Difficult films can teach us about life

Several years ago, I was invited by a local community-service group to speak at one of its weekday breakfast meetings.
I was given the freedom to talk about pretty much anything I wanted – as long as it entailed my job and how I did it.
Well, much of my job is, believe it or not, boring. Checking the wire, compiling People column items, sorting through more junk mail than likely goes to the state of Arkansas, looking at books that (for the most part) would make better doorstops than worthwhile reads, making calls to double check information on press releases that might as well have been written by the kindergarten class at Woodland Montessori.
Ah, but then there’s the movie part. Yeah, part of my job does entail going to the movies. And that’s the part that people always want to hear about.
So I was all set to give the group what it wanted. I was prepared, as I have many times, to talk about what a movie reviewer does, how he (or she) forms an opinion, what my favorite films are … and so on.
Then I got an idea. On a recent trip to visit my daughter in New York City, I had seen the Paul Thomas Anderson film “Boogie Nights.” And our experience, there in Manhattan, on an IMAX-size screen and in surround-sound, was enough to restore – once again – my faith in the future of American filmmaking.
So I thought that I would present this film to my early-morning audience. I thought I would make a case for watching difficult cinema, how it’s necessary for us to embrace art that affects us profoundly – and not always in a good way – as one of the obligations of aesthetics.
And that’s what I did. If you’ll remember, “Boogie Nights” is Anderson’s film about the pornography industry. It follows characters who make films that feature people taking their clothes off and having sexual congress in ways that might embarrass even Paris Hilton.
My summation was to compare another Anderson film, “Magnolia,” to a film that I found second-rate (the Jodie Foster film “Anna and the King”). Here’s what I said:
“To me, ‘Magnolia’ is a film about flawed people surviving, sometimes only barely, in a flawed society. To people who grow up feeling like outsiders, as if the world they see on television and preached at them by parents is foreign to the extreme, Anderson’s world feels more real than any feel-good movie such as ‘Anna and the King.’ It lets them know that they aren’t alone, and it can – I emphasize can – help them see their own way to happiness and fulfillment. How does it do this? Because it says that even the weak, the untalented, the luckless dreamers among us have a chance.
“The fact is that the best of life’s lessons sometimes comes from surviving difficult experiences. It follows that difficult, even objectionable art, can sometimes lead to a better understanding about life as a whole. My personal feeling is that a world full of nothing but such films as ‘Anna and the King’ would be a sadly limited place to live.”
Yeah, I actually said this – to people who had recited the Pledge of Allegiance, were sitting in the shadow of the American flag and who were still digesting their pigs in a blanket.
I don’t know if I made any converts that morning, anymore than I think I’m going to now when I say the following: I just came from a screening of Kevin Smith’s film “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and I can’t remember when I’ve laughed so hard.
But even more than laughing, I found this film – raunchy, filled with profanity, full-frontal nudity and more scatological references than would be found in your average proctologist’s textbook – has, at its heart, more real feeling than most films that come from the Hollywood dream machine.
Once again, Smith has made the merely gross into something thoughtful and entertaining.
So I say again: the best of life’s lessons sometimes comes from surviving difficult experiences. Even if that difficulty includes having to view a closeup of Seth Rogen’s butt.
Hope that doesn’t put you off your pigs in a blanket.