In one of the early moments of Clint Eastwood’s magnificent western Unforgiven, the protagonist William Munny, played by Eastwood, stands in front of his oldest friend asking him to do one more favor, to join him on a journey. In their earlier days he and Ned Logan, played by Morgan Freeman, were bad men, with Munny described in the films opening crawl as “a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” Were it necessary, or probably unnecessary in some cases, they killed anyone who got in their way, be they men, women, or children. But Munny found himself a wife, had some children, started a hog farm, and put that life behind him. After the untimely death of his wife from smallpox, he concentrated on being a good dad and keeping the family farm functioning. But now he needs Ned’s help.
To interrupt Munny’s peaceful retirement, along comes The Schofield Kid and offers him a chance to accompany him to take down some ranchers who, in increasingly outrageous ways the more the story is told, cut up a lady. Although the accounts of the incident are exaggerated, the truth remains that a woman, now thought of as damaged property, was assaulted and deserves avenging despite the thought that “nobody is going to pay money for a cut-up whore.” The Schofield Kid, knowing the awful legends of William Munny, decides he needs him as a partner and offers Munny a chance at some easy money, killing “hard-working boys that were…uh…foolish.”
Munny is not that man anymore, or at least that’s what he’s convinced himself over the passing years. Back then it was the “whiskey done it” and he “ain’t had a drop in ten years,” so if he’s going to collect on the bounty money raised by the young ladies’ co-workers, he will require the help of his right-hand man Ned Logan. Logan offers up the same agreement but nonetheless agrees to help Munny on his mission.
The first time I saw this film, from that gorgeous opening shot to its rain-soaked conclusion, I knew neither the date I was on nor the movie would end well but I couldn’t bring myself to look away. Any attempts to steal my attention from the film would end in failure and possibly hurt feelings. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but looking back at it years later it raised a question that created today’s topic. For those of us who love movies, who study each frame instead of merely watching…are we pains in the asses to deal with?
Do cinephiles make terrible dates, or is it just me?
Let’s take a trip back to when I was a young man and somehow managed to rent this rated R film from the local video store. The intent behind renting this movie was to bring it over to a young lady’s house and have ourselves a date night. In those days my hometown offered nothing in the way of teenage entertainment other than the roller skating rink and driving aimless for hours in what was known as “The Loop.” If you were a bit older, and a bit cooler, you could hang out on the steps of Val’s Pizza, but I never felt I really achieved that upper echelon until my Senior year. For me, an evening’s entertainment was the chance to cuddle up on a couch and maybe even make out a little, but only after you rent a movie as a cover story.
I had been waiting for Unforgiven to show up at the video store for months. It had recently won best picture and I was enamored of Eastwood thanks to Dirty Harry, Heartbreak Ridge, and Any Which Way But Loose. I knew he had been known for his roles in past westerns but I’d never had the chance to see a single one. After weeks of being on the waiting list, because the store only had two copies, my name had finally risen to the top and it was my night to watch. I took the tape over to her house, popped some popcorn with her, picked her seats out on the couch, and was quickly joined by her father, who had been on the waiting list to see the movie. To this day I’m not sure if it was his role of protective father or Clint Eastwood fan that brought him downstairs that night.
This should have been the end of any chances to make out, but as I’ve learned as I creep further and further into middle age, a two-hour movie started after 9 pm is an invitation to fall asleep halfway through. Before Munny and his band of men even made it to Big Whiskey and crossed paths with local lawman Little Bill Daggett, her father was sound asleep and snoring in his recliner. Before Little Bill laid out his brand of justice the sound of her father’s snoring should’ve been the starting pistol we needed to kiss while we had the chance. But no kissing would take place while the titans of acting prepared to draw pistols on one another. Her father might have fallen asleep, but don’t judge the performances based on the dad’s reaction, as Gene Hackman won the Best Supporting Actor for his role as Little Bill and waiting for the eventual showdown between Little Bill and Munny is a masterclass in tension building, so much that I forgot why I rented the movie in the first place. I was fixated.
Truth be told, I was an absolutely awful date. She did everything she could to focus my intention on her instead of Eastwood’s hardscrabble face. Without going into any detail, because a gentleman never tells, she gave it her best effort and was promptly ignored because I had to know what happened next. There was no way I was going to divert my attention from anything other than Eastwood as he fulfilled his bounty.
We hear all the time that teenagers are nothing more than raging hormones but for that two hours and ten minutes I was more Roger Ebert than Porky’s. To her credit, that young lady stuck around for a little while longer, doing her best to get me to ignore the silver screen, but our next movie date night was A Few Good Men, a film from Aaron Sorkin that could easily inspire another essay, and that ended in nearly the exact same manner.
A smarter man would have come to the conclusion that if you want to kiss the girl, for the love of all that is holy stop, renting movies that are interesting to you and will take all of your attention from the human being sitting next to you that is trying to connect. However, when you’re young with a limited budget and choices at the movie store, wasting money on something you’re not going to watch somehow seemed sacrilegious. If her family had HBO, maybe this all would have been avoided…but I doubt it.
I place all the blame for this on Tom Hanks.
Like many teenagers, my first chances at making out were often at the wondrous “boy/girl” party and/or sleepover. In instance number one it was the beginning of the summer after eighth grade and my younger cousin was having a sleepover with her friends. She was living with our grandparents at the time and I happened to be staying over as well for some reason I cannot remember. But while she and her friends were outside doing whatever they were doing I was inside watching The Burbs. I was doing my best to keep myself separate from them because I was a soon-to-be Freshman and I wasn’t going to hang out with middle schoolers. However, one of her friends was either brave or foolish enough to join me on the couch and before I knew what was happening, we were making out. For the record, I had already seen The Burbs numerous times, so I believe that was a factor in my attention being able to be drawn away from their neighborhood hijinks.
Fast forward a few months and now my older cousin is having yet another party at my grandparents’ house, this time with boys and girls. I was immediately out of my element as most of the attendees were upperclassmen and most of them were having nothing to do with me. Once again I found myself by myself on the couch, this time feeling a bit more dejected. To ease my sense of rejection I reached for that comforting VHS bootleg copy of The Burbs. (My grandparents frequently ignored the FBI warning and recorded everything to their own blank cassettes.) About an hour into the movie a young lady joined me and for some reason decided that she wanted to kiss me. I’d later learn that the boy she liked actually started dating the girl I liked that night, so perhaps it was kismet, or a mutual adoration of this forgotten Tom Hanks classic that bonded us. Thanks to The Burbs my underdeveloped teenage brain learned that if you put on a movie, slightly aggressive girls will want to make out with you.
Of course, as with many things that I thought were gospel in reference to girls, I was very, very wrong, not just about them, but about myself.
It was around this age that I became fascinated by the Academy Awards and so-called prestige films, and yes, I will fight you if you don’t consider The Burbs a prestige film. The aforementioned video store opened up in my hometown and for the first time, viewing choices weren’t relegated to a small room or a handful of racks or whatever was playing on HBO that month. There were now sections of movies available to me and, of course, I begged my mother to put me on her account so that I could start working my way through that vast catalog on my own. Like any good parent, she put a limitation that I could not rent Rated R movies, but in what was probably my first sign of true bravery, I took R-rated films to the counter anyway and dared the employee not to rent to me. More often than not I walked away with the film I wanted. I might have not been facing down armed gunmen like William Munny, but it still felt like a hard-won battle.
I dove headfirst into each and every movie I could afford to rent, carefully making my weekly choice based on award nominations, the actors involved, and for the first time, the directors who made the movie. I learned that reading the film credits was just as important as reading the film synopsis. Often I picked out movies that no one else wanted to watch but for me, but hell, I was paying so I got to choose. And since I was more successful at picking out movies than I was with the ladies, movie watching soon became more of an education than a hobby for me.
Looking back on it now, I certainly could have been a better date. In this age of everything being available across a wide variety of platforms, certainly, I’ve learned to just watch the movie another time or to pause it and go back to it later, right?
Not so much.
Over the years I’ve taken first dates to films I was dying to see such as Leaving Las Vegas, Magnolia, Men In Black, and Deep Impact. While they all rewarded me as a filmgoer, they did not result in a second date. One poor girl accompanied me to the film A Perfect Murder, where I spent most of the pre-movie conversation discussing/mansplaining how the movie was actually a remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. I’m honestly surprised she ever talked to me again after I spent most of the post-movie drink going over Hitchcock’s career instead of asking her many questions about herself.
As awful as that sounds, perhaps my greatest gaffe came a few years later. A young woman and I had been seeing each other for a little while and were then at the stage where she’d spend the night at my place. One morning we both had the day off and planned to spend much of it still in bed, only we were out of condoms. We decided that I would go across the street to the Rite Aid and buy some more, but sadly I proved just as reliable as Jack who traded his family cow for some magic beans. I’d made it as far as waiting in line at the counter, $10 box of condoms in hand, when I noticed a movie standee off to the side. Recently released to VHS was one of my childhood favorites The Dark Crystal, on sale for $13.99. I had $15 to my name, so I made the executive decision to leave the condoms behind and purchase the movie instead. Upon return to my apartment, I excitedly stated that we could spend the entire morning in bed watching the movie. For me, this was still a win-win situation, but she didn’t agree and within moments I was left to watch the movie all by myself…which I did.
How I didn’t spend my entire life alone I’ll never know.
Luckily for me, I now find myself with a lovely woman who enjoys movies just as much as I do. She gets excited to watch terrible horror movies, watch a foreign film with me in bed, or make plans to go see the next big movie on IMAX even though it’s a two-hour drive away. Hell, she even wants to go to the Cannes Film festival with me someday. She is a dream come true when it comes to my movie viewing habits and makes me feel like maybe I’m not quite crazy.
But does that mean I’ve changed? As an adult, we don’t have to steal away moments to make out. I can now afford to buy both a movie and condoms if needed. Either the hard choices aren’t really there anymore or I’ve become better at creating situations that require them. Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned that while I’m endlessly fascinated by trivial information about movies, not everyone is, so if I’m going to spout off about Scorcese I make sure to read the room first and just keep quiet if necessary.
I want to think I’m not that young man anymore, the one who focuses on film and not people, who knows he can pause the movie and give someone attention when they need it, and for the most part I can happily do so, but there are moments that bring me back. I cannot abide people talking in the movie theater and heaven forbid someone takes out their cell phone, even if we’re watching at home. My lovely fiance can attest to my problems overlooking this small slight but luckily for me she forgives my momentary lapses into dickishness.
Towards the end of Unforgiven, when Munny has learned that Little Bill killed Logan and displayed his corpse in the center of town, Munny comes to a hard truth. There is a look on his face when he delivers the line “I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another, and I’m here to kill you, Little Bill,” that lets you know, when it comes to his core, he’s still that same man that he spent a decade trying so hard to bury.
The lesson he needed to learn was there all along, and as much attention as I paid to the movie, I should’ve learned it myself way back then. Despite how much you might want to change, or think you have changed, it’s very easy to fall back into old behaviors and old patterns when you put yourself in the situations you once found yourself in. For Munny, that meant his character was still a killer at heart. For me, it means I’m still that man who is capable of giving my attention to the wrong thing despite the negative effect it might have on myself or others. I might not be shooting bullets at anyone, but what comes across as disinterest can hurt them just the same. That’s something that’s hard to forgive at times knowing I can’t make it up because I can’t change past behavior.
But I’ll work at it until I ain’t that man anymore.
