Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [143]
I looooved the movies.
I always did. Like most kids of my era, my first films were Bambi and Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson and The Alamo. But the first movie I remember having a strong reaction to was PT 109, the story of John F. Kennedy in World War II. It had everything an eight-year-old boy could want: action, suspense—but in this case, the story of a hero who initially screwed up and ran his boat into the path of a Japanese destroyer. Yet he didn’t let his mistake defeat him. He saved his crew and found a way to get them all back to safety. He was a rich boy, and probably could have gotten out of being on the front lines, but he wasn’t that kind of American. Even at eight, I got that.
I came of age as a teenager when the great films of the late sixties and early seventies blasted their way onto the screen. Out were the stiff, formulaic movies of the aging studio system, overblown fare such as Hello, Dolly! and Doctor Dolittle. In were Easy Rider and The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and The Last Picture Show, Deliverance and Taxi Driver, Nashville, and Harold and Maude.
At seventeen, I saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and then I saw everything else by Kubrick, and after that there was no looking back. I was hooked on the potential and the power of cinema. I took two Introduction to Cinema classes as a freshman in college, and the professor, Dr. Gene Parola, had us watch all the greats, starting with M and Metropolis and landing on Blow-Up and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? My friend, Jeff Gibbs, took both classes with me, and we would spend hours afterward dissecting every nuance of these movies. Two years later I opened my own “art house” in Flint where, for just two nights a week, I would show everything by Truffaut, Bergman, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Herzog, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Buñuel, Fellini, Kubrick, and all the masters of cinema. Each film would get four showings, and I would spend my Friday and Saturday evenings watching all four shows. On the first viewing I would sit close and enjoy the experience. On the following three screenings, I would sit in the back and study them, sometimes taking notes. This became my one-room, one-student film school.
I did not like documentaries, and so I rarely went to see them. Documentaries felt like medicine, like castor oil—something I was supposed to watch because they were good for me. But most were boring and predictable, even when I agreed with the politics. If I wanted to listen to a political speech, why would I go to a movie? I’d attend a rally or a candidates’ debate. If I wanted to hear a sermon, I would go to church. When I went to the movies I wanted to be surprised, lifted, crushed; I wanted to laugh my ass off and I wanted a good cry; and when I left the theater afterward, I wanted to glide out onto the street as if I were walking on air. I wanted to feel exhilarated. I wanted all my assumptions challenged. I wanted to go somewhere I had never gone before, and I didn’t want the movie to end because I didn’t want to go back to where I was. I wanted sex without love and love without sex, and if I got the two together then I wanted to believe I would have that, too, and forever. I wanted to rock and be rocked and five days later I wanted that film ricocheting around in my head so madly that goddammit I had to go see it again, right now, tonight, clear the decks, nothing else matters.
And I felt none of that when I went to see a documentary. Of course, it was rare, rare, rare that a documentary would play in a movie theater in Flint, let alone any other place in the state. But when it did, and when it was constructed as a movie first and as a documentary second, then it would fuck me up in ways that no work of fiction could. I sat in the Flint