North of unreal
A storm of cinema
It’s been hard for me to enjoy movies these days. The windstorm that blew down the carport last winter also knocked the TV antenna halfway off the roof, and the neighbors had already given away their rabbit-ears.
True, we still had a DVD player, because it came free with the new bed we bought at the Brick to replace the extra-long, double-wide, memories-of-cowboys, rusty mattress we’d bid on at a late-night auction in Williams Lake. But this brand-new DVD player and our whirring old VCR both became useless when the tiny TV we’d snapped up at a Quesnel pawn shop sputtered and choked. For a while, the only movies I got to watch were in my dreams.
Which is not to discount my dreams. There is a clown character, for example, who’s already appeared in his own sequel, even though I ripped his head off in a fright during the first night’s run. Undaunted, he’s returned. In the sequel, he stands up during a party, complaining of being disembodied. The rest, I don’t remember.
But I do remember crossing the Atlantic on a ship from Germany, long ago, and this part seems true. I was tiny and seasick, and watched sloopy grey waves through a porthole. Soon we’d dock in America, where customs agents would stick long needles into the seats of our car and a drug dog would sniff his way over a mound of suitcases while a passenger howled: “Just don’t pee on them, for the love of Christ. Just don’t pee!”
But on the dark voyage to the New York dock, my brother and sister and I settled into the soft seats of the ship’s own cinema. Where were my parents? We didn’t care. Hands over eyes, squinting through my fingers, I watched as Bambi’s mother was shot by a hunter and Scarlett O’Hara was tossed down a grand staircase in the Deep South and a Confederate soldier’s leg was cut off in a surgery tent. And that’s how we arrived in America.
My sister grew up to become an expert on East German film, even though East Germany’s reel was about to unspool and the credits were already rolling. In the old days, my sister took me downtown to see Mary Poppins once. But she ushered me in to Planet of the Apes by mistake, where there were power-hungry monkeys in leather. It was nothing at all like a spoonful of sugar. Sometimes we’d stay up all night in Indra’s rec room to watch the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre or the crazy car chases in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World and we’d eat fistfuls of popcorn on the orange carpet.
Later on, I dreamed of becoming a cool, 12-year-old heroin addict just like Christiana F. in Wir Kinder aus dem Bahnhof Zoo, who lived in a Berlin train station and ran through a shopping mall to a David Bowie sound track and sweated and puked in bed alongside her skinny boyfriend to try and kick the habit. One summer, I took a movie course about monsters as a reflection of society’s fears and melodrama as a reflection of bourgeois values and I made my own film of homeless Hartley blowing a trombone up on a roof in downtown Peterborough, a film that no one ever saw. One winter, I watched Persian movies without subtitles in a basement in Scarborough as my Iranian friends sucked tea through sugar cubes they gritted between their front teeth. Iranian cinema was about to become famous. My friends tossed back Tylenol 3s they got without a prescription from the doctor by the Christie Pits and waved at the screen and explained, “ Cow, cow. It’s very symbolic. The villager thinks he’s a cow.” And I would nod and nod and sip my tea.
These days, I haven’t been able to see many movies. But at the tail end of the season, we packed up the truck with pillows and sleeping bags and hot-air popcorn. And we drove up the Hart Highway and turned left and followed our noses straight through the dip of Garvin’s Canyon and parked at the Drive-In for a double feature. And the car heater blew cold and we held hands and the baby climbed around the front seat instead of watching the cool, doomed love of Miami Vice’s cocaine smugglers. And then the baby fell asleep in my arms, her heart beating through the blankets, beneath the pictures on the big screen.
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