Surrendering to another kind of screen
After 21 months of intensive domesticity, last week I ventured out of my COVID discomfort zone to attend a family Thanksgiving in Greater L.A. For me, the drive down Highway 101 is primal, a route I’ve traveled so many times with so many associations that maybe it’s just as well the landscape is by now almost wall-to-wall industrial agriculture including, beyond the food fields, new vineyards that in their regimented rows are a rusty orange this time of year to complement the rolling, oak-studded hills south of Paso Robles that still reveal why California is called The Golden State, even if insects no longer splatter the windshield thanks to the triumph of pesticides.
By the time I arrive at my boutique hotel on the West Side I’ve traversed the San Fernando Valley’s wide rivers of headlights and taillights flowing endlessly through the sprawled grid of its vast suburbs, reminding me why I fled these denatured reaches of civilization before they choked my inspiration and destroyed my soul with their noxious fumes. But this is what I endure from time to time to see what’s left of my next of kin while we’re still among the living. Even though my 78-yearold sister is much diminished in assisted living, my brothers, at 85 and 82, are more or less their old selves, if older than ever, and the next generation and the one after prove that our line may continue for a while yet.
We gave thanks together in the usual way as if no plague had intervened, and the rest of my stay was taken up with equally concentrated encounters with childhood friends and recently befriended poets, in conversations impossible to summarize here but full of inspiring reminders of why I bothered to make this journey back to my native land.
During a break from social life on Saturday afternoon, when I had a few hours to myself, I found time for that essential Hollywood experience: to see a movie on a big screen, something I took for granted pre-pandemic that now has the strange sensation of being discovered for the first time with the stunning impact of a revelation. The film was Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a rancher in 1925 Montana and Kirsten Dunst as the widowed mistress of a boarding house where she lives with her sensitive teenage son and is courted by the rancher’s brother and business partner.
But the plot, psychologically interesting and suspenseful as it is, is not the point of this account, which is not to be confused with a review. What I want to tell you about, if you haven’t yet rediscovered it for yourself, is the recovered magic of the silver screen and what it can reveal without the sensationalism of gratuitous violence. There is plenty of emotional violence in this story, but no gunfights or explosions, which for me increased the impact of the complex dynamics among the characters. More than anything it was the scale of the images, both human and those of the magnificent natural landscape (Campion’s native New Zealand standing in for Montana) shot in painterly compositions so ravishing they practically knocked my mask off with their visual power.
Sorry, home video fans, but this immersion in the visualemotional immensity and intimacy of a full-size movie is impossible to feel anywhere but in a darkened theater with a giant screen. To rediscover this cinematic reality as if it were a new technology was almost as much of a gift as the human connections of my meetings with friends and family. For the cinema at its best is a humanistic medium despite its current degradation to a techno-futuristic dystopia of computer-generated mayhem.
Back in Surf City, with our few theaters reopened, and few such old-school dramas worth viewing, I will be newly alert for any chance to sit in the dark and surrender to an art I’ve been deprived of and didn’t realize how much I’ve missed.