EPISTOLARY PURGATORY

I watch more movies than I care to admit. There are periods where I don’t, but I keep returning. I've almost always enjoyed it, and yet I hesitate every time.

I started paying close attention to film around the beginning of college, and recognized it as something assembled from parts. I spent the anxious summer after twelfth grade rapidly catching up on the usual suspects — Tarantino, Fincher, Scorsese and such. In the following year, I really believed that film was the best way for me to express myself, and studied directors passionately. I tried writing and filming ideas several times. I made my friends learn the Kubrick Stare. A lot of my camera-phone footage from that era, hastily edited to my favorite music, would get shared on Facebook.

Music was still central to how I imagined my own movies to be. Reading about Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson curating the music first as a moodboard for their stories, and eventually cutting footage to the soundtrack was a huge enabler for the way I’d approached my own projects. In the years that followed I transitioned to fully working only on music, though I probably wouldn’t have if I’d had access to the powerful in-phone video editors and AI engines like we do today – and the vast social networks of Tiktok and Instagram.

I enjoy going off to see movies on a whim. Often they turn out to be memorable in the strangest ways. I’m glad I jumped on last minute plans to watch Midnight Special with a roommate. Getting dragged by an old lover to see Midsommar left me dazed for days. Then there was that quick excursion to see Power Of The Dog on a night alone before a long and dreadful trip overseas. The strangeness of Mysterious Object At Noon felt like a balm for my disoriented, jet-lagged mind. I remember watching Drive My Car, Inside and Tic Tic Boom in rapid succession — all stories about a troubled psyche during the gestation of art. Having gone through some of it myself, I found them deeply relatable.

I travel to India once a year, and spend most of the 20-odd hour flight catching up on Indian movies. This has increasingly become my way of catching up with the country, and helps me slowly transition into a version of me that knows how to live there, replete with humor and the attitudes — via a little screen on the back of an airplane seat.

There are some movies I keep returning to every few years, as if to recalibrate my emotional barometer and put life experiences in perspective. I’m reminded of Before Sunrise, which I first saw as a teenager hopeful at the possibility of a similar profound connection with a stranger. Now both the movie and the future it once represented are firmly in my past. Before Sunset, in comparison, feels a lot more resonant these days. Similarly, Darjeeling Ltd., originally introduced to me as an inversion of the Bollywood-in-Europe trope, means a lot more now with its astute portrayal of sibling dynamics and their relentless enactment of neurotic behaviors inherited from parents. These are not real people and yet the stories, almost with a heavy hand, influence the standards I set for my own life, the choices I make, and the people I entertain along the way.

While I’ve come to appreciate the emotional potency of film and the sheer hard work it takes to make one, I find myself less and less interested in it as a storytelling medium, and more as capsules of atmosphere that I can momentarily inhabit. I like it when a movie has no plot, or when things are too absurd for me to even consider making sense of them. I don’t know if that makes me a snob. Immersing myself in someone else’s art offers me the space to think about my own, at times leading me to strange connections and threads that I didn’t know existed. It must be that I prefer forming ideas and memories in spaces created by those of someone else.