Movie Log, 2006-2010: A Memoir
Wrinkled and worn, you know it’s mine because of the stains.
Three years I’ve kept it–four if you count 2006, the year I started halfway in and only rated in stars, the year I started Netflix. Three years I’ve kept it, decorated its pale inside covers with multicolored stubs, and after every movie I watch, I take it out and we keep each other company in letters. I talk. It listens, lying flat on its back on top of my desk as if it were waiting all night for this.
After so long, precious few of the pages inside are still clean or tight in their binding. Most are crumpled and loud in blotches of spilled drinks that somehow, after being repeatedly patted and blown on and dried, still make the paper look damp and slightly bruised. Smudges of black where things that were once important enough to write down used to be. It’s the kind of character you get when you dip manuscripts into coffee to make them look ancient. Except this is from clumsiness. And time. Words just age faster, I guess.
A
fter four years I’ve seen 583 movies–the proof is right in front of me. And that’s not including ones I’ve rewatched or caught on TV (those don’t count). Every one gets logged, like memories, complete with accompanying ideas and emotions that light the scene of each particular collection of hours, recount the highlights, offer context in a web of barely visible veins creeping underneath the pages like laugh lines.
Soon the next turn will be to cardboard and the final sentence etched may be rushed or end without a punctuation mark; already, a new book is waiting patiently and anonymously in some shadow in the closet. A flimsy, inevitable layer of white–that’s all that’s left before all the words stuffed inside this celluloid diary grow too heavy and spread to the back, infect the spine, until the book can’t hold any more and it collapses into my bookshelf. Not living. Not listening. Just a bunch of snapshots captured in the halflight of projector burn.
This was what we set out for together in 2006, back when “the end” was no more than a metaphor and film device, before it was even set in ink, scrawled to shaky, fragile life–and then gawked at.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 10:39 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction, film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
