As I’m going through the AFI Top 100 (top 122, once you combine the old list and the new list), I’m continually discovering things. One, that it’s a terrible idea to watch classic films late at night when you’re tired, and two, it’s a much better idea to wake up early on a Saturday morning and put one on – this morning, for example, I woke up and put on John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers. The result was a nostalgic flashback to when I was a kid and the networks would play old movies after the cartoons on Saturdays, and a personal resolution that this is something I’ll do with my kids someday. Laura and I were talking about the list in the car last night and I found out that she’s seen way more of these than I have, in large part to this being something her family would do together. We did this in my family too, somewhat, but we never watched as many classics. I remember going to see Return of the Jedi a second time with my Mom, the Indiana Jones and Back to the Future movies with both of my folks, and seeing Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in the theater when I was 9 and falling asleep just as the crew was about to go back in time and waking up just after they returned, which meant that for years I thought Star Trek IV was just a really short, really dark movie that took place inside a spaceship. Yeesh.
Watching The Searchers, though, makes me wish that the VCR had been invented sooner, or that it might have become more widespread much earlier, since I suspect that my Grandpa Alexander and I might have had a great time watching these John Wayne movies together. Instead, Grandma and Grandpa’s TV never even had video in jacks, which I remember from being frustrated the first time I tried to hook up my original NES, and instead of us watching this kind of thing together I just know that Grandpa had piles and piles of old Louis L’amour Westerns around the house, and I was too young to really get into them. I was more interested in G. I. Joe and Masters of the Universe, and our bonding experiences tended to happen more on our regular trips to the malls in Akron and Canton and sharing fried fish and shrimp at Red Lobster. I believe that’s why I like going shopping and eating out so much now, because of how much fun I had with them when I was a kid.
Missed opportunities aside, watching John Wayne movies is a great way to understand the culture of my Grandpa’s generation; knowing that this actor was considered worth emulating for a large demographic of men helps to understand their ethics, their attitudes, and even their modes of communication. I wonder what I’d be like now if I’d watched more John Wayne as a kid and less Captain Kirk. More stiff upper lip, I’m sure, more “That’ll be the day!” and more swagger. Which now makes me wonder who the modern John Waynes are – Russell Crowe? Hugh Jackman? I tend to agree with the popular assertion that George Clooney is our generation’s Cary Grant, and that my folks’ generation John Wayne was probably Clint Eastwood, but modern Westerns tend to feel more like gimmick movies instead of a real, heartfelt genre. I managed to catch the modern remake of The 3:10 to Yuma while I was in Austin for AGDC last year and I thought it was fun, but it didn’t feel like a real Western – but why that is, that’s more difficult to explain.
The Searchers is a fascinating time capsule, both of what the Wild West might have been like and of how Hollywood was selling the Wild West in the mid-1950s. The scenes of the the film feel like an old Viewmaster toy reel, with beautifully clear skies and towering buttes and mesas. Watching The Searchers in HD-DVD like I did is somewhat jarring; a crisp, clear Western doesn’t feel as authentic as a scratchy, somewhat out-of-focus Western (although there are a few scenes in the HD-DVD version that remain fuzzy, due to an uneven restoration), but I’m not sure that’s it. It might be the tinny music, or the sense of, if you’ll pardon the cliché, sweeping grandeur of the shots that are harder to get now outside of a CGI film. When watching The Searchers there’s no sense that if the camera were to go over just one more hill there’d be a Wal-Mart and a McDonald’s squatting next to a six-lane freeway, which is hard to replicate in modern Westerns. Political correctness also stands in the way of a really good modern cowboys-and-Indians movie, I suspect, due to both a more popular contemporary notion of relative culture values and of fear of lawsuits from the descendants of “the Comanch”. And, oddly enough, the modern desire for the dark and bloody means that films where the good guys simply fall down clutching their chests when shot without a glimpse of red are getting harder and harder to come by – although they might be ideally suited for the kind of low-budget filmmaking delivered on YouTube. Films like this demonstrate that you don’t need huge budgets to make entertaining films, just a handful of fascinating characters, some great character actors (Hank Worden’s Mose Harper was priceless) and some brilliant settings – all great lessons for modern cineastes, media scholars and filmmakers to relearn.

As I’ve mentioned here before, one of my main resolutions this year was to finish watching the AFI’s top 100 (now 122) best films of all time. I’ve debated with myself as to whether or not I should include my reactions to these films, or even share which films I’m currently watching, as some of the gaps in my viewing experience are, shall we say, excruciatingly embarrassing. For example, the two I’ve knocked off the list so far this week: Jaws (1975) and Goodfellas.
I can hear you spluttering now: “Geoff! You’re a giant media geek! You own hundreds of movies! How can you have never seen Jaws or Goodfellas?” To which I will respond, “Yes, that, that right there, is what I’m trying to fix by watching these… That, a sense of missing some of the classic references in popular culture for the last 20-odd years, and a desire to really be able to hold my own when I eventually do begin to teach classes on subjects like these.”
So. Jaws and Goodfellas.
First off, I want to note that even in these great American cinema classics, some of the acting is absolute crap. Some of it is brilliant – I very much appreciated all the main characters in Jaws, and I really liked Pesci and DeNiro in Goodfellas… But I can’t stand Ray Liotta. His laugh in particular is like nails on a chalkboard to me, both in its sound and in the way he pulls his head back and drops his jaw into his neck. It’s not a laugh, it’s a totally phony cackle. Ugh.
Second, both films were really compelling stories. Some people belittle Jaws with the rest of Spielberg’s early work as pop schmaltz, especially given its status as the first American blockbuster film (first ever to surpass the $100M mark) but I really appreciated the way that he depicted life in Martha’s Vineyard, where all the Amity Island business was shot. I totally bought that the mayor and the locals would be willing to gamble with people’s lives because if they didn’t, they themselves would be completely out of business for the rest of the year. Jaws depicts two levels of a life-or-death struggle: man versus nature in the water and man versus nature in a larger socioeconomic playing field. Similarly, I enjoyed how Goodfellas depicted both De Niro’s and Liotta’s characters as outsiders in the gangster culture, reflecting tensions between immigrants and ‘natives’, members of rival families, issues of honor, issues of compensation, issues of family… Very, very well done, and its spot on the list was very well-deserved indeed.
Third, like I noted at the beginning of this entry, I really enjoy being able to truly get some of the cultural references that these films spawned in the last 20, 30 years. The “dance!” scene in Goodfellas, the “you’re going to need a bigger boat” line in Jaws, Pesci’s “do I amuse you?” routine, and – of all things – Roy Scheider’s “that’s some bad hat, Harry” line that spawned the name of the production company behind House M.D..
So far this has been a great project. I’m not sure what’s next on my list: A Clockwork Orange, Bull Durham, Unforgiven… I’ll probably catch at least one more before the end of the weekend, but we’ll see what happens.

Tonight after work a bunch of us – Mike and his wife, Matt and Clara, Pilar, Talieh, Lana and our newest addition to the lab family Jesper Juul – caught a free preview screening of Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage (or, in its original Spanish, El Orfanato). The film didn’t disappoint, as it was as dark and creepy and poetic as I was hoping it would be. It’s beautifully shot, and although I have some issues with the subtitles – while I don’t speak Spanish I do recognize the repetition of syllables enough to realize when a character’s saying something repeatedly when it’s roughly summarized as “very” in the little white letters – I thought it was very well done. Fans of Pan’s Labyrinth might mourn the lack of magic, but it’s not a fairy tale, it’s a ghost story, and a dang good one at that. It’s also got an ending with a touch of the same ambiguity as Pan’s Labyrinth, which had me wondering if that was a Spanish thing or a Del Toro & Friends thing. Matt suspects it’s primarily European thing, although I’m not so sure. It’s odd, because there is a little bit of a Hollywood sense to it, but painted in a more complex, nuanced light than something like Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others.
One thing I really enjoyed about this film, though, was how it scratched an itch I’d had for a while: I’d been wondering where all the really good modern ghost stories had gone. Sure, we’ve had a couple good ones here and there, but I would have thought that our modern day and age would be more receptive to ghost stories. My favorite scene in the film is one that reminded me of shows like Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State, two kinda-reality TV series dealing with the paranormal on cable: the frantic parents bring in a medium to connect with the ghosts haunting the orphanage, and she shows up with an entire entourage armed to the teeth with videocameras, microphones, and wireless headsets. The medium goes into a trance, and then the team (and the parents) follow her wanderings through the house from a control station downstairs. The result is something similar to the old Sega CD game Night Trap, with a touch of the same sense of voyeur-esque remote control. The team issues commands to the medium as she wanders through the house, interacting with a past spirit world that only she can see. The audience is as limited as the team, viewing the medium’s progress in the grainy night vision tones and experiencing only the scratchy, ghostly whispers and cries picked up by the medium’s microphone.
That’s where I think the modern ghost story really has the most to offer – in its expressions of what happens when technology fails us, or ways in which technology can serve us in ways that we don’t fully understand. McLuhan’s understanding of media was as extensions of man, things that extended our senses in other forms of distance, physicality, or temporality. What happens, then, when our devices pick up things we don’t understand? When they see things we can’t? Like cats staring at the corner of a room with their hackles slowly raising, a radio crackling as it picks up a transmission that there’s no way it possibly could… This is the stuff of B-movies, but also the stuff of great literature and cinema, depending on how it’s handled. Back around Halloween I attended a screening of the Japanese film Kairo introduced by Alan Lightman, the author of Einstein’s Dreams and a lecturer here at MIT. The film itself was grim, dark, realistic and utterly chilling – and, in true Hollywood fashion, it was largely lobotomized when translated into the Kristin Bell vehicle Pulse. The idea of the ghost in the machine can provide cheap thrills, as proven by Michael Keaton’s White Noise, or even cheaper thrills, as proven by the direct-to-video White Noise 2: The Light, despite its having starred Whedon regular Nathan Fillion. Yet it certainly doesn’t have to – what, after all, are extensions of man if not extrasensory perception? Media as ESP? “Unnatural” technology as supernatural tools?
This summer there’s a conference in the Netherlands that I really want to attend called Uncanny Media; something tells me that there’s definitely a paper in this line of reasoning. First the writing, then the submission, and then, if accepted, comes trying to scrape together airfare to Utrecht. Ah, the glamorous globetrotting life of the academic!
Long story short: The Orphanage was worth seeing. It might be the kind of thing better experienced in one’s home theater, however, due to the ease with which a fat guy two rows back constantly scoffing and wheezing can spoil the delicious mood and suspense Bayona worked so hard to achieve. Still, the film is a creepy, extremely atmospheric piece with some truly interesting bits for fans of artful, techno-savvy ghost stories. Recommended.