It’s Oscar season again, and just like every year, I’ve seen maybe two of the movies in contention and can “look forward to” forcing myself to watch one film per day every day until the Academy Awards, because my formal schooling may have ended thirteen years ago, but my unattractive need to get an A in any test-like situation remains undimmed…and the Oscar pool is like a test. A test with money. I have no realistic chance of seeing all the movies on the list, of course, unless I make that my job for the next month, but I still feel like I should.

My Netflix list follows the same principle — completely impracticable, Infinite Jest-ian in length, the online embodiment of the vain hope that I will one day have seen every film worth seeing, read every book and poem worth reading, and heard at least a few songs by every band worth listening to, thereby completing my education as a student of the culture. (See also: my Amazon wish list, which is kind of pushing the boundaries of the definition of “list” and edging into “library at Alexandria” territory.)

Couple problems with that plan, though. First: I don’t have the time. I just don’t. I have probably fifty unread books stacked up around the apartment, and it’s not like I don’t want to read them; I do, I extra-do, but I only make a significant dent in the heap when I go on vacation, or on a business trip that involves a cross-continental plane trip. Second: Even if I had the time, the way I prioritize my entertainment consumption is all out of whack. I’d rather read a baseball book at bedtime that I’ve read seventy times before than put down a few pages of something new, I’d certainly rather read a tell-all book about Warhol’s Superstars than any Melville, and I’ve never even seen Casablanca.

…I know! It’s insane! But I hadn’t seen Animal House until like two years ago, or The Blues Brothers; I just saw North by Northwest a few months ago. I have massive, embarrassing gaps in my personal canon, and I’ve got to buckle down and fill them.

Or…do I? Because the thing is, I wonder if I actually do have to fill them, and here’s why. As I said, I didn’t see Animal House until a few years back, and when I did…enh. Liked it okay; didn’t exactly see the big whoop. Catcher in the Rye, same sort of deal: read it in my twenties; admired the writing, but felt I’d probably read it too late for it to become a touchstone. I think too that maybe it’s one of those Fight Club deals where men don’t just love the piece of art, they join it like it’s a secret society, whereas women are like, “…Yeah, it was a’ight.” Skyrockets argued the other night that it’s a different book every time you read it, so I thought, well, maybe I should read it again, but…really? Again? With everything else I haven’t read yet, and my schedule already jammed with rereading Wharton, which I tell myself I do to “refresh” myself on that particular Edwardian diction of composure but which I really do because I dig the stories? And shouldn’t I finish The Reef finally instead of leafing through The House of Mirth again, parts of which I could already recite from memory?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: shelves groaning with every book I’d like to read and DVD I’d like to watch, stretching away as far as the eye can see, and all the time in the world to take them in — that’s heaven. But I live on a tightly scheduled earth, I’ve already lost a day this week to an impromptu sinus infection that left me unable to concentrate, except on the injustice of coming down with it after quitting smoking, which I would not have bothered enduring the agonies of had I known that I would just get the same colds I quit to avoid, consarn it! And now I’m cursing like a sitcom ghost-town prospector, apparently, which is not what I would call a welcome development, but anyway, much as I would like to patch all the holes in the quilt that is my cultural experience, it’s obviously not realistic to try — and in some cases is probably a waste of time to try, given that I saw Monty Python and the…whatever the one is with the knights who say “nih.” Don’t email me, I’ll get it…Holy Grail, that’s it. I mean, I support your right to think it’s genius; it probably is. But it got a lot of build-up, and after all that, I didn’t really dig it.

That’s an overquoting issue, probably; nobody said shit to me from Life of Brian, ever, and I love that movie. But some of this stuff, it’s like, I’ve gone three decades and change without actually reading or watching it; either I need to consume it now, or I need to forget it and move on with things. And you, dear readers, have to help me decide.

Casablanca
I don’t know why I’ve never seen it; it’s on my Netflix list — although, seriously, what isn’t. Casablanca; that Christian Slater movie where he has a baboon heart or some goddamn thing, with Marisa Tomei (I think); some crappy documentary about the pharaohs…my movie-viewing taste is goat-like, I’ll eat anything.

I will say, on the reluctance tip, two things. One is that I keep hearing how romantic the movie is, and it’s on all these all-time lists, blah blah, and you can never underestimate Ingrid Bergman’s ability to sell a movie that you’d otherwise check out of in fifteen minutes, but still: that’s a lot of hype to hold up. The other is that Humphrey Bogart is like a shot of morphine to the eyeball for me. I have started watching The Maltese Falcon at least five times since I DVRed it, and I cannot get even ten minutes into it before his voice lulls me into a stupor. (Lord Kenneth Clark has the same effect, strangely. It took me several tries and endless pots of coffee to get through the Civilisation series.)

On The Waterfront
Again with the all-time-list issue, plus…okay, this is sort of hard to explain, but you know how you look at pictures of Elvis towards the end of his life, kitted out in a skin-tight white satin get-up with about eighty pounds of Swarovski shit on it, sweating just crazy balls like he’s John Henry, fat, sideburns that ate Pittsburgh, and you say to yourself, “That guy? …Really?” But then you watch the ’68 TV special and you go, “Ohhhh, okay,” because he could really sing and dance and he’s an all-century fox in those black leathers? So, you have the ammo to bust on Fat Elvis, but then you can say something nice about Thin Elvis?

I feel as though I should do the same for Brando. I’ve gotten so much material out of his marble-mouthing and his girth and his “I may or may not have slept with Sal Mineo, but I will not answer questions about it, not that you asked in the first place, but for the record, it’s your hang-up, not mine” routine and the hackitude of Jor-El, I think I should give Thin Brando the same backup I give Thin Elvis.

But On The Waterfront looks On The Boring As Hell, honestly. I’ve seen A Streetcar Named Desire several times, and I won’t deny that Thin Brando had it going on — and Fat Brando had it going on as well, in a different way. He rocked in The Godfather. But I’ve seen Streetcar, and I’ve seen The Men, and I don’t think it’s Brando’s fault so much as that it’s not an era of naturalistic acting, but he is stay-gee, and I just don’t think I can make myself care.

It’s a Wonderful Life
It’s kind of amazing that I’ve managed never to see this one; it’s like never having seen any of the Star Wars movies. I’ve never seen Miracle on 34th Street either, although that one’s less prevalent — but you’d think I’d have seen one of them at some point. But: nope.

I’ve seen snippets of it, of course; every TV show on earth has worked it into a Christmas episode. I know the plot; I get the gist. I still think I should see the whole thing for myself, though.

James Dean movies
Not that I have much to choose from, here; I could watch them all in a day. The question is whether it’s worth doing. Dean is a cultural icon whose symbology has, at this point, almost nothing to do with his work, and almost everything to do with the fact that there just isn’t very much of it because he died so young, and when you add to that the whole rebel-poet fluid-sexuality thing…we don’t know who he is because he was an actor. We know who he is because he was A Star.

Which is fine. The culture is getting a little too heavy into that for my tastes these days cough Hiltons cough, but if you can get by on charisma, good for you. I do wonder if James Dean is still going to show up in the calendar of cultural saints in fifty years, or if people will start forgetting why they should care about him, and then forgetting in turn to care.

Westerns
I have seen exactly two: High Noon, which I liked fine (and three cheers for getting the job done in 85 minutes); and Unforgiven, which I liked okay. So, that’s one old one and one more recent one. So, I’m done, right?

Right?

You think the stuff I’ve never seen is bad…wait ’til you hear the stuff I’ve never read.

Hamlet
For realsies. And yet, somehow, I managed to read King Lear no fewer than four times. I could give you a thousand words on the theme of blindness in Lear while sleeping off a tequila bender. In French I could do this. And I read the other tragedies; in fact, I read most of the other plays, period — I can’t give you a plot summary of As You Like It or anything, but I did read them.

But I didn’t really like them. I admired Lear the first couple of times, and Macbeth, I guess, and I like the sonnets pretty well, but the plays…hacking through the tangled undergrowth of the language, where each page of the bigger-than-the-phone-book Collected Shakespeare has more gloss in the margins than it does actual text, explaining “s’blood” and “zounds,” overselling a pun on “codkin” that goes back to the first act and how it ties into the Falstaff blah blah we know you don’t really get it but Elizabethan audiences would have found this word-“play” uproariously funny, trust us, because…with the penis reference? Ha…ha? Blah? And it’s like, okay, but if you have to explain it, then it’s…not that funny, and I believe you that the Globe regulars went crazy for this shit, but I’m not a Globe regular. I’m a college sophomore, and if I don’t finish this shteez by precept tomorrow at 10:30, I’m a fucked college sophomore, so maybe Will could get to the goddamn point instead of sending the Fool out to comment on the basic pointlessness and absurdity of human affairs. …No? No. I see. All righty then.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most important tragedy, I’d bet. Certainly it’s the most referenced. I haven’t seen it; I haven’t seen the movie. But I know the plot and I know what the references mean. It’s pretty shameful for an English major not to have read it, but if I cared that much, I’d have gotten on the stick and read it at some point in the last decade.

Call it.

Moby Dick
Hey, guess when I learned the plot of Moby Dick? A week ago. I am almost 34 years old. This is not normal, is it?

Okay, it’s not like I just came to Earth from another galaxy; I did know that it involved a whale who is white, and I did know that Captain Ahab is one of the characters, and I did know that “Call me Ishmael” is the first line. I sort of could guess the plot (mostly correctly, as it turned out), and now I know the end.

On the other hand, the only Melville I’ve read is “Bartleby the Scrivener.” On the other other hand, that story is maybe more widely read than MD.

So?

Tolkien, print and film
I tried The Hobbit, back in the day — got three pages in, hated it, took the book back to the library, didn’t try it again. I haven’t seen any of the movies, either, and probably won’t, because Elijah Wood as Frodo, all damp-eyed and pointy-eared, just bugs me, and I — well, elves. I can’t, I’m sorry.

And it’s strange, because I would say that I just don’t dig the fantasy genre, but I’m into graphic novels with superheroes, and I liked Buffy and Angel a lot; there is a certain epic self-seriousness to the genre, it’s true, but you could say that about a lot of things, and it doesn’t necessarily make for an unpleasant entertainment experience. With that said, Tolkien is a big time commitment, and one which I am predisposed to resent. What do you think?

Harry Potter
I don’t think I “need” to read the Harry Potter series; I don’t feel like I miss a whole lot of references by not knowing the ins and outs of the stories (at least, not compared with the boatload of allusions I miss not watching sitcoms, but that’s a whole ‘nother entry). It’s sort of everywhere in the culture, and I think that, if I know who Voldemort is and what the general scuttlebutt is on the latest book, I can get by with not reading them. And to start reading them now…my God, it’s like a hundred and sixty-two pounds of book, even in paperback.

It seems like quick reading, though; the Couch Baron likes them, which is a good indicator that I would too, usually. But damn — six books, long ones, and a seventh coming this year? Where exactly do I carve out the time to read these bad boys — it’s not like I’m getting too much sleep over here.

January 30, 2007

Share!