There was a time not very long ago at all that I would have enthusiastically agreed with Martin Scorsese’s comments about Marvel movies. For a handful of my early 20s I was in love with what Scorsese calls “cinema,” enraptured by artistry and moral ambiguity and disgusted by anything that smelled of kitsch. I once registered a blog domain called “The Astute Film Critic,” and let me assure you it was every bit as pretentious as it sounds. Even now, reading Scorsese’s comments pokes at a tender spot in my heart that conjures up joyful memories of discovery, optimism, and a feeling of genuinely falling in love with film.
And then last spring I attended a screening of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. As the end credits began flickering I knew beyond any doubt that the film buff I had aspired to become in those years was gone beyond recall. I left the theater feeling little else but contempt and scorn for what I still believe is an utterly confused movie. Yet I knew I was supposed to love it. Critics, including several whose work I still respect, tripped over themselves to declare First Reformed a brooding masterpiece. There was absolutely no square inch of my soul that concurred or even comprehended that judgment. I hated that film. And I knew immediately what that fact meant: it wasn’t meant for people like me.
First Reformed was the climax, not the beginning, of my exit from cultured cinema. By the time I was parking the car in the Yorktown AMC for the movie, I had been sensing a transformation. Cinema had lost its charm. I was bored by the same critically lauded, morally ambiguous films I had devoured in a previous life. Whilst critics lost their minds over Three Billboard Outside Ebbing Missouri, I stopped watching after 90 minutes. I’m told by multiple columnists that The King’s Speech is one of the worst Best Picture-winners ever. I really like it. See what I mean? There’s only so often you can be out of step with an aesthetic culture before you realize the differences are irreconcilable.
For the last few years my movie tastes have become what the cultured despisers call normie. I like Avengers and still love Spielberg. Noah Baumbach bores me to tears. Wes Anderson annoys me. Christopher Nolan thrills me. Don’t get me wrong, I like good movies (Phantom Thread was much better than I expected). But I agree with Scorsese…cinema is its own thing, and it’s not for me anymore.
As best I can tell, what happened to me is that I started having kids. I don’t even know why, but as soon as my inner film critic met my son, he hit the road. It’s not a logistic thing, like, “I can’t watch movies for grown ups anymore.” Nothing prevents me from streaming cinema after the kids’ bedtimes. I would just rather re-watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. It wasn’t always like this, but it’s definitely been this way since I became a dad. Is it simply nostalgia or sentimentality? Probably somewhat! But I’ve got two other theories.
1) I think becoming a father had a transformative effect on why I put myself in the way of stories. My “astute film critic” days were mostly about being an astute critic, not the film. In other words, I think for me the operative desire was not to delight and learn from and be shaped by story but to be the kind of person people thought of as intelligent, while using movies to get that desire.
The more I reflect on this, the more I think bastions of “elite” opinion are pretty much all designed toward this end. It’s inner rings all the way down. Yes, if all you read is Harry Potter your imagination and your moral intuitions will be stilted, but all this means is that the Potter books are finite and limited. It doesn’t mean that the antidote is to subscribe to the New York Review of Books and farm out your soul to the coastal literati. Why not? Because—surprise!—if you do that, your imagination and your moral intuitions will likewise be stilted.
What did becoming a dad have to do with this? I’m not entirely sure, but it may be that children have a way of disabusing one’s delusions of grandeur. Want to be The Atlantic’s film critic? First, change this diaper. I wonder if even more than student loan debt, this is what keeps millennials from having kids. You can do anything in the world, until you have to do one thing.
2) When my son was born, my heart was flooded with the desire that he grow up to be a certain kind of person: Strong, courageous, compassionate, confident, etc. When I looked at the kind of movies that Scorsese dislikes, I saw, imperfect and idealistic, characters like this. When I looked at “cinema” I saw characters who were supposed to be “the real world.” The more closely I looked, though, I realized that the “real world” was actually not a real world at all, but a world created by people like Harvey Weinstein. Was this sex scene or that ideology really a reflection of the authentic world, or was it simply put in there to placate a powerful suit?
I don’t know. Not knowing is part of life, of course. And there’s something to be said for art that is personal instead of market researched. But more than anything, becoming a father has made me want to unite truth, goodness, and beauty, to keep them all together and to resist selling out to the expert opinions of people who know how to win Oscars but apparently not how to spot a hero. I just think that’s a poor trade-off.
image credit: By hashi photo – hashi photo, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9976941
Letter & Liturgy 