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Life from the Sticky Seats Posting Date: May 5 2008 1:57AM Trees measure their growth in rings. They can look back – well, actually the lumberjack who cuts them down can look at the rings of the trees and see how many years have passed since the tree began its life and generally speaking, how good each year was.
Knowing that the human body is composed of up to 68 percent water and trees are composed of up to 60 percent water, that means that humans and trees are pretty much the same, hydrologically speaking. This, in turn, means that humans have 60 percent chance of having rings too, though they may be metaphorical rings, granted.
Some people take the whole rings thing perhaps a little too literally and emblazon life milestones on their skin with a tattoo. New girlfriend, new baby, new round of tetanus shots? All good reasons for a new tattoo. Other people take photographs or write a journal or collect T-shirts.
I don’t have any of those systems. I’m too scared to get a tattoo, too absent-minded to carry a camera, too lazy to write a journal and too fashion-conscious to keep any article of clothing for more than five years unless it happens to have buttons or be a pair of beige pants.
Instead, I collect movies. Looking back at the movies you went to see – not rented on VHS or laser disc, not caught on late-night TV, but watched in a movie theatre – tells you a lot about your life in that particular year.
You can tell if it’s a good year … like 1987 when I went to La Bamba with Sherry Black, The Princess Bride with Elizabeth Sutton and Full Metal Jacket with Tracy Ross (which wasn’t a date; we were friends … for the record, Full Metal Jacket is a bad date film, both for the disturbing themes and violence as well as for the Matthew Modine factor … just letting you know in case it gets re-released).
You can tell if it’s a bad year … like 2000 when two of the best movies I paid money to see were The Perfect Storm starring Mark Wahlberg and U-571 starring … wait for it … Jon Bon Jovi. I paid money to watch Marky Mark die in a gigantic digital wave and the guy who sang “My Guitar Lies Bleeding in My Arms” die in a submarine … at least I think he dies in that movie. Sorry if I ruined the ending for you.
Movies, you see, are uniquely qualified to comment on our lives, much more so than television programs, records/CD’s or books. Movies, uniquely among today’s most popular media, are a collective, social experience. In this way, the movies you see comment on your social life of the time. For example, guess which year I had a girlfriend: 1996, the year I paid to watch Independence Day, Mission: Impossible and The Rock (twice) or 1995, the year I saw The American President, Sabrina, and The Bridges of Madison Country?
Reviewing your life’s movies makes you remember that you actually saw Back to the Future in 1985 at a drive-in that’s now a bunch of townhouses and She-Devil in 1990 at a theatre which is now a Canadian Tire. You saw The Shadow in 1994 by yourself at a movie theatre in Halifax, the first time you had ever been to a movie alone, and you bought a ticket in 1983 to Mr. Mom in cinema one, hoping to sneak into the restricted Risky Business in cinema two.
Of course, you can also look back on the movies that wasted your time (The Matrix Revolutions during which your friend John actually fell asleep during the big car chase) and you can look back on the movies that made you buy a BMX bike (ET: The Extraterrestrial – 1982), made you buy a soundtrack (Walk The Line – 2005), made you buy several action figures (Star Wars – 1997), made you laugh (A Fish Called Wanda – 1988), made you cry (Field of Dreams – 1989), and made you fall in love, somewhat irrationally, with Linda Kozlowski (Crocodile Dundee – 1986). She married Paul Hogan, you know. |
