A Profound and Dreamless Sleep

My dad just successfully defended his thesis and was awarded an MFA in Creative Writing, which is awesome. What a scholar and a gentleman! Going back to school at age SEVENTY to learn how to write fiction after a lifetime in journalism. He had to take all these intense seminars where he read, like, Voltaire and Joyce and stuff. It was super challenging but he persevered and got so much smarter, the goal of every grad student. And he wrote a novel! I’m so proud of him.

After his defense we went out for martinis and I should not have had two martinis. When will I learn that one martini is great but two is maybe less great, and that then having a beer with your Japanese noodles is a terrible idea? Some things never change. When it was over and my old man and I were going to catch the bus back home, we passed by a movie theater and suddenly said “lets see a movie!” We had never heard of any of the movies showing, and as we were talking, the ticket lady started weighing in from behind her microphone. It was so hilarious. She said we should see “Room 237,” and after she told us what it was I got incredibly excited. How have I not heard of this movie?? I ended up tipping her 3 dollars which I didn’t even know you could do. Then we got chocolate mousse pie while we waited for the movie to start. What a crazy night! What is this, New York City and I’m Rihanna? Or something.

Incredible film. It’s a film about film studies, really. It’s about interpretation. I found it incredibly moving. It’s an exploration of all these different people who have performed complex, intricate readings of “The Shining,” and have come to all kinds of different conclusions about what the film is “really about.” One guy sees Holocaust imagery everywhere. Somebody else reads it as an allegory for the genocide of the Native Americans. One lady is obsessed with space, and figured out that there are all these impossible spaces in the film, like a window where there couldn’t be a window, if we are to believe the physical space the film has shown us in previous shots. And from there she builds this huge theory about labyrinths and minotaurs. Some of the interpretations and insights are kind of astounding–I’ve seen the movie 100 times and never noticed many of the things these people were pointing out–and some of them are kooky and hilarious, like the one guy who thinks the entire movie is Stanley Kubrick saying “fuck you” to Stephen King, and the other guy who thinks the whole movie is Stanley Kubrick’s meditation on his own feelings about having helped NASA fake the moon landing. One guy at one point ended up watching the film backwards and forwards at the same time, on top of each other, and found all these incredible synch points, like where Jack’s face is overlaid with blood splatters, or Wendy’s horror at discovering Jack’s “novel” is overlaid with a close-up shot of the typewriter from an early scene.

It was really emotional. We both said afterwards that we just kept thinking about how we wanted to show it to our students. It’s somehow both this exhilarating example of how beautiful and profound interpretation can be, and also how weird and bad and subjective interpretation can be. And yet interpretation is all we have; it’s the only way we have of communicating with one another or with making or understanding art or science or anything. It’s the melancholy truth of our reality. There’s this part where someone talks about realizing that in empathizing with Wendy and Danny what we are really doing is thinking about brutality and suffering generally–and as she talks, a still of Wendy holding Danny and desperately wielding her knife was multiplied into countless repetitions, a million Wendy and Dannys fending off a nameless horror, and I was genuinely moved.

I fell into a profound and dreamless sleep, only to be awakened at five in the morning by a voice shouting over a police megaphone at our scary neighbor, insisting he “come out with his hands up.” K9 units barking and screaming, a woman demanding to be read her rights, a cop saying he was gonna taze somebody, and all the while the main suspect still in the house refusing to come out, yelling that the cops were “dumbasses.”