This Is Running for Your Life (2 page)

One of the great, time-released pleasures of moviegoing is watching the actors of your generation grow older. Maybe
pleasures
isn't precisely the right word—but maybe it is. With time comes the impulse to seek out evidence of accrued wisdom, pain, or contentment—the mark of experience—in their faces. This one had a baby; that one just lost her dad. Along with the R-train moment, for me it was watching Ethan Hawke in
Before Sunset
that left no doubt: this thing was really happening. Life had begun to show itself as more than a series of days, or movies, all in a row, which I might or might not attend.

In
Sunset
, set and shot nine years after
Before Sunrise
's slacker riff on one enchanted, European evening, the characters played by Hawke and Julie Delpy reunite for a late-afternoon walk through Paris, delicately stepping around the last decade's worth of disappointment and longing. Perhaps the one striking formal difference between the two films is that
Sunset
takes place in real time, where
Sunrise
uses elliptical fades to tell the story of an entire night spent wandering around Vienna. Time had become more present, and the present moment more urgent.

Loping through the Latin Quarter in 2003, Hawke appears gaunt and slightly stooped and basically body-slammed by time. But it was his face—with its rough skin, scored forehead and sunken cheeks, and, especially, the deep, exclamatory furrow wedged between his eyes—that transfixed me. Some said he'd come through a divorce, and it had taken its toll; that's what life does to people. I'd heard about such things but never seen it rendered so plainly, and on the face of someone only a few years older. It was shocking, even a little horrifying. And yet so marvelous to see, so unexpectedly righteous and true.
Testify, Ethan Hawke's Face
, I thought.
Tell it for real.

If they last long enough and have earned a large enough share of our hearts, movie stars are often cued to acknowledge time's work on-screen. Traditionally, either a mirror or a younger character reflects the bad news, and we pause to consider it with them. At sixty-one, Katharine Hepburn gave herself a rueful once-over in
The Lion in Winter
. Forty-eight-year-old Marlon Brando was taunted by his teenage lover in
Last Tango in Paris
, “You must have been very handsome, years ago.” In
Towering Inferno
, Fred Astaire (then seventy-five) gets the former treatment and Paul Newman (then forty-nine) the latter.

Pauline Kael was galled by this kind of thing. “It's self-exploitation and it's horrible,” she wrote about Hepburn's pantomimed requiem for her beauty. But then Kael didn't foresee the coming rarity of actors aging normally on-screen; nor, of course, the futility of an actress fudging her age on IMDb. Neither character acknowledges Hawke's transformation in
Before Sunset
, probably because flashbacks to the previous film, and his previous, almost unrecognizably vernal self, make the point more poignantly than a more direct reference could.

I must admit, I was never much of a fan. I remember finding Hawke too on the nose, somehow, too much the thing he was supposed to be—always an actor first instead of a living, changing, insinuating being, someone who demanded watching. Of the many things I failed to imagine back then, watching
Before Sunrise,
I could not have conceived of a future in which a reprise of his role would feel like an act of generosity. I could not have fathomed feeling so
grateful
to Ethan Hawke for lending his face to a handmade, jewel-cut meditation on what life does to people—a slow-cooked sequel to a film about those too young and smitten to be concerned about what life might do to them. And what was life doing to me? I worry.

*   *   *

I worry, specifically, about 1999.

*   *   *

The year didn't register too broadly on my personal barometers—fairly crap, if nowhere near as crap as 2000. But it was an extraordinary year in film. It was, I am prepared to argue, one of the greatest years for film in movie history, and certainly the best since I had been alive. Possibly the best year in the second half of the twentieth century, but there's a two-drink minimum if you want me to summon the table-rapping righteousness I'd need to go that far. Making this case ten and more years later now, increasingly the rebuttal is written on the impossibly pink and pinker faces of my sparring partners:
But you were really young in 1999. That's the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I call the theory of receptivity and now find you slightly sadder than before.

But it's just not true. I was young, yes, but I was a terrible young person—an embarrassment to my kind, really. And 1999, for me, was a nonstarter; hardly a time, I think, when I found things new and exciting because I was young, or that I now associate with my new and exciting, young world. If anything, I felt old and worn-out and generally skeptical, and it just so happened that the only thing I was good at was spending a lot of time alone, in the dark. I never saw more movies in a single year, it's true, but it was my great good fortune—and I remember thinking at the time,
Can you
believe
this?
Again
this week?
—that so many important directors of the last generation and the next one seemed to be cramming their best work into the final seconds of the century.

Why the confluence? Hollywood's obsessive chartings account for little beyond box office, and even some critics get their narrow shoulders up about making lists of a year's best and worst films. But perhaps patterns should form the beginning of a story, not an end. Perhaps a run as hugely, almost freakishly accomplished as 1999's holds meaning that we can't get at any other way. If they're anything like Ethan Hawke's face, anyway, the integrity of the patterns formed in our culture can at least remind us of exactly how many miles can be racked up over ten years—what a decade looks and feels like—which is handy information, especially for those who have not yet developed a sense of it for themselves.

Check it out: Leaving aside the big-ticket items that weren't half-bad, like
The Sixth Sense
,
American Beauty
(okay, half-bad),
The Insider
, and, say, horror kitsch like
Sleepy Hollow
and
The Blair Witch Project
, something was up with the year's output of smaller, largely independent, madly inventive films. An era was either peaking or having an intense, pre-expiration paroxysm. It was a culminating moment, in any case, when there was still something like legitimate independent film, and the people with money weren't as frightened about taking risks; perhaps the co-opt had begun, but some fight was still left in the independent system. Even the old pros were stepping up their game, trying something new: Spike Lee brought
Summer of Sam
, David Lynch had
The Straight Story
, Kubrick unleashed the love-it-or-laugh-at-it
Eyes Wide Shut
, Woody Allen offered the underrated
Sweet and Lowdown,
and Pedro Almodóvar broke through with
All About My Mother
.

The reign of 1999 began with the wide release of
Rushmore
, in February. Forebear of all things fresh and wonderful, it set the tone and the bar for the year. Then came
The Matrix
and
Office Space
in March. I snuck out of my own stultifying office job to see Mike Judge's second film over a distended lunch. A multiplex was underneath my office building, and another close by; my coworkers and I all cut out for movies now and then, each pretending we were the only one. Then there was
Go
,
Hideous Kinky
(oh, Kate!),
Open Your Eyes
, and
eXistenZ
, which I zoned out of on a kind of principle.

And then:
Election
. Glorious
Election
. After that came
Last Night
, a scene of which was shot in my apartment building;
Buena Vista Social Club
; then—yes—the first
Austin Powers
sequel;
Run Lola Run
; and the goddamn
South Park
movie. What a great time—a great summer—to be dating, now that I think of it. With
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
, I could tell in the first fifteen minutes—as I was cramping up from the laughter gushing from some awesome, astonished wellspring inside me, never before tapped in a movie theater—that Mr. Easter Island beside me would hardly do.

Dick
!
Romance
. And then the fall season, where things get ridiculous:
Three Kings
and the one-two crunch of
Boys Don't Cry
and
Fight Club
, both of which spat me into the streets feeling like someone who'd just been kidnapped, injected with adrenaline and heartbreak, and jack-heeled out of a moving car.
American Movie
;
Dogma
;
42 Up
;
Sunshine
;
Girl, Interrupted
;
Holy Smoke
(ohhh, Kate); and
Mansfield Park
are comparatively minor but still pretty fucking good. Then came
Being John Malkovich
, a true-blue circuit-buster, and
The End of the Affair
, which I am prepared to fight about, and finally
Magnolia
and one of my favorite films of all and ever:
The Talented Mr. Ripley
.

*   *   *

So, about that. About 1999. Then I had just spent four years studying the film and the literature of the past, as though that is indeed where all good and worthwhile things can be found. Then I was recently out of school and unconcerned with continuity, or the connection of inner scheming with the form a life might take in its fullest expression. Then I answered a relative's holiday dinner-table question about what was next for me with the only option that seemed both honest and objectively accurate: Oblivion?

There's a chronic history of that kind of thing, but let's not get into it. Let's just say that even when I wasn't playing the in-house Visigoth at family gatherings, “the future” was a concept that tucked my mind into twilight mode, like a pleasant whiff of ether or the wave of a prestidigitator's hand. In the fog of youth, all of my ambitions were internal and subject to daily renewal, so that each morning I thrashed my way back into the world, having just found my footing when the sun began to set. All of my longings had in some sense to do with time—for time, against time—and the trip wire that kept me from experiencing the world with any kind of reliable, butt-wagging rhythm. At the end of a century defined by its compressions of distance, space seemed more like a cute theory, a dead question. The quest for a modern self is defined not by a map but a schedule; to lack a clear timeline is to be lost. Often I went to the movies to mess with time, to get it off my back or keep it from staring glumly at me from across the room. Just as often I went to get right with it, to tether myself to the present in a way I couldn't otherwise manage.

It worked to that weirdo's advantage, I think, that in 1999, at the movies anyway, so little nostalgia perfumed the air. Through the nineties we dressed like filthy hippies one year and peg-legged mods the next, wearing Goodwill weeds to mourn a time when we didn't exist. For a while, nostalgia was only acceptable in the very young, as though working forward from our parents' generation might show us where we fit into the picture. Back then I figured that the mixed-up, inter-era quality of much of what was going on would make it impossible to reheat on the nostalgia-market stove. But then the eighties returned with the millennium, and the aughts had hardly hobbled out before the nineties came pogoing back, and I saw clothes I still had in my closet arranged in store windows for maximum retro cachet. Is it that time already?

Being a practicing nostalgic is no longer a stain on your record; odds are your records will come back into fashion before you begin to miss them. Its prevalence makes it tough to differentiate between meaningful recovery of the past and the perpetuation of a craze. A lot of crap gets unearthed not because it's good but because ours are kitschy times. Often that's the same difference: evoke a moment however you like, as long as it's both past and specific. The yearning behind that impulse has less to do with sensibility than the drive toward a more stable sense of time.

That nostalgia has become an integral part of American culture is odd not least because it was initially considered the exact opposite. In
The Future of Nostalgia
, Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym connects the beginning of closely measured, delimited time to the birth of what an eighteenth-century doctor called “the hypochondria of the heart.” Basically, absent the option of sweating the apocalypse, a pile of closely bordered countries were left in a kind of spiritual pickle. According to Boym, it's no coincidence that, in medieval Europe, the end of the End Times was also the beginning of nostalgia, which is to say of individuals and collectives looking back to sustain a sense of identity; of pooling memory funds from which to draw meaning; and of shrinking time's unwieldy continuum to reflect a specific situation, specific values, and specific ideals. The more objective our measurements for space and time, the stronger our impulse to transcend them with a sense of personalized order. The longing for a sense of confinement—of home—is both personal and communal, its basis purely human, its paradox even more so.

A Swiss doctor put a name to this longing in 1688, while writing a medical dissertation on a pathology he had observed in Europeans displaced from their homelands—students, servants, and soldiers, mostly. Johannes Hofer described the condition in terms of extreme homesickness, using Greek for street cred:
nostos
, meaning “to return home,” and
algia
, “longing, or sickness.” Over the centuries, treatments for nostalgia included leeches and potions and other earthy voodoos, but the first prescription was the most basic: get back where you belong.