a collection of about 5,000 videos, he has ample means to do so. But his taste is for the most fantastic and abstract genres, the ones with the least relationship to reality--sci-fi, horror and kung fu epics, comic book adaptations--and the largest dependency on special effects, which are, of course, constructs utterly unknown to the real world. A near-exclusive concentration on such stuff is a sure sign of emotional arrest. So is Knowles’ love of outsider status. Children are society’s ultimate outsiders, desperate for the inside dope adults refuse to share. Hence his obsession with penetrating their circle and spiriting away their secrets. But once he’s revealed them, he doesn’t know what else to do with them.

We’ll not talk “criticism” here because Knowles deplores it. We’ll talk, instead, intelligent and subtle engagement with film, leading the writer to order instinctive, highly subjective responses into rational argument, something you can conjure with, which you cannot do with Knowles’ paranoid rants about the system, which exist, he seems to think, mainly to marginalize his favorite genre artists and ruin his favorite trashy books in adaptation.

There are, obviously, other ways to take your traumas to the movies and deal with them. For example, Madelon Sprengnether’s. She also suffered a devastating childhood trauma, her father’s death by drowning when she was 9. She sought the usual escapes from tragedy’s impositions--books, films--and became, eventually, a writer and professor of English. But as she relates in “Crying at the Movies,” one day in the 1970s, she found herself weeping at the death of the young girl in “Pather Panchali.” These were not the misty-eyed snifflings that happen to all of us occasionally at the movies. They were great, racking, uncontrollable sobs that went on for hours, a startling outburst of long-suppressed feelings about unexpected death.

Sprengnether does not ignore the aesthetics of Satyajit Ray’s great film. Nor those of the other movies that worked on her with similar force. Her readings of an eclectic list of titles--they range from the mainstream “Shadowlands” (about C.S. Lewis’ loss of his wife) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s complex and mysterious science fiction, “Solaris”--are excellent. But what’s most interesting is the way this moviegoer, dropping more or less casually into this or that film, finds her emotions surprised, then passionately stirred, by the “entertainment” on offer. She admits to a complicated, needy sexual life, much of it conditioned by her search for father substitutes, and she bravely connects the emotions of that search with those elicited by these film encounters.

Sometimes, perhaps, she tells us more than we strictly need to know about the state of her quivering viscera, but that’s a small matter compared to the alertness and disciplined nuance of her responses, her aching openness to the full range of unexpected possibilities a seriously intended film can offer. She is engaging herself in very specific ways with the very specific effects of particular works of--no apologies here--art. She surely does not give a hoot for how their test screenings went. It is enough, for her, that somehow they exist and have somehow arrived within her gaze. It is enough for her that these movies do not offer the soothing reassurances of predictable emotional “beats” carried over from genre film to genre film but rather are unique objects capable of bestartling an open, instructible heart. Hers is not the only way to watch a movie intelligently, but it is one way grown-ups grapple with them. Do not look for her Web site any time soon.