Television stands in, at best, as a substitute teacher mildly aware of the cinematic curriculum. It’s the big screen films are made for. The best movies suggest an enormity of plot, a largeness of their characters, demanding nothing less than a screen as long as a school bus to contain their stories. So praise God for any theater that makes “Classic Film Nights” part of their regular source of revenue. I first saw Magnolia on that kind of screen, transfixed by shot after shot, the interplay of sin, fate and grace playing out like a broken ballet. Characters stood out like Adam with the breath of God. It was bigger than life but right at home, a gargantuan window through which the world was new.
I approached the opportunity to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous ensemble piece, Boogie Nights, with gleeful anticipation. Theater 1, Regency on Sunflower, the same one as before, an fitting, elliptical end to a baptism begun months ago. Now let’s get one thing straight: I don’t go in for disco and pornography. But give me a rumination on how people are people, individuals, communities, darkness, light, and you’ve got me dead-on, bullseye. Lights go down, projector starts and up comes an almost mythical tracking shot. One character, two, three, four, all introduced with humor and poetic ecstasy. Anderson’s characters don’t stay up on the screen, they’re just more members of the audience. They watch each other like we watch all of them, they stand on the edge of teary-eyed conversation with the front row of the theater. It’s you and me up there but worse, I hope. Quirks and jokes abound but these characters, neurotic, erotic, and crazy, are signatories on an inclusive inheritance. They dream of vindication, a day when they can look their greatest critic in the eye and say ‘I made it.’
The movie’s fine throughout the seventies. If tension builds, it does so in the face of what feels like a permanent lightheartedness. Once the decade ends though, a trigger and three characters meet their end right then and there. The event is shocking in and of itself but I was more disturbed by the fuse it lights. From here on out, the charm and kitsch fades out while self-destruction sparks brighter and wild. Anderson doesn’t shirk from revealing depravity in places we would rather not see it or humanity in the debauched. His characters are adrift and self-mutilating. They descend to the depths because they’ve been pushed there and he lets them head for hell without a tinge of sadism. Once the train started running, he was powerless to stop it. Like a god without omnipotence, he weeps for his creations while still somehow behind it all.
So why did I walk on Boogie Nights? It wasn’t the pornography, though I seem to be more unsettled by that enterprise than the average male. The stark reality, the blunt facts of the matter, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is that this is one of the most non-pornographic films I have yet to see. Pornography reduces men and women to sex objects, defined solely by their genitalia. As the characters trek further down desolation row, the musical score turns to the ringing of bells. This dreary harmonium couldn’t help but put me in mind of a church chiming in its worshipers. But it’s at this moment, when the characters most need redemption, that step blind into the dark night of the soul. Rape, child pornography, prostitution and abuse all enter the mix at once. It turns your stomach, makes you enter by gateways you wish had never opened. Options run dry: there’s either a God who doesn’t stop child pornography or no God at all. These men and women tried to be porn stars but forgot their humanity along the way. They are more than what they think they are, whole souls dedicated to self-reduction.
I walked because I couldn’t stand to watch much worse things happen. The bells kept chiming and this confused, little Christian had to leave. I watched objectification and abuse happening right before my eyes, the meanness of people in real time. I became convinced that something truly awful was going to happen to a pregnant character and couldn’t even bare the thought. So I walked not because I was offended but because I was unready to be exposed to something I rather hadn’t seen. The humanity of the ‘depraved’ and the depravity of humanity makes for painful viewing. I’ll be able to finish it someday.
