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August 15, 2010

Critical Dreams

I've been having the same dream a lot lately. I've never been one for recurring dreams, much less extremely literal ones, which makes this one all the more noteworthy. In this dream, I meet Roger Ebert. Sometimes it happens at what I understand to be his house, other times at a movie theater or film festival. I introduce myself, and he responds, and I find that he's able to speak once more. He's written that in his own dreams he can communicate as he always had before. In mine, he's on the mend. To what degree depends on the particular dream, but the vocalization denied to him is no longer absolute; his voice is there, instantly recognizable. He can eat and drink, and smile, and argue; and sometimes, dreams being dreams, he's also my dad.

My dad is the star of the other dream I've been having, and his own convalescence the subject matter. In reality, his mobility has been challenged over the past two years by a debilitating case of lyme disease, which manifests itself through symptoms of Parkinson's. I haven't been around to see the graduation of this ailment; I remember what he was like before, and I know what he's like now, and in my sleep whatever dystrophy occurred between those two states is speedily reversed. This remarkable change is sometimes attended to by a shift in hair color, or length or thickness; in weight and posture, and fashion and overall physical makeup. And sometimes he's Roger Ebert.

These dreams are largely about the same thing; a bifurcated worry line somewhere in my brain, fed by two tributaries that trickle back further than I can remember. I've been reading Roger Ebert since the days when reading meant bringing a book to my mother and sitting on her lap. Surely I've written about this before, about how she would read me his review of Return Of The Jedi until I practically had it memorized. I received various copies of his Movie Home Companion for various birthdays, and I believe they still sit tattered and coverless on the shelves at my parents' house, long since exchanged for his website. New reviews used to go up on Thursday after midnight, and I'd be there to read them; lately they come in the wee hours of Wednesday, and Ebert provides links to them on his twitter page as he publishes them. They've become, in many ways, supplementary material to his blog, which seemingly began as a lark two summers ago and then opened up, floodgate style, to a deluge that was equal parts Proust and Samuel Johnson. He wrote about anticipating death, about God,, about his earliest days as a newspaperman. He wrote about science, and his attachment to books, and teenagers making out. He discussed losing his voice in a beautiful entry that explicated the journal itself. Recently, he wrote about his father. There was a specific moment when his journal truly flowered from the casual to the profound. I remember thinking that here is the writing of a man trying to put it all down before the end.

The profundity stuck around, but that sense of fatefulness did not; maybe it was Chris Lemire's Esquire article which dispersed it, and perhaps that was aided and abetted by the thousands of twitter posts that eroded any notion that he'd be going anywhere anytime soon. Lately, it's been a joy to see him take so kindly to the work of my friends - Frownland, The House Of The Devil and 45365. And as much as I hold onto my one-sided hope that he'll one day review one of my films, I've started to hope even more that such an event won't be one-sided at all, and that he'll get something out of whatever I have to offer. There's time enough, or maybe there's not. It's something I think about, but not too much.

But let's jump back a bit, to the decay, to what he's written about coping with illness, and to that Esquire article, which presented an encapsulated portrait of the same. I think of the term lionizing, which is so often used in a pejorative sense, without regard to those instances in which it's earned. Suffering on its own terms does not make one a hero, but sharing one's own context can provide some comfort to those struggling with it. It's the same principal by which Ebert has called movies the greatest art form; they offer a channel towards perspective and, through that, empathy. And so it is that I dream about him; because he's made an impact on my life, and because he currently puts a spin on something happening within it that I myself am unsure how to handle. Not that I am handling it - I go home to see my family once in a blue moon. Which, circuitously, is probably the source of this subconscious currency.

The laws of good composition imply that I must now write about dad for a paragraph or two, and then loop back to the subject of dreams as I proffer my hypothesis as to why these elements have become so intertwined. Were I to end this entry here, now, it would be lopsided, an incomplete expression. But I'm going to cheat. For it's here that my thoughts and feelings about the little film I'll be making next month begin to weave their way into the mix. And while I could play the good essayist and complete this miniature memoir in print, I fear that it would somehow dim the other sort of illumination I'm after, one much more in tune with the language of dreams, in which the amorphousness of history and personage can remain intact, and twenty pages of dialogue can rest upon a lifetime of growing up.

We start shooting in three weeks.

Posted by David Lowery at August 15, 2010 4:55 PM

Comments

Posted by: Jerry at August 18, 2010 5:48 PM

Posted by: Adam Donaghey at August 19, 2010 9:50 AM