Wednesday, May 16, 2012

The Path of the Beam, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tilda

So I’m at a point in the writing where I have to write the section where the not-doing-so-well-in-his-classes college freshman goes to see the film Orlando so he can write a short paper about it and get some extra credit from his English professor. The scene is set up with the freshman showing up by himself at the Fine Arts building. There, he runs into a girl he has met only once or twice all semester (this is taking place right before Thanksgiving), and who has wound up screaming at him (for things that were not his fault) each time they have met. She apologizes to him for having been hotheaded with him before, he shrugs it off, and they go in to watch the film. When it’s over, the girl wants very much to go out for pie and talk about the movie.

I have not been looking forward to writing this section (and particularly this scene) because I don’t feel like I know the film well enough to convicingly write people who are talking about it like they have just seen it. I certainly don’t know it well enough to write the two-page paper on what the film was trying to say and what it meant to the student who saw it. That could probably be remedied, if I were to watch the film for a third time myself. Unfortunately, I don’t own a copy of it, and the library does not have one, either. (The library also does not have a copy of the Virginia Woolf novel the film was based on. The mind reels.) I was sort of hoping for instant gratification on this one. I can get it from Netflix, but the DVD would not arrive until Saturday.

I have a cheap copy of the novel, something I got from the clearance racks at Half Price Books to stem the tide between not owning that book at all and owning an edition that was actually worth owning; but I don’t want to just drop the other things I’m reading to spend that much time on a novel I’d be reading pretty much just so I could write one section of this story (leaving off the fact that reading Viriginia Woolf is its own reward). (Also, the section I’m writing is supposed to be about the film. Though I have seen it twice, I don’t know it well enough to be able to read the novel and separate what was in the film from what was not.) So long story short, that leaves cheating—at least for the next day or two, until I get the DVD from Netflix.

There are several different avenues one could take if one needs to get good information about a film without actually watching that film, but I’m not going to make an exhaustive list of them; this rambling bit of nonsense is short on point to begin with. More and more, I find myself consulting Roger Ebert when I want to read a small amount about a film. In addition to having a remarkable knowledge of and appreciation for film, Mr. Ebert is also a very good writer. Though Orlando came out before Al Gore invented the magical interwebs, I was hoping that someone might have gotten around to archiving the print review that Mr. Ebert would have written; and sure enough, when I Googled “roger ebert orlando,” I got his review at the top of the list. It begins with a short paragraph on the premise of the story, and the next paragraph is but a sentence, and would you believe that that sentence is:

“This is the kind of movie you want to talk about afterward.”

See? I was trying to write a section about two people sitting down over pie to talk about Orlando, and I wound up finding a review that describes it as just such a film—one that you want to sit down and talk about when it’s over. Now, vis à vis the cosmos, such a thing is utterly meaningless. But for me, there is a harmonic there. I did not choose Orlando as the film for the section I am writing because I thought it might be something you’d want to sit down and talk about afterward. I chose it because I actually did go see it when I was a freshman in college—and I didn’t understand it at all. All I knew for sure after I saw Orlando was that Billy Zane was awesome and that Tilda Swinton was an absolutely stunning nude.

However, the film stuck with me (though that says more about what I thought of my freshman year in college than it says about what I thought of Orlando), and I eventually developed an affection for Virginia Woolf, which has lasted over the years—due mostly to reading A Room of One’s Own later in college, and then seeing The Hours (which led, of course, to Mrs. Dalloway). I got back to Orlando a few years ago when I got it from Netflix, and I even started to write about it—but that post wound up in the vast wasteland that is my “Un-Posted” folder. I expected that I would get around to writing about it in a novel setting at some point—and it would appear that that point has arrived.

It’s a happy accident that Roger Ebert wrote what he wrote about Orlando, a sentence that was written nearly twenty years ago; and it is also entirely coincidental that I ran across that sentence at the time that I ran across it, and for the reason that I ran across it. (And do I feel a little bit good that my idea for situating the film in my story equates to something that Mr. Ebert thought was true about the film when he watched it? Yes. In a stupid little way, I do.) It’s a minor inspiration, but it’s an inspiration—a small sign that maybe I have finally landed on the Path of the Beam.

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