“Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah Stayin’ Alive…”
—The Bee Gees

I thank God that my parents didn’t watch movies with me growing up. But should I really thank them? Would it not be cruel for me now to do the same to my children? Did them not watching movies allow me to watch and sublimate the American masterpieces with proper maturity and respect? It is unclear, but it likely saved me from the extent of my interaction with them being the purchase and use of a Scarface or Godfather themed gaming mousepad, likely, but not certainly.

Did this absence of mine stem from my parent’s inate understanding of the possible evil and malaise— it’s now a truly laughable idea that movies could be the culprit of ‘brainrot’ in an age where they are one of the most literarily attention heavy mediums amidst smartphones the rest of it— that can come through movies? Or was it, especially on my father’s part as one who does seem to have alloted significant psychic real estate to enjoying and regurgitating his generation’s movies, a fear of watching dark or nuanced films with the young me that resulting in him losing my respect to watch films with him as my teen years progressed? Regardless, even in my late teens, he would have been fearful to watch something with sex and drug use and violence and the cruel world’s rest. So much fear even though the majority of our interactions were him strugging with me about these very things. It is hard to make sense of it all, and I certainly played a part.

As for my mother, I can be grateful that she is a bit of a ‘granola’ and focused on things other than movies like being outside, an obviously important thing—the most important; but so is art (of which movies are the most important form of the last century); so are communication and knowledge and reverence, some strains of which being exclusively impartable by that very art: of which I recieved none.

Given all of this, let us redeem the past with present talk about four of America’s greatest (and most famous) cinematic works that my fellow parents and compatriots, who seem to be suffering from a form of collective amnesia or programming, have greatly misunderstood, misremembered, and most importantly misapplied— for “faith without works is dead”. We begin with debatably the most egregious case of misunderstood art in history, James Dean in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause.

James Dean, the quintessential American bad boy. And yes, he cant help but look the part, he’s young and quick, calm and fiery with his defiant yet easy cigarette pose, but even after all of that, even after he may have died in a bad boy car crash, in Rebel Without a Cause, he is not a bad boy he is quite the opposite, and this movie is more famous than him generally, so let us alot proper measure to each. Mentions of this movie, both consciously and symbolically, highlight its violent nature, and it seems the collective imagines this movie to be about roving gangs of teenagers killing teachers and riding motocycles under the influence of drugs, of which in this movie there are none, or worse through the streets to shoplift en mass with blades and pistols for weapons. The worst part about this ignorance is not that it was used to incite fear toward adolescent life or that these days the way most people interface with this movie and Mr. Dean is through “A little diddy about Jack and Diane”, but how far from the simple truth this misunderstanding is.The film is simple. Highschooler Jim Stark (James Dean) moves to Los Angeles with his family of extremely, heavy emphasis here, dim-witted parents and is isolated as a new comer. He also unsuprisingly falls for the harsh but alluring in-group girl, there is no roving street violence that ensues. Yes, the cool kids of the highschool are harsh and violent to Jim but all within the context of events exclusively attended by their peers. These events include a knife fight at a tour to the Griffith Observatory (the wonderful scenes that take place here set one up for gargantuan dissapointment when visiting the overcrowded hiltop as a tourist) and a daredevil car race on a cliff-face. At the latter, Jim is brave enough to accept the alpha male’s challenge to a race which ends with him surviving while the cool kid accidently drives off a cliff.

From then on out the movie is not about rebellion or anything of the sort, but about Jim and his lover (the newly deceased alpha male’s ex) taking care of a maladapted beige-skinned nerd named Pluto, who nominatively and unsurprisingly ends up dying. Jim is a relatively altruistic and noble character in the film. He cares for the meek at the risk of his own life and is only violent when provoked (often turning the other cheek), all while being surrounded by decay and imbecility on every authoritative level: from household to school. If anything the films is more an indictment of the old than the young.

On the theme of the power of the young, we now move to the film that prompted me to think in this vein generally, and one that contains a icon equal in stardom to Dean, albiet with a slightly more mature allure. Allure mixed with tragedy given that while we can still happen upon some puerile stud like Dean at a stray American roadstop, thanks to “environmental factors” we will never see a 23 year old man like John Travolta again.

The best way to start talking about Saturday Night Fever, released in 1975, is to talk about its innocuous director. After watching the film and being blown away, I threw on the director’s commentary, not knowing much about him, and left the viewing even more satisfied knowing that there wasnt too much to know (his only successes being this picture and the sci-fi film War Games). He made this movie innocently and without real intellectual or pretentious ends. The movie in mass culture is first and foremost a movie about John Travolta and the Bee Gees: the beautiful music, a soundtrack that until Thriller was the best selling album of all time, and Travolta’s dancing— the fact that America used to Disco. Ultimately, they are right.

The soundtrack is heavenly, in every sense of the word, even the dourest. In addition to the Bee Gees hits, there are fantastic inclusions like A Fifth of Beethoven, a disco rendition of… (you guessed it) and The Trammps Disco Inferno, songs good enough to be played for the rest of one’s life*.* However, once the initial awe of the movie’s music and dance begins to fade to an everlasting hum behind the rest of the plot, we see what lies beneath: a coming of age story and a love story. This movie is a hard watch, it is not a Bee Gees’ concert. A spurned, dull lover kills herself, people sacrifice themselves and their integrity to climb social strata— to climb over the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan. This movie is morally, sexually, and empathetically difficult, the characters can be cruel and brilliant. There is a tension to every aspect of it. Infinitely, we are blessed to be able to glipse Travolta’s glimmer in everything he does, from staring straight up his abdoment while while he looks at the a Serpico poster in his bedroom in his tighty whities, to his dinners with father, mother and brother, the skiddish priest. This movie is more than a dance movie. Beware… you may never stop dancing.

The next film America didn’t understand (and in this case likely didn’t watch) came out 6 years after Rebel Without a Cause, to much less of an audience and mass spectacle. The reason for its relevance in this list has more to do with its sequel The Color of Money (1986) grossing $52 Million compared to the original’s $7 million, than the original, but that is the point: retrocausal misunderstanding.

The Hustler is led by another magnetic male actor, Paul Newman, in his prime. He has something so electric but even-keeled about him that he is hard to keep your eyes off of, his performance stays with you. Somehow, the only two things in this movie that do make you take your eyes off of him are a (Minnesota) fat man in fine dress playing pool and a crippled lady Newman falls in love with at the train station. The cripple, having nothing to do with pool, is what makes this movie great— she is one of most moving and entrancing female characters in all of film. This movie is not about pool in the same way The Color of Money is about pool. The Color of Money is only about pool. And even though Scorsese’s direction, filled with mind boggling and swirling edits that swoop and takes you from pool rooms to bar to indoor stadiums, is fantastic and it is a moderately good movie, the film lacks almost everything The Hustler has.

The Hustler is not about pool, it is a tragic story filled with characters of Shakespearean depth. Newman’s manager manages to get his lame but beautiful and disarming and instictive girl to kill herself with levels of manipulation even Iago could not emulate. All of the characters are deep, all of the movie is beautiful, the movie is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. It is about love and it is about the consequence of mastery. It left me with a tragic feeling that I couldn’t belive it was brave enough to even consider… I thought it was just Newman’s Own shooting snooker.

Last but not least, we take on a lighter picture, a picture that also suffers misunderstanding more than anything from its sequels, all 5 of them. Everyone has heard enough plenty about Rocky, about the steps of the Philadelphia (the blessed of the 7 churches) Art Museum, about the many sequels— some of which are quite good—, but nothing, nothing compares to the you, the first Rocky. In this case, yes, even the public knows that it is not just about boxing but also a love story… “ADRIAN!”… but even more importantly, the public soon forgot how wierd of a movie it really is.

Rocky is art-house. Rocky is art-house. I kept thinking this to myself as I watched it for the first time a year or two ago. Stalone is not the garguatuan but absolutely lean man he will become for the rest of his life. Stalone is wide and muscular but has some body fat to the point of looking even more beautiful. Stalone talks almost as if he is mentally disabled. Stalone’s girlfriend is not some high-class lady but borders on a local pet-shop freakshow. Stalone spends half the movie chewing gum and bouncing a ball; God how beautiful it all is. Everything from the pacing of the film to the dialogue to the cinematography is so out of the norm I could not believe it, so out of the norm that it cannot even be blamed on the film’s low budget.

This movie contains multudes in its simplicity. Is there a more erotic scene in cinema than when the dullard Stallone plays (or does he) takes the shy Adrian into his bare white tank top arms just inside his apartment door? Is there a movie more about the American Dream such that its very success becomes the American Dream in a way even more surprising than the almost farcical plot line of Apollo Creed deciding to fight a man off the street to not waste a stadium rental? This movie was Stallone’s American dream and it shines on a level almost nothing can compare to. Stallone is different, he even looks different, in the first Rocky than the rest. It is all so innocent.

At this point, the point is quite clear. Somehow, between the marketing meetings and the public’s consumption of a film and time’s famed gravitational warping of events, America has never once been able to remember her art. She remembers political cartoons of them, she blurts out one liners, but she has yet to fully see them, she sees them as trees walking. How kind the God must be who gives her even that for sight; it could be the healer or the healed’s halfway.

“Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah Stayin’ Alive…”
—The Bee Gees

I thank God that my parents didn’t watch movies with me growing up. But should I really thank them? Would it not be cruel for me now to do the same to my children? Did them not watching movies allow me to watch and sublimate the American masterpieces with proper maturity and respect? It is unclear, but it likely saved me from the extent of my interaction with them being the purchase and use of a Scarface or Godfather themed gaming mousepad, likely, but not certainly.

Did this absence of mine stem from my parent’s inate understanding of the possible evil and malaise— it’s now a truly laughable idea that movies could be the culprit of ‘brainrot’ in an age where they are one of the most literarily attention heavy mediums amidst smartphones the rest of it— that can come through movies? Or was it, especially on my father’s part as one who does seem to have alloted significant psychic real estate to enjoying and regurgitating his generation’s movies, a fear of watching dark or nuanced films with the young me that resulting in him losing my respect to watch films with him as my teen years progressed? Regardless, even in my late teens, he would have been fearful to watch something with sex and drug use and violence and the cruel world’s rest. So much fear even though the majority of our interactions were him strugging with me about these very things. It is hard to make sense of it all, and I certainly played a part.

As for my mother, I can be grateful that she is a bit of a ‘granola’ and focused on things other than movies like being outside, an obviously important thing—the most important; but so is art (of which movies are the most important form of the last century); so are communication and knowledge and reverence, some strains of which being exclusively impartable by that very art: of which I recieved none.

Given all of this, let us redeem the past with present talk about four of America’s greatest (and most famous) cinematic works that my fellow parents and compatriots, who seem to be suffering from a form of collective amnesia or programming, have greatly misunderstood, misremembered, and most importantly misapplied— for “faith without works is dead”. We begin with debatably the most egregious case of misunderstood art in history, James Dean in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause.

James Dean, the quintessential American bad boy. And yes, he cant help but look the part, he’s young and quick, calm and fiery with his defiant yet easy cigarette pose, but even after all of that, even after he may have died in a bad boy car crash, in Rebel Without a Cause, he is not a bad boy he is quite the opposite, and this movie is more famous than him generally, so let us alot proper measure to each. Mentions of this movie, both consciously and symbolically, highlight its violent nature, and it seems the collective imagines this movie to be about roving gangs of teenagers killing teachers and riding motocycles under the influence of drugs, of which in this movie there are none, or worse through the streets to shoplift en mass with blades and pistols for weapons. The worst part about this ignorance is not that it was used to incite fear toward adolescent life or that these days the way most people interface with this movie and Mr. Dean is through “A little diddy about Jack and Diane”, but how far from the simple truth this misunderstanding is.The film is simple. Highschooler Jim Stark (James Dean) moves to Los Angeles with his family of extremely, heavy emphasis here, dim-witted parents and is isolated as a new comer. He also unsuprisingly falls for the harsh but alluring in-group girl, there is no roving street violence that ensues. Yes, the cool kids of the highschool are harsh and violent to Jim but all within the context of events exclusively attended by their peers. These events include a knife fight at a tour to the Griffith Observatory (the wonderful scenes that take place here set one up for gargantuan dissapointment when visiting the overcrowded hiltop as a tourist) and a daredevil car race on a cliff-face. At the latter, Jim is brave enough to accept the alpha male’s challenge to a race which ends with him surviving while the cool kid accidently drives off a cliff.

From then on out the movie is not about rebellion or anything of the sort, but about Jim and his lover (the newly deceased alpha male’s ex) taking care of a maladapted beige-skinned nerd named Pluto, who nominatively and unsurprisingly ends up dying. Jim is a relatively altruistic and noble character in the film. He cares for the meek at the risk of his own life and is only violent when provoked (often turning the other cheek), all while being surrounded by decay and imbecility on every authoritative level: from household to school. If anything the films is more an indictment of the old than the young.

On the theme of the power of the young, we now move to the film that prompted me to think in this vein generally, and one that contains a icon equal in stardom to Dean, albiet with a slightly more mature allure. Allure mixed with tragedy given that while we can still happen upon some puerile stud like Dean at a stray American roadstop, thanks to “environmental factors” we will never see a 23 year old man like John Travolta again.

The best way to start talking about Saturday Night Fever, released in 1975, is to talk about its innocuous director. After watching the film and being blown away, I threw on the director’s commentary, not knowing much about him, and left the viewing even more satisfied knowing that there wasnt too much to know (his only successes being this picture and the sci-fi film War Games). He made this movie innocently and without real intellectual or pretentious ends. The movie in mass culture is first and foremost a movie about John Travolta and the Bee Gees: the beautiful music, a soundtrack that until Thriller was the best selling album of all time, and Travolta’s dancing— the fact that America used to Disco. Ultimately, they are right.

The soundtrack is heavenly, in every sense of the word, even the dourest. In addition to the Bee Gees hits, there are fantastic inclusions like A Fifth of Beethoven, a disco rendition of… (you guessed it) and The Trammps Disco Inferno, songs good enough to be played for the rest of one’s life*.* However, once the initial awe of the movie’s music and dance begins to fade to an everlasting hum behind the rest of the plot, we see what lies beneath: a coming of age story and a love story. This movie is a hard watch, it is not a Bee Gees’ concert. A spurned, dull lover kills herself, people sacrifice themselves and their integrity to climb social strata— to climb over the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan. This movie is morally, sexually, and empathetically difficult, the characters can be cruel and brilliant. There is a tension to every aspect of it. Infinitely, we are blessed to be able to glipse Travolta’s glimmer in everything he does, from staring straight up his abdoment while while he looks at the a Serpico poster in his bedroom in his tighty whities, to his dinners with father, mother and brother, the skiddish priest. This movie is more than a dance movie. Beware… you may never stop dancing.

The next film America didn’t understand (and in this case likely didn’t watch) came out 6 years after Rebel Without a Cause, to much less of an audience and mass spectacle. The reason for its relevance in this list has more to do with its sequel The Color of Money (1986) grossing $52 Million compared to the original’s $7 million, than the original, but that is the point: retrocausal misunderstanding.

The Hustler is led by another magnetic male actor, Paul Newman, in his prime. He has something so electric but even-keeled about him that he is hard to keep your eyes off of, his performance stays with you. Somehow, the only two things in this movie that do make you take your eyes off of him are a (Minnesota) fat man in fine dress playing pool and a crippled lady Newman falls in love with at the train station. The cripple, having nothing to do with pool, is what makes this movie great— she is one of most moving and entrancing female characters in all of film. This movie is not about pool in the same way The Color of Money is about pool. The Color of Money is only about pool. And even though Scorsese’s direction, filled with mind boggling and swirling edits that swoop and takes you from pool rooms to bar to indoor stadiums, is fantastic and it is a moderately good movie, the film lacks almost everything The Hustler has.

The Hustler is not about pool, it is a tragic story filled with characters of Shakespearean depth. Newman’s manager manages to get his lame but beautiful and disarming and instictive girl to kill herself with levels of manipulation even Iago could not emulate. All of the characters are deep, all of the movie is beautiful, the movie is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. It is about love and it is about the consequence of mastery. It left me with a tragic feeling that I couldn’t belive it was brave enough to even consider… I thought it was just Newman’s Own shooting snooker.

Last but not least, we take on a lighter picture, a picture that also suffers misunderstanding more than anything from its sequels, all 5 of them. Everyone has heard enough plenty about Rocky, about the steps of the Philadelphia (the blessed of the 7 churches) Art Museum, about the many sequels— some of which are quite good—, but nothing, nothing compares to the you, the first Rocky. In this case, yes, even the public knows that it is not just about boxing but also a love story… “ADRIAN!”… but even more importantly, the public soon forgot how wierd of a movie it really is.

Rocky is art-house. Rocky is art-house. I kept thinking this to myself as I watched it for the first time a year or two ago. Stalone is not the garguatuan but absolutely lean man he will become for the rest of his life. Stalone is wide and muscular but has some body fat to the point of looking even more beautiful. Stalone talks almost as if he is mentally disabled. Stalone’s girlfriend is not some high-class lady but borders on a local pet-shop freakshow. Stalone spends half the movie chewing gum and bouncing a ball; God how beautiful it all is. Everything from the pacing of the film to the dialogue to the cinematography is so out of the norm I could not believe it, so out of the norm that it cannot even be blamed on the film’s low budget.

This movie contains multudes in its simplicity. Is there a more erotic scene in cinema than when the dullard Stallone plays (or does he) takes the shy Adrian into his bare white tank top arms just inside his apartment door? Is there a movie more about the American Dream such that its very success becomes the American Dream in a way even more surprising than the almost farcical plot line of Apollo Creed deciding to fight a man off the street to not waste a stadium rental? This movie was Stallone’s American dream and it shines on a level almost nothing can compare to. Stallone is different, he even looks different, in the first Rocky than the rest. It is all so innocent.

At this point, the point is quite clear. Somehow, between the marketing meetings and the public’s consumption of a film and time’s famed gravitational warping of events, America has never once been able to remember her art. She remembers political cartoons of them, she blurts out one liners, but she has yet to fully see them, she sees them as trees walking. How kind the God must be who gives her even that for sight; it could be the healer or the healed’s halfway.