Disappointment Artist And Other Essays

DefendingThe Searchers (Scenes in the Life of an Obsession) 1. Bennington What's weird in retrospect is how I seem to have willed the circumstances into being, how much I seemed to know before I knew anything at all. There shouldn't have been anything at stake for me, seeingThe Searchersthat first time. Yet there was. Going to a film society screening was ordinarily a social act, but I made sure to go alone that night. I smoked a joint alone too, my usual preparation then for a Significant Moment. And I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the ones I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality. The evening of that first viewing ofThe SearchersI readied myself like a man who suspects his first date might become an elopement. I wasn't a man. I was nineteen, a freshman at Bennington, a famously expensive college in Vermont. I'd never been to private school, and the distance between my experience and the other students', most of whom had never set foot inside a public school like those I'd attended in Brooklyn, would be hard to overstate. On the surface I probably came off like an exuberant chameleon. I plied my new friends with stories of inner-city danger when I wanted to play the exotic, aped their precocious cynicism when I didn't. Beneath that surface I was weathering a brutally sudden confrontation with the reality of class. My bohemian-artisan upbringingmy parents were hippieshad masked the facts of my own exclusion from real privilege, more adeptly than is possible anymore. It was 1982. Soon the weight of these confusions crushed my sense of belonging, and I dropped out. But before that, I cloaked my abreaction in a hectic show of confidence: I was the first freshman ever to run the film society. The role freed me to move easily through the complex social layers at Bennington, impressing people with a brightness that hadn't affixed to any real target. Plus I was able to hire myself as a projectionist, one of the least degrading work-study jobs, then pad the hours, since I was my own manager. So when I walked into Tishman Hall, Bennington's small, free-standing movie theater, I was entering my own little domain on a campus that really wasn't mine at all. Which had everything to do with the episode that night. The rows of wooden seats in Tishman were fulldeep in the Vermont woods, any movie was diversion enough for a Tuesday nightbut I doubt any of my closest friends were there. I don't remember. I do remember glancing up at the booth to see that this night's projectionist was my least competent. The lights dimmed, the babble hushed, and the movie began. A cowboy ballad in harmony plays over the titles. You're thrust into a melodrama in blazing Technicolor, which has faded to the color of worrisome salmon. A homestead on the open range--no, hardly the range. This family has settled on the desolate edge of Monument Valley, under the shadow of those baked and broken monoliths rendered trite by Jeep commercials. You think: they might as well try to farm on the moon. The relationships between the characters are uneasy, murky, despite broad performances, corny lines. At the center of the screen is this guy, a sort of baked and broken monolith himself, an actor you might feel you were supposed to know. John Wayne. I'd seen part ofRooster Cogburnon television. The only feature Western I'd ever watched wasBlazing Saddles, but I'd passingly absorbed the conventions fromF Troop, fromGunsmoke, from aMad Magazineparody of3:10 to Yuma. Similarly, I'd grasped a sense of John Wayne's iconographic gravity from the parodies and rejections that littered seventies culture. I knew him by his opposite: something of Wayne's force is encoded in DustiLethem, Jonathan is the author of 'Disappointment Artist And Other Essays', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385512176 and ISBN 0385512171.