I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to study at college. I went because it was what my parents expected of me, and because they’d set aside the money for it. I applied mostly to places they suggested, and ended up going the place they thought was the best fit for me – they were probably right, to their credit. Unlike a lot of weird, alienated young men, I would say my folks understand me just fine, and always have. Anyway, it’s not like I was ever going to try and make it with just a GED – at 18, my then-undiagnosed arthritis was bad enough that I could barely walk, putting a life of manual labor or “drifting” firmly out of the question. But like I said, that didn’t mean I knew what I wanted to study. Despite having spent the last few years as a hunched and shuffling cripple beset by constant, grinding pain, I felt generally okay with how my life had been going thus far, and such a mindset is not conducive to the development of ambitions. I had some vague ideas about studying English, or Literature, or English Literature, something like that, and so I made some overtures in that direction when signing up for courses. But I also, more or less on a whim, decided to try a class about “World Cinema” – I was an artsy kid, an “avant-teen” if you prefer, and while my main thing had been music (subjects of Halloween costumes in those years had included Elvis Costello and Keiji Haino), cinema was certainly in the mix, too. I’d seen Wavelength, some Brakhage, a whole bunch of video art; I was big on Tarkovsky, Wes Anderson, I’d DL’d Violated Angels off Rapidshare from a blog that mostly posted rips of noise tapes and it had blown my mind. So I thought, Why not? Maybe this could be my thing. It is because of this thought, more or less directly, that now, 12(!) years later, you’re reading this essay about how I logged my 10,000th movie on Letterboxd, just the other week.
This essay will be split into two major parts, probably (a nice thing about being a guy with a Substack instead of an “academic” now is I don’t have to actually plan these things out anymore – I can just kinda start writing and see where it goes). The first will be about the “feat” itself, by which I mean mostly a list of reasons why it’s not actually that impressive or meaningful or important to have watched 10,000 movies, as well as a defense of my decision to write about it anyway. The second will be about the movie I chose for the Big Number itself, F.W. Murnau’s City Girl. Then there will probably be some sort of conclusion as well, where I’ll probably gesture towards some profound, overarching thesis without quite spelling it out, because I generally don’t really know what I’m trying to say, and neither do you, and we’re all just here learning to be people together. I dunno, you’ll have to read it to find out. And since this is obviously all very self-indulgent and (unlike the last essay I posted here) not particularly relevant to what’s Going On In The World Today, you’ll have to give me $5 to do so – unless you already have! In which case I love you and eagerly anticipate being your slave in the afterlife. But I digress.