Loneliness, Learnedness, and the Ultimate Acquired Taste

Yes, I have used this picture before, but seriously, can you see it too many times?

I recently watched Citizen Kane for the first time in six years. It was a mind-blowing experience. In between the last time I watched Citizen Kane and this viewing, I have watched something approaching 400 new movies, read numerous books on movies, hundreds—nay, thousands—of reviews, essays and articles, and in general attempted to actually learn how to watch movies. Whereas the first time I saw Citizen Kane I merely sat there, and the second time I stared at the screen attempting—and mostly failing—to discern what was so great about it, this time I was enraptured. It was a feverish joy, watching this most famous of films. Every shot was stunning, every cut was new, every line was fresh, every shadow was crisp, every angle sharp, every tone pitch perfect—I don’t know if I have ever been so blown away by a movie, much less one I had seen a half a dozen times before.

Well, duh.

Citizen Kane is a fantastic movie, you are saying to yourself. What is so new about that? Nothing, of course. It was fantastic when he made it and now, when critics didn’t like it, when critics did like it, when audiences didn’t like it and when they did, when I didn’t really care about it and now that I do. But watching it again—and then, even more joyously, watching Roger Ebert’s commentary—made me think of a few things, the most important of which was obviously God. To explain this, I will have to explain my movie-watching story. I apologize for the personal anecdote; I don’t like it either.

When I first began my movie-trek, I liked movies that mostly everyone likes. No, I wouldn’t have enjoyed Transformers (Written By No One!) even then, but my tastes were relatively undiscerning and if they threw a few spaceships up on the screen I would probably be fine with it. Also, I didn’t particularly like old movies. There is a stink of outmoded narratives, affected acting and cheesy dialogue attached to old movies which it was hard to overcome. I might pretend to appreciate one here and then, but let’s face it, I didn’t. Part of this is due to the fact that most old movies—like most movies in general—do stink, and that I hadn’t gotten around to watching the good ones yet (why, why was I watching countless carbon-copy John Wayne movies when I could have been watching Red River or Rio Bravo?!). But much of it sprung from the fact that I didn’t have a clue how to watch movies. Of course, I was totally oblivious as to this fact. “Not know how to watch movies?” How can someone not know how to watch movies? You just sit there and stare at the screen, for crying out loud.

Then a few little things happened, in no particular order. I saw Batman Begins, and I didn’t like it at all. This was weird. It was a superhero movie—which I usually enjoy—and it wasn’t terribly cheesy. Why didn’t I like it? Why did I sit through it but not enjoy it? Was something wrong with me or the movie? I couldn’t answer that question.

Then, in my freshmen detective fiction class, we watched the eminently watchable John Huston masterpiece The Maltese Falcon. What’s this? An old movie with snappy dialogue, sordid plot and decent acting? Where did that come from?!

Then, in my freshmen film class: for an exam we had to watch a shot of a film and describe it using the terminology we had learned in class. The terminology itself was helpful if not overly important (it makes things easier to articulate, not easier to understand) but the notion of having to watch a shot and really figure out what made it what it is helped me think about watching a movie in a whole new way. The fact that the shot was the opening long take to Welles' Touch of Evil was even better. Now, when watching Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, I was able to express to myself why a certain shot was so amazing. (The first shot of them racing away in the mini-van, for those wondering). I had always loved that shot, but now I could express why I did.

Then, the kicker had to be Barry Lyndon. Over Spring Break of my freshmen year, Left Thumb and I (yes, he does exist) watched Barry Lyndon. I had never seen a film anything like it. Even my newfound vocabulary was at a loss to describe the assault of pulchritude that this film made on the eyes. I had no idea how to explain what I just saw, but I knew it was amazing.

So I decided I was going to watch movies. I didn’t do it overnight, per se, but I decided over time that this would be a hobby of mine. And so it became. It was helped along by the fact that, being lonely and socially inept at college, movies were something I could do on my own, in those many depressing lengths of time during which I had nothing else to do. Even when I did finally meet some friends, the movie-watching habit stuck.

But I still didn’t know how to watch movies! I would watch certain movies—like, say, the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple—and like them but not know why. Or I would watch others, such as William Wyler’s Sunset Boulevard, and know that I should think I was watching something important… but was I watching something important? I had no idea! If I hadn’t been told I never would have gotten past the twenty minute mark. I was watching movies out of a vague sense of duty to finally master them, but when someone told me that they didn’t like Sunset Boulevard (or countless other films) because it was boring, I didn’t really know what to say. They were kind of boring.

Well, suffice it to say that watching Citizen Kane last night was like coming full circle. After years of movie-watching and reading and writing and discussing, Sunset Boulevard is not boring to me in the least. Stagecoach is not just another black-and-white western, it is an exciting work of art. Citizen Kane isn’t just a myth, a legend, a movie you claim is great because you’re supposed to—it is actually, legitimately, one of my favorite movies.

Now, not all people are called to love movies. When someone tells me they just don’t “get” Blade Runner or that Kill Bill is the greatest movie ever made, I just assume they don’t know how to watch movies. And that is fine, not everyone can learn everything. I don’t know the first thing about wines and probably never will; it is up to others to detect the hint of vanilla and persimmon. Movies, like almost anything, are an acquired taste, and everyone can’t acquire every taste.

But there is one thing we are all called to acquire a taste for, the Ultimate Acquired Taste, if you will: God.

Due to our fallen nature, we don’t exactly have a “taste” for God. There is a deep seated longing somewhere in us, but most of us can go for quite some time ignoring God, pretending He doesn’t exist, or perhaps worst of all, pretending we are doing all the right things (much like I might have pretended to love Citizen Kane in the past) while doing nothing to actually bring that love about. I fall victim to this more than anyone I know (which makes sense because we do tend to be most aware of our own sinfulness). For quite a long period of time (i.e. my entire life) I would say things like: “Well, I just don’t feel anything. I go to Mass, but I don’t feel anything. I pray, but I don’t feel anything. I sin, and unfortunately I don’t feel that bad about it. I can’t do anything about the way that I feel, though. So it isn’t my fault.”

Isn’t my fault. We love saying that. That is only true in the same sense that not understanding movies or wine wasn’t my fault. I didn’t enjoy good movies because I hadn’t trained myself to love them. I don’t enjoy good wines because I haven’t taught myself anything about them. But while movie-watching is not a pre-requisite for Heavenly bliss, and wine-tasting is not something Saint Peter will probably be asking me about, loving God, loving what is good, and coming to hate sin are probably going to come up in the conversation at some point.

And it is learning to love God and hate sin which seems so obviously paralleled to me in movie watching. You can put forth anything you want here: music, movies, dance, food, economics, sports (baseball, in particular!)—you name it. To really learn to love something, you can’t just pick it up and say “how does this feel?” Picking it up repeatedly without ever going further than that is no better, and as Cardinal Henry Newman would say, it might even be worse, as you have convinced yourself you are doing what it takes to improve yourself when in fact you are stuck in a rut.

It starts with grace, obviously. In my own personal movie-story, the analogue for grace would be those first few encounters. Batman Begins, The Maltese Falcon, the exam where I had to analyze a shot, Barry Lyndon. Moments of movie-grace, if you will, that I did nothing to earn. They just happened. It is similar in our life of faith, except perhaps that God is pouring grace on us at a much higher rate.

Also, suffering and/or self denial is another important aspect. Without those constant lonely nights in Tower C, do I ever start watching Pulp Fiction, Seven Samurai, Paths of Glory or Miller’s Crossing? Probably not. Even though it seemed like a pointless piece of crapitude at the time, that loneliness meant something in the end.

Then, of course, after the journey is started, you have to do the right thing even though you don’t feel like it and sinning doesn’t seem so bad. You hve to make an actual, radical change to your life. And the amazing, stunning thing, is this: without you even realizing it, after a while, the path of righteousness begins to excite you and the sin does begin to seem hateful and opprobrious (because it is). The excuse that we don’t have control over our feelings doesn’t work any better with God than it does with movies. If I was willing to spend years of reading, watching and thought to become fluent in movies, shouldn’t I be willing to spend all the time in the world to become fluent in Holiness?

The particularly crazy part is this: I understand movies better now than I ever have, and yet only now do I realize how little I understand them, and how much there is which I don’t know. The same thing happens in our faith. The closer we get to God, the more we realize how much closer we need to become!

It often seems downright impossible to do what God is asking us to do. But then again, it seemed unthinkable that I would ever understand Sunset Boulevard in such a way that I actually enjoyed watching a movie like that. The discipline it takes to learn movies is unsurprising. What is surprising is that we don’t expect to have to do the same thing on a much larger scale with the Most Important Thing in Life. If we want to love God and hate sin it takes an enormous amount of work. The surprising thing is that by the end, the work itself becomes joyous, and we no longer understand what took us so long. We can empathize with those who do not understand Citizen Kane, and we can empathize with those who find God so hard (as we all do, at times; God is much harder than movies) but with each little thing we learn, the road becomes clearer and the burden lighter. Hopefully, by the end, we will all be watching Citizen Kane with God, wondering what on Earth took us so long.

~Right Thumb~