Chekhov's Mistress

How Literature Makes Me a Better Movie Watcher

by Bud Parr

I was just writing to a friend in San Mateo about some of my favorite movies. Last weekend I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and loved it. That’s no surprise because it was written by Charlie Kaufman, one of my top three film writers/makers, the other two being the Cohen Brothers (counting as one) and Terry Gilliam. I love all these filmmakers for their mind-trippyness and playful inventiveness.



In that vain I also like David Lynch, but I think his films are more mind-trippy for shock value and thus less memorable – although outside of “Seinfeld”, I haven’t faithfully watched a tv show since “Twin Peaks.”



My friend, in reply, commented on “Eternal Sunshine…” with “I’d have to watch it again to understand all it had to offer.”



I didn’t feel that way after watching the movie, so her statement sparked a question in my mind: Am I just smart?



No, that’s not it, and I’m not being modest, but I don’t think it’s intelligence that makes these unconquerably smart movies enjoyable. In fact, I think it’s the opposite.



I think that it takes a certain comfort with ignorance to fully enjoy films like these. If you sat through the second half of “Mulholland Drive” wondering what the hell happened after that box thing, you had no chance to enjoy the experience.



That “comfort with ignorance” for me comes from reading great literature. I know that I sound as though I’m jumping off the deep-end of oxymoronacy, but it is not until you have shuddered at the mastery of Melville or Proust or Joyce or Tolstoy that you can claim comfort in not knowing – because it is then that you see that there is no hope in doing so. I would bet that even these authors, these demi-gods, don’t even understand everything in their own creations.



On the other side of that equation, literature also gives you a stronger sense of metaphor and allusion that doesn’t come out so much in other media. Sometimes the filmmakers have to make it shoutingly obvious, like the frogs in “Magnolia,” or Kaufman’s Jeckyllian double in “Adaptation.” Other times they are more subtle: perhaps the biblical allusions in “Amores Perros” or (again the Bible) the Adam and Eve story in Neil Labute’s “The Shape of Things.”



In Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman breaks the premier rule of science fiction writers: when you change history you have to account for all of the resulting implications. Several of the main characters have part of their memories erased (nothing revealing here) and then have to confront that “lacuna” when they find out. Those events are totally irreconcilable, particularly because each end up with legacies to their memories they no longer have, but the way the movie unfolds it becomes a metaphor for the selectivity of memory in real life.



I’ll stop here because this is more of a conversation topic than something to write about, which in doing implies neat conclusions. But I hope it suffices to say that I am intrigued by the small set of movies that have literary qualities – I don’t just mean good – I mean the depth and crawl of a great book. Like with so many things, it’s impressive when someone can masterly say so much in something as short as a film.



IMDB Movie Links – these are either mentioned above or relevant:



The Shape of Things

Amores Perros

Memento

Mulholland Drive

Twin Peaks

12 Monkeys

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Being John Malkovich

Blood Simple


Read widely, think well, and write often.

posted October 19, 2004

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