Looker

Sob Story

I cried the day Reagan got shot. But not because Reagan got shot.

Thirty years ago today I was a few days shy of my eleventh birthday, and I was a burgeoning cinephile. I loved Star Wars and Close Encounters, of course, but I went to see every movie I could, including grownup ones with my parents like Coal Miner’s Daughter (which I saw twice at the long-gone Trans-Lux 85th Street Theatre, two blocks from our home in Manhattan), The Elephant Man (at Loew’s Orpheum), and the wholly inappropriate Dressed to Kill (at 72nd Street Playhouse; afterward my mother said, “Please don’t tell any of your friends we took you to see this.”) My favorite was probably Hair. But to my ten-year-old self, there was no such thing as a bad movie. 

I had also recently learned that there was something called the Academy Awards, and that you could see them on TV. March 30, 1981, was a Monday, the last day of my fifth-grade spring break. That night I was going to watch the Oscars for the first time. I was ecstatic. That afternoon I was home with my friend Kingman, and we were watching my parents’ black-and-white TV when the news of the assassination attempt came on. The slo-mo images of Reagan waving, grimacing, and being pushed into his limo have stayed with me, but Kingman and I were unfazed. (Maybe that had something to do with the horror movies we had begun seeing, like The Fog. I remember staying up late around this time to watch Psycho on TV. Alone.) 

There was a rule about TV in my house. My parents allowed me and my brother to watch TV only on weekends and during school breaks. That evening, when we tuned in to watch the Oscars, an announcer said that the ceremony would be postponed for one day out of respect for our hospitalized president.

I was devastated.

I sobbed. My parents were sympathetic but baffled—what on earth was wrong? I choked out that tomorrow night was a school night and I wouldn’t be allowed to watch the Oscars. I think I kept crying even after they assured me they'd make a one-time exception.

The only thing I remember about the ceremony is Reagan’s videotaped greeting. Looking now at the nominees and winners, I see it was a standard occasion of predictability and egregious misjudgment: Robert Redford, for example, winning best director (for Ordinary People) over David Lynch, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro won his Raging Bull Best Actor award that night and delivered an awkward acceptance speech while Scorsese and his wife at the time, Isabella Rossellini, anxiously and giddily looked on. Among the winners I probably recognized only Timothy Hutton and Sissy Spacek.

How soon did I learn, I wonder, that John Hinckley Jr.’s nutty act was inspired by his own cinematic obsession?

These days I do my best not to watch the Oscars. But nothing tells me how much the movies already meant to me back then as my heaving, inconsolable sobs.

Deep Red

If you can imagine watching five dozen skeezy slasher and exploitation films from the ’70s and ’80s—in pieces, out of sequence, at the same time—you’ll begin to know what it’s like to see “A Film by Jesus Rinzoli,” Jamie Shovlin’s show at Horton Gallery in New York. Shovlin, a young artist based in London, amassed a thousand clips from 300 movies and arranged them to fit the screenplay he wrote for a spurious 1980 horror pic called Hiker Meat, which he attributes to the nonexistent Rinzoli. The show includes that screenplay and its Italian and Spanish translations, along with the posters Shovlin illustrated for the three imaginary productions. (That’s the Italian poster pictured here; naturally, each version has a completely different title.) The show also features a video installation of fragments of the patchwork film projected simultaneously, increasing almost imperceptibly over 77 minutes from five to 64 screens—impalement, bludgeoning, evisceration, molestation. The effect is disorienting, cheeky, gross, and mesmerizing.

I interviewed Shovlin for a short piece in the February issue of Modern Painters, and he was lighthearted about the project that he’s been working on for two years. (He’s shown it in varying permutations in London, Rome, and other European cities.) His previous work has involved hoaxes of one sort or another, but he stresses that he’s not trying to fool anyone into thinking Rinzoli is real (unlike the prankster behind the apocryphal cult filmmaker J.X. Williams), and he recognizes his place among artists who make films out of films, like Craig Baldwin. Yet Shovlin has gone further: Hiker Meat has a music soundtrack written by a friend, sound effects recorded by foley artists, dialogue recorded by actors, and costume designs created by Shovlin. His immersion in such an elaborate conceptual pursuit seems to be his way of both keeping himself amused and diverting attention from his remarkable draftsmanship. (When I asked him how Hiker Meat differs from the fake horror-exploitation trailers in Grindhouse, he told me he had just been watching Planet Terror—the Robert Rodriguez–directed half of Grindhouse—while drawing.) After fast-forwarding through 300 blood-soaked movies for the sake of his art, had his interest in them flagged? “It flagged pretty much from the beginning,” he told me.

Some Came Running

In the new issue of The Believer—the film issue!—there's a nice piece by Mark Oppenheimer on movies about runners. That is, long-distance runners, the solitary kind. It's a personal essay, since Oppenheimer considers his own past as a high-school distance runner, pondering just what kind of person devotes himself to such an activity. The answer is embodied by Michael Cera. "With Cera," he writes,

we at last have an actor who effortlessly honors the American teen male anti-athlete, a boy who populates so many high-school cross-country teams. He is not a genius, he is not pathologically shy, and he is not widely loathed. Rather, he is a little shy, a little marginal, and a good bit quirkier than his classmates. He does not necessarily read constantly, but when he reads—or listens to music, or skips school to go to a matinee by himself—it is with an outsider’s wistfulness, with a hopeful eye on the world beyond high school. He is a character who resonates with a kind of kid—and that kid is everywhere—who turns to movies for reassurance that he is not alone. That boy wears short shorts, and he runs.

I'm no runner—sure, I jog when I can be bothered to, but I've never understood why anyone would want to run a marathon—yet that bit about the kid "who turns to movies for reassurance that he is not alone" strikes a chord, as does "skips school to go to a matinee by himself"—my adolescence encapsulated. "Cera’s characters are always adolescing," Oppenheimer says, "and adolescence is nothing if not a race into time. You’ll always get to your destination, and really you are the only one who can speed up or retard the process of maturation—nobody can stop you from getting where you want to go, but nobody can help you get there, either." Oppenheimer's links from running to Cera to finding one's way are a bit of a stretch (except for the fact that "In Juno, Cera’s Paulie Bleeker is an actual cross-country runner"), but it's affecting nonetheless.