'A More Real World Than Ours'

For several months my oldest son has been watching all the movies, nearly a century of them, to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The plan is to write up his findings in time for this year’s Oscars. I’ve never paid much attention to the awards and neither has he, until now. One assumes, as with the Nobel Prize for Literature, that most winners are worth avoiding, but even the Oscars get it right on occasion – Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, the first two Godfather pictures. Over Thanksgiving, Josh and I watched two of the winners – Marty (1955) and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). The latter is especially good. 

My son’s exercise has revealed several things about my own changing relationship with movies. Seeing them in theatrical release has never been less central to my  experience, and that’s a shame because I once loved not just movies but the seductive ritual of moviegoing. The last Oscar-winning film I saw in the theater was Million Dollar Baby (2004), which was awful. The most recent Best Picture winner I’ve seen is No Country for Old Men, from 2007, and that was by way of a streaming service. The winning movies for the 2010’s are a void. I sense movies are no longer made primarily for adults. And yet, there was a time, as an undergraduate, when I saw five or six films each week – in film classes, in free films shown on campus (Duck Soup, Boudu Saved from Drowning, Psycho) and in the two commercial theaters in my university town.    

 

My moviegoing would seem to have more in common with earlier generations. L.E. Sissman was born twenty-four years before me. In his second book, Scattered Returns (1969), the second section, “A War Requiem,” is arranged in five movements with thirty-two subsections. The poem’s scheme is a forty-year sampler of American life starting with the Great Depression, thematically bracketed by World War I and Vietnam. The scaffolding of “A War Requiem” is Sissman’s American life. He was born in Detroit on New Year’s Day 1928.

 

In the sixth poem of the first movement, “Rosedale Theater, 1938,” he captures what I remember as the romance of movies. In it, he sees the original production of Mutiny on the Bounty, with Charles Laughton, which won Best Picture in 1935:

 

“Waves

Of raw sensation break upon each white

Face that reflects the action, and our ears

Eavesdrop upon the commerce of a more

Real world than ours.”