Over the years I have come close to that original magic place where Close Encounters took me. Star Wars, natch. I saw Christopher Reeve in Superman and I did believe a man could fly. My adolescence was fraught with acne and blown chances with girls at dances because I spent most of my time reading Frank Miller’s multi-industry changing four-issue Batman series “The Dark Knight Returns” over and over and over again. High School and bummer grades ensued with the futility of trying to fit into a strange world. New heroes arrived in the form of John McClane and Martin Riggs. These were Lone Wolves with a chips on both shoulders and I could identify with them, minus the taking-on-the-world-and-winning part. Ten years later Luc Besson showed me a sense of style with Nikita, then Leon in The Professional. I became older and more cynical. Pulp Fiction staccattoed its way across my consciousness and drove me down a wet, gray side-street straight into Sin City. Hello again, Frank Miller.
I still thumb through that old comic book but the new fantasy was sharp dressed gunslingers with snappy patter and a tragic flaws. Haven’t we seen this before? I mean haven’t our parents? The graphics are better now and we are a generation raised on comic books and A Team reruns. Fuck the A-Team, gimme Reservoir Dogs! It was good to see someone die for a change. Continental Op planting a drop piece. Cary Grant as the rapist. Sam Spade with a drug habit, seventies soul on the 8-track and a multi-hued background ripping by.
Our brains, however, as we grow older, want for more fantasy but sadly can accept less and less. We’ve seen the strings at the puppet show or the sleight of hand on the street corner. The headlines become bloodier and our ability to interpret or believe in the fantastic is trampled underhoof by runaway headlines of real rape and real torture and real rape-torture! Reality encroaches as we age and our grasp on the belief in beings from outer space or the stalwart champions who always do the right thing and get the girl slips with every marble-chinned matinee idol who hides the cuffs under a suit-jacket on the way to county, doesn’t it, Sugar Tits.
Fantasy has returned in the form of Avatar. James Cameron's immersive and entertaining feast for the senses has the power to bring those of us who had lost faith and hope in a system that puts faith and hope in Scary Movies and Adam Sandler. Fans of comedy and drama have turned to HBO and Showtime for decent writing and acting because at this point we’ll settle for writing and acting that is at best, decent. A reformed drug addict wrote that the whole god damned time he was snorting coke or banging heroin he was looking for transcendence. While I am not addicted to the movies, I go to them in the hopes that they take me somewhere and for the first time since 1977 I had a feeling. One that has been waxing and waning and skirting the edges and flirting with taking me somewhere. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wept as a boy when little Barry stutter-stepped out of the craft, searching for the source of his mother’s voice. I wept when Roy Neary was chosen to step aboard that same craft. I wept at a theatre for the first time in thirty years not for a particular scene or a sad turn of phrase. Not because a hero died or lived or a man was lost at sea. Not for a Notebook or unrequited love. I did not cry for a hooker or a vampire or a misbegotten son. I think now, a week after seeing the movie Avatar, I cried because in thirty years I have never felt so good, so transported, so transcendentalized sitting in the seat of a theatre. The type of experience I had was the reason I go to movies. If its all been dreck for you in the last 5, 10, 15, whatever years for you, well, someone finally gave enough of a fuck to make a movie that will reward you for being a fan of movies. Go see it. Just don't cry, you big baby.
