We'll Forget It For You Wholesale
Wishing for selective movie memory erasure
This past weekend I watched THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT on the big screen. It was my first time watching the film in a theater since 1999 and my first time watching it all the way through in at least twenty years.
I was obsessed with the movie when THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT came out. It was the spring of 1999 and my family had just bought a video camera and installed AOL onto the family computer. It was MALLRATS, though, that set off the chain reaction in my brain; like somebody lighting a Black Cat and throwing it into a mailbox. My life exploded and has never been the same.
I remember watching MALLRATS on ABC (yup, MALLRATS on broadcast television hits slightly different than the real thing, but I didn’t know any better). It was a Saturday night, I was home with nothing to do (per usual) and the movie’s premise intrigued me. As I sat in front of the 19-inch television set in my bedroom, I felt like David Bowman in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY - the universe flashing before my unprepared eyes. I had never seen a movie like MALLRATS before - and by that, I mean I had never seen a movie that pandered so directly to my narrow interests (comic books!) and my underdeveloped emotions (emotionally stunted teenage boy!) It was love at first sight.
About a week after that first viewing of MALLRATS, I rented CLERKS from the local video store and, newly obsessed with the film’s director, I began spending time on NewsAskew.com, the premiere website dedicated to Kevin Smith news and rumors. That led to me visiting AIN’T IT COOL NEWS which led to my discovering the films of Sam Raimi, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, and the list goes on. I had fallen down the rabbit hole of film bro geekdom and there was no digging myself out of this self-made pit.
It was the one-two punch of watching CLERKS and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT that made me want to become a filmmaker. These were two crudely made films - sewn together by emerging filmmakers in such a way that you could see the instructions one would need to follow to trace their footsteps. I started picking up my family’s video recorder and making movies with my friends - but more than that, I started to study the movies I obsessed over.
Previous to that summer, I’d watch most movies while only half paying attention. I’d sprawl out in front of the television with a puzzle or a sketchpad and watch movies with a quarter of my available concentration intact while I indulged in other pleasures. If I were to become a filmmaker, though, I needed to study the movies I enjoyed to learn how to reverse engineer them. I not only watched my favorite movies multiple times in short succession, but I would also watch every special feature to be found on the DVDs - especially the commentary tracks.
Looking back at the amount of time I spent watching featurettes about the type of wood used to make the faux White House in X2: X-MEN UNITED or listening to a commentary track for ZOOLANDER in which Ben Stiller spent the majority of the time mocking the kind of person who would listen to a commentary track - I just get sad. That was valuable time I’ll never get back. But, as a 15-year-old wannabe Kevin Smith, it was essential homework. Homework that was far more essential, in fact, than my actual homework, which I often skipped out on doing in favor of time spent watching movies.
The movies I watched between 1999 and 2007 are some of my favorite movies of all time - I was deeply in love with cinema in a way I had never felt before and do not feel now. I lived and breathed movies and the films I watched during this transformative period in my life left a permanent mark on my very being. I watched films like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or CLERKS over and over and over again - to the point where I practically had the movies memorized.
Unfortunately, what this means now is that I have become completely calloused to some of my favorite movies. I love DONNIE DARKO, for example. It’s a deeply important movie to me but I have seen it so many times that I can not bear the thought of watching it once more. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, despite me having obsessed over it as a teenager, left me cold on Friday night during my revisit. Instead of losing myself in the movie, like I so often was able to do as a teenager, I found myself wondering how long it took for the three protagonists to completely devour their marshmallow ration.
I wish I could forget films. I wish the technology from ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (another movie I was obsessed with during this period) existed and I could erase the very specific parts of my brain that contained any memories of watching and enjoying my favorite films. I just want to watch these movies again for the first time. I want to enjoy them with fresh eyes and fall in love with them all over again.
Well, unfortunately, Lacuna Inc. does not exist. The good news is that there are a lot of other movies out there in the world.
Seriously. A lot of them. More than I will ever be able to watch in my lifetime.
I don’t revisit movies as much as I used to. I try my best to put at least half a decade between viewings of a movie I particularly love. More so, I have a small list of titles - including THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT - I’m going to try not to revisit for at least 15 years, if not longer. I can’t forget a movie through science but - at the rate my memory is going - if I wait long enough maybe I can fall in love with the movies that shaped me all over again naturally.
At the very least, if I wait long enough, maybe I’ll be able to watch my kid watch these movies for the first time - an experience, I imagine, that’s as close as you can get to watching a movie with fresh eyes yourself.
God, I hope my future kid likes Kevin Smith movies…