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a filmography of what I want

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I've been trying to explain to you the place I want to get to, and I've been failing. I've been trying to describe the feeling, at once carefree, yet focused, secure, yet brimming over with possibilities, that I want to feel when I get there. I've told you it feels like the Decameron, Bocaccio's novel about a bunch of young aristocratic friends who go up into the hills to tell each other stories to pass the time while Florence is descimated by the plague. I've told you it feels like living in a yurt. I thought I'd find this feeling on the beach in Thailand, but the closest I got to it while I was there was listening a prayer being broadcast on a loudspeaker from a mosque across a bay at dusk. Let's face it, all of my efforts so far to describe what I want have failed.

Since I'm having so much trouble telling you about what I want, perhaps I can show you. To do so, I'll run through a catalog of images that evoke the place I want to be and what it's like there. First stop, it should be no surprise, is the Reed College website. Take a look around. Here, in spite of all the recent unnecessary building projects, it's the closest I've ever come to being where I want. The college hires good photographers who know how to depict the type of leafy academic republic I long for. If you're not a fan of Reed, pick the small liberal arts college of your choice. They all look the same, only you may trade douglass firs for maple trees. Of course I realise you can't go home again. Looking at my college is an exercise in anachronism. Reed is the Valhalla of the 18-22 year old set. The place still looks great, but I can't connect with the feeling there anymore. There's no thesis left to write, and a forty year old hanging out on the Student Union porch is just a terrible thing. To show you my version of paradise, we'll have to look elsewhere.

Happily several film directors have captured (often unwittingly) the feeling I'm talking about in their movies. Unfortunately, these films often offer only glimpses of the life I'm talking about, which means watching an awful lot of bad movies to get the picture. A case in point, Bernardo Bertolucci's “Stealing Beauty,” which is a disaster of a movie that chronicals the deflowering of a young Liv Tyler at a Tuscan villa. With such a promising premise, one wonders how exactly Bertolucci managed to screw this up. Liv Tyler visits a Tuscan villa populated with relatives and friends who are artists and writers who take lovely afternoon naps in the sun, swim naked in the pool, have sex, and eat great food. In between these activities they engage in some really terrible dialog, witness: “there's a great tradition of art in these hills...” Never mind! Watch the movie and just soak up Darius Kondji's photography. I have nothing invested in the characters or the story, but I love the idea. A beautiful place that a group of talented and creative people can use as a refuge. It helps to look at the movie as a collection of stills. Here's how it would be. People coming together, in a beautiful place, without a care in the world. Stealing Beauty's story will give you a headache, but Bertolucci depicts the microcosm I long for in an unforgettable fashion. Ms. Tyler's lips and legs aren't bad either.

Next on the tour is the Johnny Depp vehicle “Blow.” This is a movie about a guy who was one of the first major cocaine dealers in America. This movie isn't any good either, but mercifully, you only have to watch the first five minutes or so. During that time, director Ted Demme creates a miraculous version of Southern California circa 1968. The protagonist and a friend have moved there to sell pot on the beach. They live in a shack, airline stewardesses pop by to buy an ounce or have sex, it's a perfectly free place. This is the idealized sixties we were always told about. You could live quietly, if illicitly. Everyone was friendly, and somehow, it felt like it could go on forever. Once the movie's action shifts to Mexico and the drug trade you can turn it off. Demme is out to condemn the excesses of the 1980s and materialism. If I want to see that, there are plenty of better movies on offer, but in those first few minutes, he summons very best of the the hippy myth. What makes it special isn't the drugs, or even the sex. What I'm drawn to is a bunch of people living happily in a lovely place without a care in the world. I try not to think about the fact that the piece of beach they were sitting on now belongs to David Geffen.

Are you still with me? I hope so, because now I'm going to ask you to really make a leap... ...into the movie Tron. Yes, you read that correctly, the Disney movie from the early 80s about Jeff Bridges being trapped in a computer game. Actually, I'm interested in only one scene. There is a point in the movie where three characters inside the computer, having just escaped the totalitarian forces of the “Master Control Program” on computer generated motorcycles, pause in an angular oasis to rest and recharge. After the frentic chase scene that preceded it, the movie pauses for breath and gives the viewers some useful plot information. The three climb up some neon scenery painted to depict a quiet forgotten corner of a circuit board and see the next goal of their adventure, a tower that can be used to communicate with the humans on the other side of the computer screen. Then, they discover a pool of water below them that is supposed to represent a “pure, clean source of power,” which they greedily lap up, making their costumes glow a brighter blue. The themes of this scene are hiding, refuge, and sustenance, all of which are very important components of my own private paradise. After having been chased by motorcycles, tanks, and flying C-clamps that make helicopter noises, the characters in Tron find a quiet corner to conceal themselves and recover. Most importantly, the quiet corner is in the midst of the enemy territory of the computer. I want a hiding place too, inside the enemy territory of taxes, jobs, and a world that I often think is struggling to change me. Hiding in plain sight. Hiding inside a system that has become too complicated for itself. The scene in Tron represents both escape and the possibility to exploit weaknesses in the system. Maybe we could leave those glowing frisbees the characters carry around home, however?

My wishful thinking filmography is as remarkable for the films that aren't in it as for the films that made the cut. Where, you might ask, is Richard Linklater's “Before Sunrise,” the movie about an earnest young American tourist who meets, befriends, and beds a lovely French girl while traveling on a train in Europe. Now this sounds like Rieb fantasy material, and it is, but there's no sense of permenance, no place. The characters move through Vienna discovering each other during the course of one day and then they leave each other. Lovely, to be sure, but hardly a destination. What about “American Beauty,” where Kevin Spacey breaks out of his ghastly surburban existence to find the meaning of life and Mena Suvari's teenage breasts? It's one of my favorite movies, and it treats themes I hold dear (breaking free from a meaningless existence, teenage breasts), but American Beauty is about the destruction of false ideals. I'm all for that, but what happens next? Once you've freed your mind, you still need to find a place to put your body. This is, I suppose, the problem the characters in The Matrix movies are struggling with. Once you've become a wild and free spirit, where do you put the vessel that keeps it, how do you feed it, and keep it out of the office? American Beauty solves the problem by murdering the protagonist. That's not a solution I'm interested in trying.

The movies are only one place to find images of what my own ideal refuge would look like. One of my all time favorites is the “Walden Commune” from Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip. During the first ten years or so of the strip, roughly from 1970 to Trudeau's hiatus in 1983, many of the characters inhabited a large house called Walden near the fictional Walden College. Trudeau draws the Colonial house in his simple style, in the middle of leafy trees and meadows, a New England idyll. Characters come and go as suits the story, and many of them took about ten years to finish college. Older people arrive, stay a while, then leave again .Trudeau's Walden is a place the characters can go to live differently. Most importantly, it's a place that will always be there for them if they need a place to go. Of course there are drawbacks too. Walden was also a den of hippy culture, something my ideal living place would avoid at all costs. I can't even type the word “commune” without my hand shaking. I'm not looking for a Zonker Harris to play alongside my Mike Doonesbury.

The Belgain comic book artist Bernard Cosey also draws images that help me picture my ideal place and feeling in my mind. Cosey's comics are about characters discovering themselves, usually through travelling and encountering foreign cultures. Consider the following two images:

In the first picture we have a pretty girl with pretty bare legs draped over a ratty old armchair in a delapidated room somewhere in Asia. Rieb fantasy material to be sure, but the picture isn't just about the girl, it's about the place. The room is shabby and yet somehow cosy and comfortable. There's fruit to eat, chairs to sit in , and a place to hang the laundry. This isn't somewhere you would want to live forever, but it will do just fine for now. It's a place of discovery in a foreign country. A place to have new experieces but at the same time be safe. Cosey's brown, rust, and yellow pallette warms the little room. I want to be there, reading with the girl, meeting fellow travelers. I like that the room is messy and poor. I don't want a hotel room when I travel. What kind of memories can the institutional furniture of a hotel room produce? Cosey's image also depicts a refuge, and perhaps a portable one. Rooms like this can be found for rent all over the world. We make them ours by inhabiting them. Perhaps we won't stay long, or perhaps we will return again and again. The discomfort of the chairs will become familiar, even welcoming. We look forward to returning, in spite of the broken windows, or perhaps even because of them.

The second Cosey image I've chosen is outside, again in Asia, featuring a towering golden temple with a couple, an older White man and a young Asian girl arm in arm in the foreground. The inherent creepiness of the image possibly depciting sex tourism is mitigated by the girl resting her head on the older man's shoulder, singing a song. It appears she is genuinely in love. They move through the shadows of evening that are devouring the lower buildings in the picture, although the giant temple remains lit by the setting sun. It must be a warm evening. There is no physical refuge here. The temple dwarfs the figures in the drawing, although not in a menacing way. The refuge in the drawing is time itself. Cosey has captured a moment with two people, one of whom is in a very unfamiliar place (and the subject of the comic is the man, not his young lover) at peace in a warm, well-lit moment in time. The moment itself has become the refuge, and even when the moment is only a memory, the man will return there and find himself home.

Here ends my tour of bad movies and other pop-culture images brought together to illustrate the type of life I'm looking for. Perhaps I've learned less about the place and more about my personality. The themes of rest, refuge, and security come up over and over again. Astute readers will notice that I've reverted back to talking about a destination, after having loudly renounced that idea about a month ago. Perhaps this note is simply proof of the power of a destination as an idea. Cosey's images, however, suggest another possibility. Cosey doesn't locate the refuge in a physcial place but in a feeling. Many of his comics take finding and maintaining that feeling as their subject. I like that idea very much. Perhaps the refuge is Bertolucci's Tuscan villa, but if that's true, the refuge is probably out of reach for me. If, on the other hand, the refuge is one of Cosey's moments, the search can continue for contentment, for refuge, and for inner peace.