a movie, we can see it again. You’ll catch it on Netflix or buy it on iTunes or splurge for the DVD box set with all the video extras.
But up until about 1980, if you saw a film in the theater, you probably never saw it a second time, unless it turned up on TV. You mostly rewatched pictures only in your memory—a treacherous, insubstantial format, although not entirely lacking in virtues. A fair number of films look best when seen in blurry memory.
When I was ten, my father brought home a Laserdisc machine, forerunner of the modern DVD player. He had also purchased three films: Jaws, Duel, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movies came on these enormous, shimmering plates—they faintly resembled the lethal Frisbees that Jeff Bridges slung around in Tron. Each brilliant, iridescent platter had twenty minutes of video on each side. When a twenty-minute segment ended, my dad would have to get up and flip it over.
All that summer we watched Jaws, and Duel, and Close Encounters, again and again. Discs got mixed up: We’d watch twenty minutes of Richard Dreyfus scrabbling up the dusty slopes of Devil’s Tower to reach the alien lights in the sky, then we’d watch twenty minutes of Robert Shaw fighting the shark and getting bitten in half. Ultimately they became less like distinct narratives and more a single bewildering quilt of story, a patchwork of wild-eyed men clawing to escape relentless predators, looking to the star-filled sky for rescue.
When I went swimming that summer, and dived beneath the surface of the lake, and opened my eyes, I was sure I’d see a great white lunging out of the dark at me. More than once I heard myself screaming underwater. When I wandered into my bedroom, I half expected my toys to spring to antic, supernatural life, powered by the energy radiating from passing UFOs.
And every time I went for a drive with my father, we played Duel.
Directed by a barely twenty-year-old Steven Spielberg, Duel was about a nebbish everyman in a Plymouth (Dennis Weaver), driving frantically across the California desert, pursued by a nameless, unseen trucker in a roaring Peterbilt tanker. It was (and still is) a sun-blasted work of faux Hitchcock and a chrome-plated showcase for its director’s bottomless potential.
When my dad and I went out for a drive, we liked to pretend the truck was after us. When this imaginary truck hit us from behind, my dad would stomp on the gas to pretend we’d been struck or sideswiped. I’d fling myself around in the passenger seat, screaming. No seat belt, of course. This was maybe 1982, 1983? There’d be a six-pack of beer on the seat between us . . . and when my dad finished one can, the empty went out the window, along with his cigarette.
Eventually the truck would mash us and my dad would make a screaming-shrieking sound and weave this way and that along the road, to indicate we were dead. He might drive for a full minute with his tongue hanging out and his glasses askew to indicate the truck had schmucked him good. It was always a blast, dying on the road together, the father and the son and the unholy Eighteen-Wheeler of Evil.
MY DAD READ TO ME about the Green Goblin, but my mother read to me about Narnia. Her voice was (is) as calming as the first snowfall of the year. She read about betrayal and cruel slaughter with the same patient certainty that she read about resurrection and salvation. She is not a religious woman, but to hear her read is to feel a little as if you’re being led into a soaring Gothic cathedral, filled with light and a roomy sense of space.
I remember Aslan dead on the stone and the mice nibbling at the ropes that bound his corpse. I think that provided me with my foundational sense of decency. To live a decent life is to be no more than a mouse nibbling at a rope. One mouse isn’t much, but if enough of us keep chewing, we may set something free that can save us from the worst. Maybe it will even save us from ourselves.
I also still believe that books operate along the same principles as enchanted wardrobes. You climb into that little space and come out the other side in a vast and secret world, a place both more frightening and more wonderful than your own.