THE phone, screen illuminated, sits poised on the table between us. We look at it, the choice that can be put off no longer weighing heavy as a chandelier.
“I think –,” an agonised pause. I’ve broken the silence that cannot be retrieved. “Godzilla × Kong.”
Joey meets my gaze. He nods. His half chicken glistens. The deal has been done.
I’ve always struggled to fully articulate my relationship with film. I think I would love to be a cinema polymath, and yet I have done little by way of making this happen. I don’t, in any kind of legitimate way, have a favourite director; I can’t hold court on anyone’s body of work or their development as an artist, certainly not in the way I can about novelists.
It feels a little counterintuitive, I guess, to be a practitioner of one artistic genre, yet be so illiterate when it comes to another. After all, art is rife with cross-pollination – there are no downsides to complexifying your chosen mode, allowing for a kind of porous membrane whereby another form’s ideas and modalities muddy the familiar territory of your own practice.
I’ve tried, for example, to be at least a little au courant with visual art – I’m a huge fan of The Lonely Palette, a podcast that feels tailored specifically to my sensibilities, in that its principal MO seems to be taking the greatest artists of the past and present and explaining why they’re secret communists.
With film, though, I’ve failed to develop any real understanding of its intricacies. I can’t identify the different types of cuts, I invariably fail to notice the score, and any canny nods to influences will almost certainly be lost on me. My attitude to cinema is a bit like my attitude to food – I’m a happy and blithe imbecile, thrilled that the ramen is ‘spicy’, chuffed that the film was ‘exciting’.
For starters, I’m already failing by not distinguishing between film as an art form and film as a capitalist project, which certainly isn’t a distinction I neglect in literature. I’ve never had much interest in reading novels that wouldn’t be classed as ‘literary fiction’ (though I’m aware that this is a term fraught with varying interpretations).
What I mean by this is that I want a novel that prioritises an exploration into psychology above all else. How that’s done – be it through formal innovations or in more straightforward narrative prose – doesn’t matter. I just want to read a book that explores some facet of the infinitely complex morass of consciousness.
Plot I can take or leave, as long as it’s not happening at the expense of blistering characterisation. I also read a lot of poetry, the sole purpose of which, in my opinion, is to dismantle anything typical about how we deploy language, so I guess what I mean is that I’m not interested in literature as escapism – I want it to shake me from the escapist possibilities of my own stupid and egocentric little mind, I want to be confronted and altered.
While I admire films that achieve this, I can’t say that it’s ever been an exclusionary criterion, and my personal history of viewership is by turns uninspiring and depraved.
My attitude to cinema is a bit like my attitude to food – I’m a happy and blithe imbecile, thrilled that the ramen is ‘spicy’, chuffed that the film was ‘exciting’
***
In our house growing up, we had access to a healthy enough supply of films. There was a VHS player, later accompanied by a DVD player, and a selection of tapes and DVDs, which inhabited the bottom drawer of an antique bureau and had no clear system of organisation.
The Lion King was nestled alongside The Thomas Crown Affair, First Fun with French sat next to Star Wars: Episode I (maybe the greatest indictment of my taste is that I was a huge fan of Jar Jar Binks).
Scattered among these legitimate, shop-bought tapes were blanks, upon which there were patchy recordings of The Muppet Show and The X-Files, but also, and maybe this is a ‘gotcha’ moment, camera footage of strangers’ bowels.
My dad is a gastroenterologist, and a dab hand at colonoscopies – a procedure where a camera is mounted on a flexible tube and passed through the anus, enabling the watchful specialist to identify irregularities and polyps and signs of bowel cancer.
In the late nineties, the camera footage from these procedures was recorded onto tapes, which my dad would bring home. Sometimes, I wouldn’t realise that the Disney tape that had previously been in the slot had been replaced, and I would then spend upwards of twenty minutes watching something I can only describe as David Cronenberg by way of Luis Buñuel.
This was non-stop spongy peristalsis – a slow and methodical voyage through a gastrointestinal tract. The camera was the first-person protagonist; the only plot points the occasional presence of an errant polyp. I adored these corporeal epics, fascinated by the implication of the alien within.
Coupled with this early penchant for rectal adventures, as a child I also had an inexhaustible capacity for watching the same film an infinite number of times. Before DVDs entirely replaced VHS tapes, the mechanism for rewatching a film was pretty simple: you got to the end, you fast-forwarded through the post-film liminal fuzz, and you pressed play, hoping to have landed safely in the opening credits.
Whenever I was left to my own devices, I would select a tape from the drawer, slot it in the player, watch the film (often in instalments), reset the tape, then start again. I didn’t even need to take a break between the film ending and my going back to the beginning – I would find out what happened in The Fox and the Hound or The Parent Trap or The Omen (I developed a rapacious appetite for horror at an early age), and I would immediately commence watching it again.
I would watch each film as many times as I could over the course of a month, then I would move onto a new one. Part of the joy of this method was that I could then recreate lengthy scenes in my imagination, watching parts of films in my mind’s eye any time I was bored (usually in church, or when I couldn’t fall asleep).
A side effect of this habit was that any time I did see a new film at the cinema, I would class it as the best film I had ever seen – the best film ever made, even. Quality became synonymous with novelty, probably because all the films I had access to at home had been so etiolated and fuzzied by cinematic semantic satiation as to no longer really be films at all; they were interactive memory games, a tool I used to hone the reliability of my imagination for the moments when there was nothing tangible to entertain me.
Susannah Dickey is a novelist and poet from Derry. Her novels are Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022), and her debut poetry collection, ISDAL, was published in 2023
Extracted from In the good seats: Essays on film, a collection published this week by PVA Books
