As readers of this blog know, I love movies. I’ve seen all kinds of them from Gymkata to La Voie lactée to The Sword of Doom to Safety Last! and so on. Among my friends, I’m known for my taste (which isn’t necessarily a good thing). But I feel confident in my taste in movies because I’ve 1) seen a lot of them and 2) had some crucial help in my early movie going years. The first movie I ever fell in love with that had an adult sensibility to it was The Usual Suspects—yes, that The Usual Suspects. I was 13 or so and my sister Deb put it on and I was soon convinced that I had seen the greatest movie ever made. Keyser Söze was the only thing I could talk about for weeks after. It then sent me down a path of Tarantino movies. I watched Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. Then I did some of the digging around Tarantino’s influences watching classics like A Fistful of Dollars. I wasn’t the only person I knew watching these movies and these weren’t the only movies I was watching. Like other kids my age, I was also regularly watching movies like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Batman Begins, and Little Miss Sunshine—though I never saw Garden State.
But then one day it all changed. I went to my local movie store, which was not a Blockbuster, and asked the guy behind the counter for a recommendation. Now, the guy behind the counter was the kind of movie guy you’d only find in LA. He wasn’t a high schooler making a few extra bucks. He was a screenwriter who was afforded the flexibility to write screenplays during the day (his scripts were mainly Z-grade horror movies of the Puppet Master ilk). He was also someone who’d watched a ton of movies. And so, for whatever reason, he responded to my request for a recommendation with Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. This is the movie that would most change my moviegoing life. It’s a unique film, a brutal tale about a down-and-out piano player who gets mixed up in the search for a man who is wanted dead for a reward of $1,000,000. It’s a grotesque, raw, and violent film that is very well acted by vaunted character actor Warren Oates. As I was watching it, I was awestruck. I had never seen anything quite like it before and I knew I would have never discovered it for myself, especially considering that it had been on the shelves at the movie store for years and I had never even noticed it.
When I returned the movie, I asked for another recommendation and a cycle began. With Shane’s help, I made my way through a catalog of movies that none of my classmates were interested in, but I was fascinated by. I didn’t love all his suggestions, but I was always happy to get them. Over the next few years, we became pretty good friends despite what must have been a 20-year age gap. We never hung out outside the movie store (see the 20-year age gap), but we didn’t need to either. He was my movie store guy. I didn’t go to him for any advice other than what to watch on a given night. I miss having that in my life. I’ve got some movie friends whose opinions I trust, but they have lives and aren’t there waiting around for me to walk in asking for movie advice. It’s also more personal when our tastes don’t align. We’re able to respect that we see things differently, but we also secretly crave mutual validation. With Shane and I’s random relationship, it was always just about picking something else off the shelf.
I’m writing all of this because the other day I read a post by Gen Z writer Freya India1 called “A Time We Never Knew.” The article is about a concept called “anemoia” which means “having nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.” In the piece, she discusses how people in her generation are nostalgic for the 1990s, particularly 1990s high school before the internet had fully taken over our lives. It’s not entirely clear how well held this sentiment is but you get the sense that she isn’t alone. Kyle Chayka recently wrote about the rise of dumbphones in the New Yorker. If there’s a powerful thrust to both of those pieces, it’s that people not only want to be disconnected from the internet, but they also want to be more connected to the people in their lives than they currently are. As I was reading about “anemoia,” I thought about Shane at the movie store and what an outsized random impact having a good local movie store had on my life. I don’t know how I would have shaped my taste in movies without having him pick Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia one evening. Maybe I still would have found it, but who knows? It’s not as though Sam Peckinpah has ever been hot in the algorithm.
The most important and wonderful part of this story isn’t the movie store or Shane. It’s that he was someone random in the world who I had a good relationship with that was not anything more or less than what it needed to be. Soon after I left LA to go to college, Shane left his job at the movie store. We’re friends on Facebook but that’s all that’s holding our relationship together these days, which is fine. What we had was confined to the movie store and it was perfect for that reason. It’s the relationship you want when you go into a record store, wine shop, the butcher, a library, a jeweler, and all kinds of other places and businesses. Although, it doesn’t have to rely on there being a transactional component. You can get these kinds of relationships through the people you meet at work, parties, leagues, clubs, church and other social groups or wherever your relationship with them stays. But they’ll give you something to look forward to because they’re the perfect reminder that the best world is the one with other interesting, wonderful people in it.
If you are unfamiliar with Freya India, she’s an up-and-coming writer with a fast-growing audience on Substack. She is a writer whose primary gripe in the culture wars has to do with how social media and technology is destroying society. I think she wants to try to write from somewhat outside the conventional left versus right debates, however, I also get the sense that her thinking is often more conservative than her writing lets on. That said, she has also written some interesting things.
I hope Shane reads this
Maybe I’ll send it to him… been a long time since we spoke though.