Tag: movies

At the Movies

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No matter how hard they try to wreck movies, I still love them. I love a great book, a fantastic album, and even a mind-blowing painting, but nothing beats spending ninety minutes in the hands of a master movie maker. Thanks to the VHS, and every medium before and since, I’ve watched more movies than just about anyone I’ve ever met. I write “just about”, because I had a “Who’s watched more movies” showdown with a fellow movie freak who cut the debate short by asking, “Do you watch porn?” I said I didn’t. He said, “I win!” 

Nobody ever died wishing they watched more movies, and it’s not something we normally lord over someone to a point of superiority. When comedians start dropping references from movies, however, movie freaks enjoy getting those jokes that the others –who didn’t waste so much of their life watching movies–don’t.  

“Before we go to a movie, we have to get to the movie theater, and is there a better way of getting there, or anywhere, than in a Jeep Wrangler? (Cue the video backdrop of a Wrangler managing various rough roads, icy snow, and large rock terrains.) “Hi! I’m somebody famous, but I have a moderately-dressed family (cue the entrance of the wife and kids and remind the paid spokesman to put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder), who need a reliable automobile to get them places. We put some serious consideration into purchasing a sensible family sedan, and then the snowstorm hit.   

“When hazardous conditions hit, the 4-wheel drive (4WD) drivetrain of the Jeep Wrangler will go from a luxury to a necessity. We don’t always need it, of course, but hazardous conditions strike, we can push, pull, or otherwise engage the 4WD to the supermarket, the drugstore, or the movie theater with comfort. The comfort 4WD owners know can be so great we might consider it a little weird. Most of us don’t care if others have a faster car than we do, and we don’t care if they think have a better car, and we never have. We’re not car guys. When that snowstorm hits, however, and it brings ice and everything else that defines hazardous conditions, there is something embarrassingly unusual that happens to us when we’re not only able to manage hazardous conditions but dominate them. 

“We all learned how to drive in the snow and ice in other cars, and those cars taught us to be cautious and never over-confident in hazardous conditions, no matter what we drive, but how often have you felt so intimidated by the “here/there be dragons” roads that you decided not to leave home. If this was you, the makers of Jeep have the antidote. The 4WD Jeep Wrangler not only provides the piece of mind that comes from making a decision that protects your family, but it can lead to some feelings of masculine machismo as you conquer nature. (Cue the son’s growl.) And now back to the show.”  

The Action Movie

“Jason Statham is our new action hero!” they say with all sorts of exclamation points. I yawn. Action movies? Does anyone still lust after a great action flick? I have nothing but compliments for Jason Statham. He’s a quality actor who picks some quality movies to star in, the Crank movies stand out as his best so far, but action movies as a whole are just dead to me? We all loved what Stallone and Schwarzenegger did to and for the genre, in the 80’s and 90’s, but didn’t the whole action movie format kind of peak in that era? How many twists on the genre can we put on this otherwise tired genre? The John Wick movies supposedly proved I am wrong. People were a buzz about them. “You have to see this next one. Do you want to see it? Do you want to see it with me? If this one is anywhere close to the first one, it’s a must-see.” So, I saw it, and as action movies go, it was really good, but I couldn’t have been more bored. Maybe there was a time when I found choreographed fight scenes exciting, but I can’t remember it. All scenes in movies require some suspension of disbelief, but we all know they’re going to win the fight. They are all so formulaic. 

To introduce his guest action-hero Steven Seagal to his show, Arsenio Hall had a great line, “This man could probably whip your tail with a french fry.” I’m sure Steven Seagal could probably beat me up, and I kind of don’t care,, but we’re talking about a man who played a character in a movie, and most of his physical exploits were choreographed with players executing moves that allowed him to punch them or kick in pre-planned moves. Does that mean he could beat me up with a french fry in real life? We all know they’re not fighting for real, of course, but we suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the choreography involved. If it’s not real, and all the moves by the main character and his adversaries are choreographed, aren’t we basically watching a ballet with some punching, kicking, and bullets thrown in? “But you’re male, and every male has just been intoxicated with fight scenes since about Bruce Lee. Why, because we’re males. It’s as every bit apart of us as our ring-a-ding-ding.” Well, then, I’m obviously not as male as you, because I’d prefer the verbal, cerebral exchanges we can hear in even the most average Woody Allen film over the finest choreographed fight scenes of the best Van Damme flick. 

The Car Chase   

Some say that the greatest car chase scene that ever took place in the history of cinema occurred in 1971’s French Connection. People still talk about this scene as if it’s one of the greatest scenes in movie history. They talk about how dangerous it was, and Screenrant.com writes that director “William Friedkin had no permission to film the car chase the way it was done, which is why The French Connection could never be made today.” They also drop a note about how the car accident in the scene was real, and Friedkin kept it in the movie to add to the scene’s gritty realism. I drop a big “who give a crud” thud. When I saw that that scene for the first time, before I knew anything about the hoopla and the hollering, I thought the scene ran too long. After hearing people gush about the scene in the decades since, I watched it again with a renewed sense, and I thought it ran too long. That scene, one car chase scene, runs approximately six minutes. About five minutes too long. “But you have to understand how difficult the logistics of the scene were,” they say. “You have to sink yourself into the drama of the moment, and how well it was edited to a perfect pulse pounding pace.” No, I don’t. I don’t care about the particulars of the artistry of the film-making, I just want to sit down and enjoy watching a movie. I also don’t plan on ever shooting a car chase scene, so why would I be influenced by anything involved in the shooting of it? I watch a movie to be entertained, and when a chase scene, or a fight scene, interrupts the pace of that movie, “because that’s what we love”, I now have the luxury of fast forwarding through it to see what happened.

The Bad Guy

Our familiarity with portrayals of bad guys began in preschool when our teacher put on a puppet show and introduced the bad guy, “And here’s comes mean Mr. Johnson,” “BOO!” we all shouted in unison. “All I care about is money!” she has mean Mr. Johnson say in her mean guy voice, as our throng of boos strengthened. It was fun and funny back then, but we fully grown, mature and responsible adults are still doing that today. When the bad guy enters our adult productions today, the writers will introduce him by having him kick a cute, little puppy down a flight of stairs, light a physically-impaired individual’s house on fire, or do some other equally heinous act such as declaring there are some virtues to profit. At some point in the production, he will declare that a side character isn’t pulling their weight in the company, and he will do it in such an over the top, mean, bad and dastardly way that it’s almost embarrassingly cheesy to watch. Enter our good guy, “C’mon man, that’s no way to talk to a person.” We all but cheer our good guy for saying what needed to be said, but doesn’t anyone else see this as the movie’s obnoxiously obvious way of endearing the main character to the audience?

I would submit that the characterizations of bad guys haven’t progressed much beyond that preschool puppet show portrayal of the mean Mr. Johnson bad guys. “Hey, if you don’t think money is important, I’d like to see you get along without it!” mean Mr. Johnsons say in modern, adult movies. “Boo!” we shout in unison. Most adults don’t openly boo in theaters, but do we avoid openly booing because we’ve matured past that impulse, or does decades of movie going let us know that the writers and directors of our beloved productions are going to make something awful to him? That’s what separates us from preschoolers, we know the movie makers are going to expose him as the bad guy he is, and we know he’s going to get his comeuppance. We’re not talking about comedies either, where it’s more acceptable to have exaggerated characters for comedic purposes. We’re talking about otherwise complex dramas that basically write Scooby-Doo bad guys as actual characters. “He’s going to get his comeuppance,” someone in the audience says, as if they’re watching a sporting event. He’s one of those “I told you,” guys who love to say they knew what was coming, even though it is as obvious as it was in our preschool puppet plays. As I wrote I don’t need, or even want, a complex, deep narrative on par with a Dostoyevsky novel, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some writers shake up these tedious, bullet point tropes that adhere to the 80’s cookie cutter characters that Scooby Doo made famous.    

My favorite illustration of this point comes from Quentin Tarantino: 

“Critics always really preferred Bill Murray movies to Chevy Chase movies,” Tarantino said. “However, it does seem as if the point of all the Bill Murray movies is that he’s this kind of hip, cool, curmudgeon, smartass guy, who in the last 20 minutes gets a transformation and becomes this nice guy. And almost apologizes for who he was the entire movie before that happened.” 

Tarantino continued with examples: “Stripes, Groundhog Day, Scrooged. The whole thing. For instance, Stripes. How does he go from where Warren Oates kicks his ass, deservedly kicks his ass…to where now he’s rallying the troops? Now, he’s getting their army on during the parade and now he’s leading a secret mission. Same thing with Groundhog Day. I mean, does anybody really think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray? Maybe it’s better for Andie MacDowell, but not for us as the viewer.”

“Yet, Chevy Chase movies don’t play that s***,” Tarantino said. “Chevy Chase is the same supercilious a**hole at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning. He never changes in his stuff…I mean, unless they have him playing a dope like he is in the Vacation movies. But when he’s playing like a Chevy character, he never apologizes for who he is, stays the same way through the whole film, and even if there’s a slight change, that’s not the whole point of the movie, like changing him into a nice, cuddly guy.”

Information Age and Movies

Another huge component of watching modern movies is all of the insider information we have at our disposal. Thanks to news aggregators, the internet in general, and the other chairs on late-night talk shows, we now know so much about movies that we crossed a tipping point of too much information about the production of a simple 90-minute movie. I used to find the information actors, directors, and everyone else involved in the production provided in the other chairs on late-night talk shows somewhat fascinating, but somewhere along the line I realized it’s all just self-imposed deification, and their sign to them that they made it. For some reason, we all want to know everything we can find about our definition of our royalty, and the roles they play in movies, and we can never get enough. I did. When the actor told me that they put weight on to play the role, I didn’t really care, but I considered it a worthwhile dedication to the role. When the host began to ask questions about the diet they used to add weight, I turned the channel. When the person in the other chair informed us that she didn’t wear make-up for their role, I didn’t care. When the host said, “You are very brave,” and he appeared to mean it, I turned the channel. When it was revealed in an aggregator, that this actor didn’t get along with that actor, their onscreen lover, we all learned that many considered working with that actor difficult. When we learned that the actor became so immersed in his method acting that he demanded everyone on set call him Weasel, because he’s playing Weasel, I found that fascinating at first. Then, when everyone copied that immersion technique, I found it trite, redundant, and a little pathetic and dumb. We learn that some actors aren’t nice, but others are. “It’s true. I know he’s a good guy, because he asked me my name when giving me an autograph, and he called me Harley from then on, and he even winked at my kid.” That director used this technique, this setting, those cameras, that soundtrack, and the movie studio budgeted it at such and such an amount, but as usual the artistically demanding director burned through that the first week. We still care about the quality of a movie, of course, but all these other late-night talk show talking points enhance the movie experience for us. Why? I honestly don’t understand how any of this information enhances your cinematic experience. You like a movie better, because you found out she’s nice, and you won’t go to see another movie, because you heard a report about how one time that star didn’t hold an elevator for an old lady carrying groceries? You might be a victim of too much information. 

Even with all that, I still love movies. I find a trip to the theater, a night at home with Netflix, Prime, etc., and a quality movie, a great evening. No matter how hard they try, they can never take that away from me.  

The Familiar Fiber

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“The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time,” Gary said. 

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t think it was that scary.”

“WHAT?!”

“It just didn’t reach me on that level,” I told him. “It was a really good movie. The acting, the plot believability, all that, but when it evolved to the scary scenes, I just wasn’t frightened. I expected it to scare the beans out of me, because everyone said it would, and maybe that was it. Maybe I sat there waiting for it to scare me in a way I’ve never been scared before.” 

Horror and comedy, more than any other genres, are about time and place, state of mind, and expectation. Expectations can ruin the best of the best, and if it were possible for me to watch The Exorcist without expectation, it might have terrified me. The same holds true with all genres to some extent, but expectation seems to affect comedy and horror more. 

If the author of a story, be it movie or book, is able to bring us in slowly, progressively, and strategically, they might bring us to that place, but it’s touch-and-go. Everyone from the writers to the director, to the editor, and everyone else involved might think they have a hit, but no one knows how an audience will react. 

Some audience members stubbornly resist. “This isn’t real,” they say with their arms folded, “and I’m not buying it.” Of course, it’s not real, but it’s your job as an audience member, if you want to have any fun, is to suspend your disbelief for just a moment to get in to the movie. I did not stubbornly resist The Exorcist. I wanted it to scare me. I tried to invest everything I had into that movie, but it just didn’t reach me on that level.

The more common description of a movie reaching us on another level is “striking a nerve”. We could also twist the term ‘striking a nerve’ to describe how a movie gets under our skin, though some reserve that term for something annoying. The point is that quality horror flicks dig past the superficial, goosebump layer of the epidermis into the nerve, and tap into the axons, the cord-like groups of fibers in the center of a nerve, that we call the familiar fibers. If we want to move the illustration further, we could say that the great horror movies reach into the neuromuscular junction, but you get the point. If we’ve always had a deep seated fear of clowns, for instance, Stephen King’s It gave us one of the most horrific experiences we’ve ever had reading the book or watching the movie. Those with a lifelong fear of dogs found Cujo one of the scariest book/movies for the same reasons. For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time, no movie tapped into my familiar fibers better than The Blair Witch Project. 

“That’s the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen,” my friend said, soon after seeing it, “and your movie recommendations will forever be tainted by the fact that you suggested that I waste my time and money on that stupid, stupid movie.”

I recommended The Blair Witch Project to everyone I knew, and they all, pretty much, had the same reaction. I found their reactions inexplicable, because they shared my taste in movies, and we were always on the lookout for the next great horror. I thought I found it in The Blair Witch Project. I thought it was a masterpiece, and while I figured they probably wouldn’t love it as much as I did, I didn’t expect them to question my taste in movies forever after. After wrestling with this, I eventually came to the conclusion that time and place are everything for some movies. (Expectations, as I wrote, is another huge movie killer, and I may have done this with The Blair Witch Project, as others did for me with The Exorcist.)

The time and place element obviously made a huge impact on my opinion of the The Blair Witch Project. I was in a theater, on opening night, at the midnight hour, with a bunch of teenagers who wouldn’t shut up. When they’re chitter-chatter, and the giggles (those blasted gigglers!) lasted 20 minutes into the flick, I thought I wasted good money. I didn’t think the giggles would ever end. They did. 20 minutes into the movie, The Blair Witch Project achieved what I considered impossible at the time: it silenced over 100 teenagers. The transformation from claustrophobic noise to claustrophobic silence ended up giving that silence a little extra weight. The sudden, creepy silence heightened my senses, and managed to narrow my perspective to tunnel vision so well that I was almost spiritually immersed in the movie. 

I could smell the burning wood from the campfire. I wouldn’t say that I was ever afraid of camping, or the darkness in the trees surrounding us, but the environment always creeped me out a little. The environment, and the compulsion to speak in whispers, is probably what makes ghost stories told by campfire so creepy. My goosebumps were always out before they started their campfire stories, and they didn’t have to do much to finish the job. The makers of Blair Witch tapped into a level of familiarity for me so well that I could smell the burning wood in the middle of the movie theater. I was there with the characters of the movie, in all ways but one. 

Then, the screaming started. I don’t know if the young girls in the theater, seated over my shoulder, took classes to help them reach the registers they did, or if their talent was granted by God, but I had my hand on my heart on more than one occasion. Those teenagers couldn’t have done a much better job if they orchestrated a plan to scare the hell out of me.

Based on that experience alone, I now tell anyone interested in watching a horror movie to try to duplicate my experience. “Even if you have to pay for the admission of a bunch of screaming, teenage girls. It might run into hundreds of dollars, but if you enjoy horror as much as I do, you might just have a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Follow the steps I did, have them annoy you in the beginning, then tell them to wrap you in silence so weighted that if someone drops a straw on the ground, everyone will turn around to see what the hell just happened. Then, in those key moments, have these young, teenage girls scream as loud as they can in your ear, in a manner that rattles you to bone.” 

Another element that separated me from my arm-folding brethren when it came to The Blair Witch Project was that I walked into that theater wanting to believe it. “But supernatural witches aren’t real,” Gary said to explain why he thought the movie was such an epic waste of his time and money. 

“Hey, if you’re having problems sleeping at night, because you think witches, vampires, or werewolves are knocking at your door, I’ll tell you they’re not real,” I told Gary. “If we’re about to watch a movie about them though, I’m going to pretend that they’re real for however long that movie lasts. It’s not the moviemaker’s job to convince you that they’re real. It’s your job to pretend, so that you can have a little fun in life. When I watch a movie, I grant the artist access to my innards. It’s a frame of mind I grant the actors and the director, and it’s their job to avoid screwing it up.” 

Not only was I there, smelling the campfire, but prior to entering the theater that night, I saw the movie’s faux documentary on Syfy, and I was a frequent guest on the The Blair Witch Project webpage. It was my first experience with web marketing, and that might have added a chunk to the believability for me. I can’t remember any of the details of the website, save one. One little nugget grabbed me. It was a note that suggested someone found five cannisters of film in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland that the characters created, and the movie makers edited it down to 90 minutes. The Blair Witch Project was also my introduction to the cinematic technique some call “found footage,” “lost footage,” or “shaky cam.”   

As a result of all of the above, I now move my listing of The Blair Witch Project as the greatest horror movie ever made to one of the best experiences, I’ve ever had watching a film. It was a time and place experience that that no film maker will ever be able to replicate for me, for whatever the opposite of baggage is, as in he brought some baggage with him into that situation, I had that, and it wasn’t just an open mind. I was supercharged for this movie, because I wanted to be scared. I wanted this movie to be true, minus the murder of course, but that desire, combined with all of the above, is what made The Blair Witch Project one of my favorite movie experiences of all time. 

I’ve yet to watch The Blair Witch Project a second time, in a more traditional setting, because knowledge and facts have a stubborn way of ruining emotional experiences, and I don’t want to ruin one of the best experiences I’ve ever had watching a movie. 

The big debate at the time was whether or not The Blair Witch Project actually happened. Most of us appreciated it as a clever marketing campaign, but others believed that it was an actual event and the actors involved actually died in the film. If you said you enjoyed The Blair Witch Project back then, you were lumped in with “the believers”. I believed The Blair Witch Project for the 81 minutes it played on the screen, just like I believed in ghosts during Poltergeist, that cars could come to life in Christine, and that aliens were abducting people in Fire in the Sky. None of these movies made a dent in my overall belief system, but I thought all of them (save Christine) were great movies. When the furor over believers vs. nonbelievers died down, 86% on of the over 250,000 fans rated The Blair Witch Project positively on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% of critics did. I don’t post these numbers to say I was right, and the naysayers were wrong. I do think it validates my argument that once we gain some distance from silly arguments, we can see a good movie for what it is. 

The citizen critic can now post reviews on everything from the best horrors and comedies to the best and worst plumbers on various websites. We can recommend others watch, don’t watch; read, don’t read; and don’t even bother calling this fence specialist. There’s nothing on the line for the citizen critic, as they don’t benefit from a positive review, and they see no ramifications from a negative one. Some of us suspect that professional critics benefit from positive reviews in ways that lead us to believe the citizen critic is more honest. We’re probably wrong in most cases, but we tend to trust citizen reviews more than professional ones for this reason. The citizen critic is not afraid to let the internet know what they really think. The problem with their reviews though, is that tastes and experiences are so relative and subjective. If someone says the subject of the movie “is not real, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool,” they’re going to give it one star. One person’s The Blair Witch Project is another person’s THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT!!! Comedy is as subjective as horror, and both are relative to the person, and they’re subjective and relative to our experiences in life. One citizen critic might find the humor in Peter Seller’s humor in The Pink Panther dated, but we might find their current favorite comedy too juvenile. They might find Pulp Fiction so personally offensive that they wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Gone with the Wind might be overrated, time pieces that haven’t aged well. The point is, we can now find negative reviews for every movie, album, and electrician, and if we read them, and heed their warning, we might never watch classic films, read classic literature, or listen to some of the greatest albums ever made. As an artist who tries to tap into those familiar neuromuscular junctions, I now empathize with anyone who tries to create art. As such, I try to keep my reviews, objective, impersonal, and constructive. 

[ If you enjoy this article, there will be more available soon at The Unfunny, and be sure to subscribe to continue to read articles from Rilaly.] 

Demystify This!

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Everything you believe in is some trumped up idea developed to foster your illusions. Don’t believe me, I’ll prove it. Give me something you believe in. Anything. Big or small. What defines you? What drives your passion? What makes you tick? Great, now back up and give me some room, because the shrapnel flies when I start in on dispassionate observations. 

Led Zeppelin was one of the greatest band of all time right? Yeah, they’re frauds, and I was onto them at a very young age. I knew there was no way one guy could come up with all that brilliant music. I know, the other guys came up with some of the music, but most of the credits for writing the compositions go to Jimmy Page. I knew, even at a very young age, that there was no way one man could come up with that much brilliance. I was a dumb kid at the time, so I thought he sold his soul to the devil. I was eventually vindicated when we all found out how much material he stole. They say he only stole some songs and some riffs. I read a report that suggested that of the first four albums, he/they stole ten songs by some measure, debatably, arguably, and whatever qualifiers we need to use to avoid incriminating lawsuits. I say we don’t know the full extent of his/their theft. I say they’re damned thieves who probably stole more than we’ll ever know. Look it up, there are lawsuits all over the place for infringements, unauthorized borrowing, and outright theft. I was so excited when I read that. It was vindication. All you silly idiots who believed that they were geniuses were wrong. Look at you! Are your crying? I enjoy the taste of tears. I don’t know if disappointment makes them extra salty, or if I just enjoy the taste of victory. Do you mind if I lick them off your face?  

Who’s your favorite actor? You know what, don’t answer that. We tell our people our favorite actor with pride. We talk about the best movie from their catalog, and we say that it was their movie. Have you ever seen the list of credits listed in your average movie? There are at least hundreds of names? How many people were responsible for that movie? What percentage of that movie’s success was due to the actor you love? They’re vehicles for the lines, the action, and the drama, but how much time do they sit in vehicles before they’re called upon to do a scene? They don’t call it the-hurry-up-and-wait industry for nothing.

The production crew hates calling the lead actor to the set, so they spend most of their day readying the scene for them. They hire stand-ins to get the shot right, and they work with the screenwriter to make sure the lines won’t cause the actor to have a hissy fit. The actor steps from their trailer, says the lines a couple times, and they all move on. Most actors hate walking onto an ill-prepared set. They don’t want to stand around to make sure the lighting is right, and the scene is perfect, so the production crew stresses each other out to make sure everything is perfect for the entrance of the actor. The actor finally enters and delivers the line, as if it’s on the fly. It’s not my intention to suggest that convincing a group of people that you’re another person is easy, or that I could do it. I’m talking about the audiences reaction to it. I’m talking about how we immerse ourselves in movies to such a degree that we believe they said the line they read. We do that. We all do it. We say, “You know it’s like Jack Nicholson says …” He said it, sure, but he read it. He memorized the line, but he didn’t think it up. A screenwriter thought up that line. Now, Nicholson probably said it with more flair and charisma than the screenwriter could’ve, but how many takes does the production crew have to sit through before he got the line just right? They’re frauds perpetuating a myth that we love.

My favorite recording artist was “hardly there” in the production of my favorite album. “What?” It was largely a creation in the minds of a producer, the guitarist, an expert mixer, and a number of other credited players who helped my favorite artist produce the product I’ve loved for decades. I learned an important lesson the day I read that: Ignorance is bliss. If we want to continue to love an artist, particularly an actor or a musician, we shouldn’t read websites or watch documentaries that dive deep into our favorite artistic creations from them. 

How about Stephen King? Do you read him? Yeah, he stole the idea for one of his most popular books Misery from an Erik Keene’s dead aunt? Our initial inclination is that Erik Keene was a delusional whack job looking for a way to harass King and his family, and while that might be true with Keene, how many struggling writers submit rejected ideas to publishers only to have the core idea of that rejected manuscript show up in that publisher’s favorite author’s library? How many authors simply run out of ideas? How many writer’s blocks have ended with a stolen manuscript? How many big time authors were so frustrated by their writer’s block that they threatened to retire? How many desperate publishers, bent on keeping a big name, help them come up with ideas? Where did they get those ideas? Have they ever sorted through the slush pile of rejected compositions and come up with an idea for your favorite author. I’m saying this happens all the time, I’m not, but has it ever happened? Does it happen more often than we know?  

How about Walter Payton? If you love football, you know he’s declared one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. Have you ever seen the guys from the 70’s and 80’s trying to chase him down and tackle him? They’re so little. With the size, strength, and speed of the NFL today, Walter Payton would probably be a third-down, situational back, nothing more. You might think that’s idiotic, but this is what we do when we attempt to tear down everything you believe in. We take your favorite bands, your favorite authors, and your favorite athletes, and we tear them apart. Nugget by nugget, brick by brick. This is our way of saying we don’t believe in you anymore, and we’ve broken free of any shackles we once had by believing in you. We have nothing to rebel against anymore, all of our parents are dead, so rebelling against you and everything you believe in gives us gas to dispel that feeling of individuality we never strove for in our teens in the manner most kids did.

There’s poetry in baseball, and baseball is poetry, punctuated by plays like “The Catch”. Willie Mays made “The Catch”. It was poetic right? Wrong. I’ve watched that catch so many times over the years, trying to figure out the big deal. I know it happened in the World Series and all that, but people say it was one of the greatest catches of all time. Have you seen that catch? I thought it was barehanded for whatever reason. It wasn’t. It was just a catch, and a catch we probably see a couple of times a year in major league baseball. Hell, I think I did it once in softball. It wasn’t a special catch by any means. 

You might not care about Willie Mays, but do you care about the Nebraska Cornhuskers? Yeah, they’re frauds too. You probably still celebrate the years they won three national championships in four years, but I say the only reason they won them is that they had such an easy schedule. Admit it, they were frauds. Everything you believe in is fraudulent.  

Demystify the past? What are you talking about demystify the past? I’m talking truth here brotha. I have no skin in this game. I want to know the truth? Why don’t you? You and the collective ‘we’ have trumped up these otherwise marginal people and accomplishments, and it sends a tingle up my leg when I’m able to pop a hole in your delusions. You’re all so ridiculous. You believe in things, and it makes you happy. Your passions breed a sense of fulfillment, even when what you know they’re false. That’s why I feel the need to correct the record. I don’t allow myself to believe in false things. Why do you? You can try to turn this back on me, but what are you going to squash? I don’t believe in anything. I have no passions, so good luck. It makes me feel smarter to know more than you and all of your silly idiot friends who believe in things and develop passions.  

The past wasn’t as great as you romantic types thought. It’s a narrative for the romantics. You’re not a romantic? Look at all the silly people you believe in. Why do we believe in people? Why do we trump up their rather routine accomplishments, because they’re about us. We’ve found a way to live vicariously through their accomplishments to idealize who we wish we could be. We treat diminishment of their accomplishments as a personal insult. 

What’s the flip side of the coin? You think that by diminishing others’ accomplishments, I hope to relieve myself of any disappointments I have in my life? All right, I’ll admit that my life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would but who’s has? I have some accomplishments in life, but they pale in comparison to these false gods you worship. They’re silly people. You’re silly, and we’re all quite boring, so we assign poetic majesty to the little things and these little people did who supposedly did big things, so we have something to believe in. 

I see what you’re doing though. You’re trying to find a super-secret part of me to analyze. You’re trying to find my motivation, so you can dismiss my findings. Go for it. Smarter people than you have tried. They were wrong, and you’ll be wrong. This is not about me. It’s about you. I’m a blank slate, an empty vessel, like the actors you adore. Have you ever heard the theory that the more devoid of a core personality an actor is, the better they are at filling that void with a fictional personality? That’s me. I have no motivation, except to prove you, and your fellow romantics, wrong. I find that so satisfying that it quenches a need. I don’t get passionate about silly things. Why do you? Why do you believe in anything? I seek to question that which you believe in, until it leads to an ultimate deconstruction, and I hope to help you ultimately reach a higher sphere of consciousness where nothing is real. It’s about you. It’s not about me. I have no skin in this game. I’m a dispassionate observer who believes that you romantics who seek poetry and majesty in the past are just plain silly. In the battle between mind and heart, most of us know that our passions will not withstand scrutiny. I dismantle these beliefs, because I think intelligence dispels belief.