1997 [excerpt]

The following is a draft of portions of my essay “1997” where I address the movies Titanic and In the Company of Men and break down their influence on my artistic development.

Titanic

People might forget—if they are old enough to remember—that in the months leading up to its release, all signs pointed to Titanic being an unprecedented commercial and artistic failure. The exceedingly negative pre-release buzz was so relentless that the movie’s status as an imminent catastrophe became common knowledge in the culture, which was especially impressive considering that household internet was still in its infancy and the bulk of entertainment news was gleaned from weekly updates in newsstand periodicals. (It didn’t hurt that the attention-grabbing headlines practically wrote themselves: endless variations on “Disaster Movie Is, itself, A Disaster!”) The dollar figures attached to the production were beyond comprehension: the director’s quixotic attempts to recreate the historic event with maximal fidelity—culminating in the construction of a nearly full-scale replica of the doomed vessel, accurate down to its very rivets, as well as the biggest pool in the world to store it—had pushed the production way past its already massive budget, with more money being hemorrhaged every day on CGI effects. It got to the point where the fabulously wealthy studio that had funded the movie had to enlist the help of another studio to relieve some of its financial exposure. The final cost of Titanic—north of 200 million dollars, a record for a single movie at the time—is high even by today’s standards. All this for a three-hour movie that everyone knew the ending of, with no real stars in its cast. By the time December rolled around there was the feeling that no one who had anything to do with the movie would emerge from it with their reputation intact, and there was absolutely no hope of the movie simply breaking even at the box office.

Despite the bad press, it was definitely a movie I was going to see. By that time, the writer/director James Cameron had already proven his credentials as an entertainer: Aliens, Terminator, and True Lies were all great fun. Seeing Terminator 2 at the arguably too-young age of eleven with my uncle and two cousins is still one of the great memories I have of going to the theater. Moreover, Cameron excelled at the big screen spectacle. He brought purpose to action sequences that other directors didn’t. Every gunshot, every explosion, every stunt felt consequential. You sensed real calculation behind the special effects, a brain at work, which made other effects-laden movies seem careless and haphazard by comparison. Titanic seemed like perfect material for him. There was no better person than Cameron to recreate one of the most famous disasters in history. And the production’s runaway budget was not a red flag to me; on the contrary, I was excited by the prospect of seeing a Cameron production on which no compromises or financial concessions were made. There was real anticipation on my part—bordering on expectation—that the sinking of the ship was going to be one of the most impressive displays of Hollywood magic I’d ever seen. And if it bankrupted a studio (or two) in the process, well, it might even be worth it.

There was a whole other aspect to the movie that no one—including me—paid much attention to leading up to its release, and that was its story. Everyone assumed the narrative would be purely functional, everything geared toward conveying the audience toward the obvious, anticlimactic climax. Maybe we’d get introduced to roughly a dozen characters so that their peril would add dramatic weight to what would otherwise be a fairly mechanical affair. But how much surprise or tension could be layered into a story whose ending was known by all? And why would we care about the characters when all the movie’s resources seemed to be allocated to the fight between an iceberg and the biggest boat in the world? The secondary nature of the human beings in this tale was all but confirmed when one looked at the cast, which was full of unknown names, devoid of A-list actors. By the end of 1997, I was watching more movies than the average person and rapidly filling in the gaps in my knowledge. I’d recognized the names of the two leads, but I’m not sure I’d seen Kate Winslet act in anything at that time, though she did have a reputation (which Titanic seemingly cemented) of doing period movies that required her to be elaborately costumed. Leonardo DiCaprio’s most memorable performance, to me, had theretofore been his small role in the ‘80s sitcom Growing Pains. Besides Kathy Bates and Bill Paxton—hardly big names—I recognized none of the other cast, and figured this was a calculated move to ensure most of the budget went into the visuals, where it belonged.

It was under these circumstances and with these general sentiments that I settled into my seat to watch Titanic for the first time, a week before Christmas in 1997. I was excited, though cautiously so. Open to seeing something amazing, but still skeptical. Expecting thrills and never once considering the possibility of being emotionally engaged. From this relatively neutral, unengaged state, things changed very rapidly. The first shot of what looked like real newsreel footage—with a somber score playing over it, embellished by a lone singer’s plaintive coloratura—had a sensitivity that stunned me, and by the time Rose started telling her story in earnest twenty minutes later, I was completely enthralled. The present world’s wreckage dissolving into an intact ship of unprecedented majesty remains one of the best transitions I’ve ever seen in movies. Seeing it for the first time was breathtaking and utterly transporting. The illusion of being brought into the past and that past being brought to life in vivifying detail was complete and impeccably executed. The fruits of Cameron’s commitment were immediately evident. The ship was as impressive on the big screen as one would imagine it to be in life. The other particulars of 1912 were just as lovingly recreated, the clothing and cars and hats and watches. All the detail and craft on display made it easy to give yourself over to the illusion. There was no suspension of disbelief in the traditional sense; one simply had to believe one’s own eyes and ears.

Our introductions to the characters are no less memorable than our introduction to the world they inhabit. In perhaps the most iconic shot of Cameron’s career, the camera cranes down to reveal Rose’s face beyond the brim of her ostentatious hat. Her beauty is striking—you’re halfway in love with her before she even boards the ship. Jack’s introduction is similarly kinetic, the camera swirling around the table during a pivotal poker hand. He is confident, smoking, ridiculously good-looking, and full of charisma. We know who they are almost immediately—her, trapped in a loveless engagement of convenience; him, a spirited young man eager to see what the rest of his life will bring—and we can’t wait for them to collide. There are other characters (as we had suspected before buying our ticket) but they are purely utilitarian in nature, background figures subordinate to our fated couple. Most of them are defined by their position or job and exist primarily to fill certain narrative roles when the ship starts sinking, but the only ones we are even tangentially interested in are those who have some proximal relationship to the two main characters, those who orbit of the story’s two red hot stars.

The movie very quickly becomes about Jack and Rose, with everything else becoming secondary—even the eponymous ship and its disastrous meeting with an iceberg. Had people known beforehand that the majority of the movie’s runtime would be devoted to charting their story, it would’ve seemed even more audacious than what most assumed the movie’s narrative would be, which was a more straight, almost documentary-like reenactment of Titanic’s last day. (Before its release, many jokes were made about the movie being longer than it took the actual ship to sink.) Fortunately Leo and Kate’s chemistry is off-the-charts good: their banter is natural, unforced, and their affection for each other is evident. It also doesn’t hurt that they look great as a couple. There was something irresistibly compelling about the two of them together, and it was this obvious spark between the two actors that audiences responded to, powering a lengthy box office run.

But all that was largely post-game stuff. During that initial viewing, I was just thoroughly enjoying characters being brought to life in a way that can only happen when there is sufficient unfamiliarity with the actors, when you haven’t seen them in dozens of roles and even their best work starts to seem like a performance instead of true transformation. I got caught up in the sweep of Jack and Rose’s story as they became the kind of characters I referred to by name—their names, instead of the names of the actors playing them. I became invested in their pursuit of their desires, and I was rooting for them all the way. Every moment they shared worked for me: every joke they made, the knowing looks they exchanged in the midst of her social set at dinner, their revelry and dancing at the party in steerage, their first kiss at the ship’s bow, Rose taking Jack’s implied virginity in the backseat of a car in the cargo hold. They all struck me as carefully observed moments, even more carefully captured by the filmmakers, in a slowly unfurling story of a fated couple, each unrushed beat giving the characters yet another small reason to fall in love. It was like watching (if I may) a flower blooming, shown in time-lapse still slow enough to convey a delicious languor. That Cameron devoted almost a feature-length film’s worth of time to developing a convincing love story in what was supposed to be a disaster movie was as unexpected as it was skillful. By the time the iceberg showed up, its appearance was surprising, nerve-racking, and truly undesirable. I really wanted to see what would happen when Jack and Rose reached American soil, and it was a shame we wouldn’t be able to see that story.

The movie, in some ways, becomes predictable as the ship starts to sink. At the very least it starts to deliver on the promise of disaster movies in general. Scenes of destruction, both practical and computer generated, started to compile. The musical score, which had been delicate and even pretty, introduced loud brass instruments and percussive elements designed to ratchet up the tension. The editing became fast-paced and choppy, adopting the familiar rhythms of typical summer movies. It is all very impressive, and one gets caught up in the sheer movie-going thrill of it, especially when seeing it for the first time. In a lot of ways, the second half of the movie is Cameron at his best: a master technician with an aesthetic eye. He is perhaps the best in the world at creating moving images of perfectly orchestrated chaos that keep the audience oriented (and therefore invested), and he knows enough about the technical side of things to integrate special effects without sacrificing a sense of verisimilitude, avoiding garishness, and making it all look beautiful. After Titanic, elements of his previous movies seem like mere practice for his magnum opus: the calamity of everyone being trapped in the breeding den in Aliens replicated and multiplied by the passengers of the ship; the digital effects and modeling work of living steel in his Terminator movies repurposed to create an ocean liner that will break in half; the water-based life forms in The Abyss paving the way for realistic effects in a movie that takes place almost entirely on the ocean. No one doubted Cameron’s ability to pull off these aspects of the movie. Even people who don’t wholly like Titanic respect—if not thoroughly enjoy—its second half.

After the ship starts to tragically take on water, the tale becomes one of survival and there are, perforce, fewer extended scenes of Jack and Rose just hanging out and getting to know each other. But there are still moments that honor the love story we’ve become invested in, many of them eye-watering for even the hardest cynic. My favorite moment, which still has the power to move me, is when Rose is seated in a lifeboat, secure and being lowered to safety, as Jack watches her from above, his loving gaze framed by emergency flares exploding behind him. While the score playing underneath reaches new depths of sadness, Rose looks around her with increasing desperation as she realizes that this will likely be her last glimpse of Jack. Her inner turmoil reaches some sort of breaking point, and with heartrending determination she throws herself back onto the sinking ship, knowing full well that to do so was to effectively consign herself to death. It was the kind of sacrifice—overdramatic, but absolute—that I, for whatever reason, found admirable, especially when it was done out of love for another person. These fictional tales that deal with matters of the heart invite us to hold our own lives up to the contours of what seems so unattainably perfect and it’s in that wistful space in-between the two where our dreams are defined. Some may wish to one day meet someone who is just like a character that represents an ideal mate, or to have occasion to say a perfectly crafted line at exactly the right time, or just to live happily ever after. Somewhere, in that scene of Rose deciding to stay on the ship with Jack, it was cemented for me the notion of sacrifice being an ultimate expression of love, and it prompted me to wonder whether I’d ever be a worthy recipient of another’s sacrifice.

The broad strokes treatment of romantic love really connected with me in a way that a more nuanced portrayal might not have. I was eighteen years old, a young eighteen-year-old still defining for himself what love meant or even was. The things Titanic gets criticized for—its sappiness, its unremarkable and borderline trite dialogue, its cartoonish villain—did not faze me. Cameron’s technical side, which extended into his role as a storyteller, appealed to my appreciation of perfect geometry. Every moment and scene of Titanic seemed perfectly of a piece with one another, a part of a fully realized world, as lovingly crafted and integral to the overall structure as a rivet in the reconstructed ship. I was nowhere near savvy enough to be too cynical for the movie. I was even too inexperienced to realize that giving your credulity to a storyteller is one of the best things you can do with it. It was enough that the story regarded love as something the world conspires to complicate and sometimes obstruct, but that love’s true form remains, for the two people who share it, simple and pure and unlike anything those outside its influence perceive it to be. It was not an overly layered concept, but at the time it was about as complex an idea about love as I was able to receive.

By the time the movie ended, I was ready to call it the best movie I’d ever seen. It was also the most impressive work of art I’d ever encountered. The full magnitude of the production was on open display; there was no attempt to disguise the insane amount of work it took to produce this masterpiece. It was something to behold, too big to take in all at once during a single viewing. It demanded multiple viewings, and I gladly obliged. I ended up seeing this relatively fleet 3-hour movie two more times in the theater—the first rewatch happening quickly, within a couple weeks of the initial viewing, and my final theatrical experience occurring many months later. That was another highly unusual thing about Titanic: there were ample opportunities to see it throughout 1998. Movies back then didn’t have as short a theatrical window as they do now, but it was still almost unheard of for a movie to still be in theaters a month after its release. Titanic’s unprecedented run of being the number one movie every weekend for almost three months will never be topped in this age of incessant entertainment options, when everyone’s attention is constantly fragmented by daily candidates for the Next Big Thing. Titanic was the only Big Thing for a long time. Marshaling the resources to make something as big as Titanic took time, and it would be a while before something came along that was momentous enough to take people’s attention away from this particular, monumental pop culture phenomenon.

It quickly became apparent that my assessment of the movie was shared by many others, members of the audience as well as the critical establishment. All the critics who had spent months predicting a disaster changed their tune after they saw the film. The reviews were glowing when they weren’t gushing, and most of them had a palpable sense of awe—awe at the production, but also that the supposedly chaotic conditions on the set resulted in something that was not only very watchable but actually good. No longer unified by their prognostications of doom and gloom, the cultural commentators pivoted to proclaiming the movie to be the last of its kind, the final word on the old-fashioned Hollywood epic made with mostly practical effects, a spectacle of the sort that we might never see again. (Whichever way they swing, hyperbole is how these commentators pay the bills.) The paying audience’s reaction was less conflicted: they just loved it with a constant—building, even—fervor, which proved to be key to redeeming its financial prospects. Titanic was number one at the box office on its first weekend, though just barely, beating out the latest Bond film by the slimmest of margins. The final tally of about $25 million wasn’t great, especially for a movie with so much ground to make up. While the swell of critical plaudits ensured that Titanic wouldn’t go down in history as a bad film, its status as a money-loser seemed all but certain. But Titanic had more things to show us that we had never seen before—off the screen this time. In its second weekend, it made more money than it had the first weekend. This was in total defiance of the traditional weekly revenue half-life, most movies’ ticket sales decaying rapidly each week, usually by 50% or more. Anything less than a 40% drop off week to week was regarded as phenomenal for a movie in wide release. Titanic’s numbers going up was like seeing things fall up into the sky instead of toward the ground…it was a complete reversal of natural law. After a few weeks, Titanic’s upward trajectory couldn’t be explained by much else than the simple fact that people liked the movie and were seeing it multiple times. There was evidence to suggest that the romance at its core provided a major impetus to its repeat business (its highest grossing weekend just happened to coincide with Valentine’s Day) and a lot was made of teenage girls’ fascination with Jack Dawson and the actor who played him. (While DiCaprio indisputably became Hollywood’s most desirable actor in the wake of the movie, not enough was made at the time of Winslet’s becoming, for young men everywhere, one of the hottest actresses around, a judgment I can personally ratify, then and now.) The longer it stayed in theaters, the more it became mandatory viewing, if one had any desire to keep up with cultural touchstones. The protracted run forced staunch holdouts to finally break. After months of earning $25-$35 million every weekend, it started climbing up the all-time box office list and was soon supplanting a different iconic film every week. After Spielberg’s most memorable films—the Indiana Joneses, Jurassic Park, E.T.—were outgrossed, the only things left were the untouchable golden idols: the Star Wars movies. The numbers for the three movies in original trilogy seemed unbeatable, and each one had even been given a significant boast earlier in the year due to a high-profile theatrical re-release. Titanic took them down one by one, and it was hard to believe as it was happening. Star Wars was an institution, the basis on which so many had developed their imaginative playgrounds in childhood. That its records were being smashed by a contemporary film was simultaneously disconcerting and thrilling.

Titanic reached peak cultural significance in March of 1998, at the Academy Awards. It was nominated for fourteen Oscars and would end up winning eleven—a record for a single film. It all had the feel of inevitability, as if Titanic’s succession of wins were a foregone conclusion. The evening was a well-deserved coronation of a film that had been unfairly maligned in the press, only then to be celebrated for reminding everyone of the power of movie magic. The ceremony was fun to watch for someone who was both a fan of Titanic and not yet jaded about Award shows. A year earlier, a sixty-second clip of a nominee inflamed my interest in films, and now the best film I had every seen was garnering nearly every award available. It was a stunning ratification of my own taste, a cosmic alignment of my inner life with the collective consciousness of popular culture. My thoughts and feelings were imbued with a powerful relevancy they never had before: they were not confined to my own personal sphere; in this particular instance, at least, they were shared—and thereby amplified—by millions of others, and this shared admiration and love was seemingly powerful enough to have real-world impact and possible practical application. It was the equivalent of supporting a presidential candidate who wins in a landslide, the feeling that enough people agreed with you that your very opinion could move the needle and have a bigger effect than even gravity in shifting the world on its axis.

I was a loner who, like most introverts, took a certain amount of pride in my iconoclasm. I didn’t need my admiration for something corroborated by public opinion in order to validate it. But whenever one of my independently arrived at opinions was subsequently adopted by the culture at large and my thoughts became indistinguishable from general sentiment, there was, in those rare instances, a not unwelcome “clubhouse” feeling associated with my having a now-popular position on something popular. I was not so independently-minded that it meant nothing when the things I loved were loved by others. I was not immune to that feeling of relief when others saw things the same way I did. And the public outpouring for Titanic in particular ended up having great significance for me personally. You see, I grew up in a household that all but denied the existence of artists. There were no artists in my family, we never even knew of one, not even an amateur dabbler, let alone someone getting paid to create art. It was a rather foreign idea to me that someone could possibly make a living as an artist. I was, however, brought up to respect achievement. And only the most intractable person would argue that Titanic represented anything but a total, all-encompassing success. On the financial front, it was hard to do better than to become the highest grossing movie of all time. In terms of cultural significance, people discussed it to the exclusion of everything else, as if no other movie, album, or book were being released; it dominated the entertainment news cycle for a whole year. And for proof of its artistic merit, one needed to look no further than Oscar night, when they gave out gold trophy after gold trophy to honor nearly every aspect of the production. This pageantry was extensively witnessed, by an auditorium full of applauding spectators, with many more at home watching on tv, millions and millions of people tuning into what would be the highest-rated telecast for an award show in years. This display of mass approbation changed how I viewed artists and their endeavors. Before, based on ingrained prejudices, I would’ve characterized all art as little more than diversionary entertainment, and the making of art seemed to me frivolous and unserious work—borderline childish, in a way. But seeing all these adults exalt something I saw as a work of art elevated it in my mind, made it seem significant and worthwhile, and the process of making art no longer seemed like a childish waste of time a part of me suspected it was. Art could participate in society, in the economy, and be taken as seriously as anything else in the adult world. When James Cameron shouted from the stage that he was king of the world, it was hard to argue with. At that moment, he was as decorated and revered as any popular artist had ever been. And it took something like this, an over-the-top demonstration of art’s importance, to pierce the barriers I had constructed that prevented me from even considering the possibility of trying to become an artist. I may have considered myself independent in thought, but to attempt something that had real stakes and real world consequences, I needed precedent. The timing was exactly right to have the biggest effect on me. Not six months before seeing Titanic, I was being asked to really think about what I wanted to do with my life, and it was my first time ever doing so. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. One area of study seemed as valid—and ludicrous—as the other. It was no use asking what I was good at…I felt I wasn’t good at anything. It was also no good asking what I was interested in…my hobbies revolves around all the time-wasting activities of youth. Going into college, I was looking, unconsciously, for role models. Someone I could point to and say that’s who I wanted to be. Cameron became that person on Oscar night. He was arguably the single most important person in the culture at the moment, lifting his gold trophy up and proclaiming himself king of the world…how could that not have an effect on an impressionable young man starting to discover his own artistic sensibilities? It was the right moment in time. And I feel it could’ve been anyone, in a way. I had no idea what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I was led to believe I had some aptitude in math or science, and my mother made no secret of her hope that I would become an electrical engineer. I was not eliminating any possibility. In my first semester of college, I chose biochemistry as a major. Halfway through the year, I tried switching to computer science. I might as well have been throwing darts at a dartboard. The idea that I could be whatever I wanted was paralyzing instead of liberating. When anything was a possibility, nothing stood out as a clear calling. Each profession was within my capability to become a vocation, which just meant that each was as unlikely as the next. I was the first in my immediate family to go to college, and I found this new territory to be extremely destabilizing. I was a pioneer without a pioneer’s enterprising spirit. Following someone’s lead is what felt most comfortable to me. I needed to see precedent, an antecedent, a model to emulate, an example of success which I could aspire to attain. I was a blank slate in need of inspiration. I didn’t know any electrical engineers and I had no idea what the job entailed, so the peak was just as mysterious as the path, should I have decided to point myself in that direction. Art was something I was beginning to understand, and it was something I was interested in, and it was something that now seemed important. If the culture put electrical engineers on tv accepting gold trophies, maybe I would’ve gone in different direction.

It’d be easy to attribute my fascination with Titanic and its success to the seductive power of Hollywood and its stars, but I think something more was at play. I don’t think it was coincidence that it was a love story that captured my attention, that the two movies that showed me that narrative storytelling could be important adult art were love stories. Love was another thing I was working out the definition for, during a time when it was starting to present itself in myriad forms for really the first time in my life. Then consideration of the romantic aspect of love had its own obvious appeal, but ultimately it was the discovery of a love for art itself that opened up my world and that showed me a way into my own future. Love of romantic partners, love of love stories, and a love of art—all these loves became somewhat entwined and some of their effects became indistinguishable as they developed in parallel in my own headspace. But there was one particularly salient aspect they all shared: a willingness to allow another individual to not only change your life, but to rewire your insides and change who you are as a person. It’s a principle that people don’t always arrive at intuitively—It’s sometimes deemed to be more practical—more mature, even—to take that power out of a single person’s hands. Better to be transfigured by systems or events or jobs or oneself…or, best yet, not at all. People can be messy, and some need to maintain a sense of control. But can’t works of art be that impersonal object, detached from human association? Maybe ideally they should be, but one thing I’ve retained from childhood inculcation is that people are inseparable from their accomplishments, that both are one and the same. And once I esteemed movies—and, by eventual extension, all stories, regardless of medium—as something worthy enough to take credit for, their authors loomed as large in my mind as the art they produced, and there was always a person to assign responsibility for the effect their creation had on me. There’s an irony that movies were what motivated me to view artists in this way, being as they are the most collaborative of all art forms. (That was another thing all those Oscar wins hammered home: how many individual artists it takes to make a movie.) But before I had even heard of auteur theory, I was inclined to think of the director as the film’s author, especially if he also wrote the screenplay. In the case of Titanic, it was clear that the film wouldn’t exist without its brainchild, James Cameron. He conceived of the entire thing and everyone on the production was working to reify his vision. He made the work of art that changed everything for me. He was the artist who made me start thinking of becoming an artist myself.

In the Company of Men

The first stirrings of a desire to become an artist did not confer to me such audacity to expect that I’d settle into the director’s chair of a $200 million production overnight. My fantasies needed to be flavored with a touch of realism in order to reach optimum piquancy. If you’re a prohibitively young person with an interest in film but who has absolutely zero contacts in an industry whose machinery seems opaque to say the least, the tales of independent, no-budget filmmaking have obvious and irresistible appeal. The ‘90s were a golden age for independent films. Every few months a new low-budget film from a debut director seemed to spring out of nowhere and become yet another inspiring story. The takeaway was always the same: everyone was a good script and a few maxed-out credit cards away from being a legitimate filmmaker. (What was at least partially lost on me at the time was that the culture’s newfound interest in DIY filmmaking was largely motivated by well-endowed corporations recognizing that money could be made from this movement, from the studios distributing the films or buying them outright to the press writing widely-read feel-good stories of an indigent artist making good.) It didn’t matter that a lot of these films’ budgets still totaled more money than I had ever seen in my life, by far. (I was also curiously unbothered by the fact that I didn’t knew any actors, either.) Every success story in this arena allowed me to think that making art was possible, which was the message I most needed to internalize at the time.

To this day I still enjoy a good no-budget film, or at least the story behind its getting made. The films themselves can be spotty and usually have to be enjoyed conditionally, making certain allowances for the oftentimes obvious deficiencies in various areas of its production. But looking back on all of them, it’s clear to me that one film in particular had a lingering effect on me as an artist, due almost entirely to its content. I forget exactly when I saw In the Company of Men, but it was certainly on video, probably sometime in 1998. Following its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, it had steadily attracted more and more buzz, attaining a certain notoriety even, until one felt the need to see what all the fuss was about. My reaction upon seeing it was extremely positive. I thought it was incredibly sharp, keenly observed, deliciously scabrous, funny and horrifying—basically it lived up to its billing. That the director, Neil LaBute, had also written it was also appealing, and its $25k budget was inspiring. (Though, again, it was more money than I could ever dream of procuring at the time.) One of the best things about it is that the images they captured seemed exactly right, with nothing you could point to that would’ve clearly benefited from more money being thrown at it. With great actors, a great visual aesthetic, and a finely tuned script, one was free to judge the movie as one would any other movie, on its own merits, and see if something valuable could be taken from the experience.

I was thinking about girls a lot, as any eighteen-year-old boy does. My perspective was necessarily male, so a lot of these thoughts on females were framed in relation to males, and vice versa when I would try to picture what men looked like from a women’s perspective. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that my concerns at the time revolved exclusively on the dynamic between girls and guys. So naturally I was most interested in stories that concentrated on that dynamic, or that made that subject its focal point. It just so happened that the two movies that opened up my eyes to higher tiers of art—Jerry Maguire and Titanic—are sweeping love stories in which love conquers all. I was certainly sympathetic to that notion and felt I had it within me to tell stories in that vein. It’s also true that movies, particularly Hollywood movies, provided no shortage of movies with a foregrounded love story that would more or less end the same way. Love sells, even more than sex. The ‘90s were also a notable era for a certain type of romantic comedy, memories of which make one either groan or smile, depending on whether they hit for you or not. I confess to enjoying a fair number of them. But even though romantic love was a big potential component of guy/girl interactions (and it was definitely where my own personal, vested interest lay, the result I most hoped for myself), I knew there were other components and textures to it. In the Company of Men showed an extreme case of what could happen when you brought men and women together. I confess to having no firsthand knowledge nor ever witnessing anything like what this clearly satirical film depicts, but elements of the characters’ attitudes and snippets of their dialogue rang true. The film itself had a very different perspective from that of Titanic, whose depiction of enduring love was honestly, in many ways, as foreign to me as the outrageous behavior in In the Company of Men. How the two movies handled the interplay of men and women represented opposite ends of a wide spectrum, and I saw an infinity of possibility between those two poles. (That one movie cost about 1% of what the other had cost just accentuated their differences.) That was thing that excited me about both movies. They showed that one could write almost any kind of story, simply by putting a guy and girl in a room together. I would not be locked into one kind of story, and it could be a lifelong fascination which could absorb any amount of interest and be the springboard for writing about anything in the known universe. Stories of men and women, boys and girls, guys and gals are still all I’m really interested in as both a spectator and creator of art, and Titanic and In the Company of Men were, to me, early indicators of the breadth of what still seems to me like an ever-renewing source of material.