Reel Life

Many of us are thinking about movies, now that the Oscar nominations are out. Personally, I don’t care about the nomination count, who or what was snubbed, not even what  racial or ethnic groups were slighted. I just like movies. But a couple of months ago, I read a blog by a very successful businessman who said one of the secrets of his success was not wasting time watching films.

We all know that movies represent an escape, but are they a waste of time? Some more than others, of course. At their best, though, they can teach in a way that other media can’t. History, for instance. The Roman Empire, British royalty through the centuries. The Civil War (and every other war we can think of). Presidential assassinations. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and lately, even Brexit. Yes, they distort and often play fast and loose with the facts, but even when they get things wrong, movies can still inspire us to do our own fact-checking on the subject involved.

Speaking of taking us places, that’s what foreign films do. I remember attending a film festival and seeing an entry from Burkina Faso. Where on Earth is that? I had to look it up – turns out it’s in Africa. It showed me through drama what it’s like to live there, and how the people think and communicate, in a special way that even traveling there might not reveal.

We all know that movies teach us fashion and lifestyle. The downside is that the perfect folks we see on screen often impose unrealistic expectations on us. So maybe the upside is, we take better care of ourselves. I remember that when I moved from the East Coast to Southern California, it seemed like everybody might have been a movie star.

In another sphere, movies can actually teach us how to feel. I have been convinced that most people are not born with empathy or compassion, and even if some of us were, we may not know how they work until we see them demonstrated in a movie. We learn about ourselves: what makes us laugh, or cry, or afraid.

On a public radio show I like, they have an occasional segment with a woman who says that movies are her church. I get that. I grew up in New York City and remember when movie theaters were like cathedrals, not like today’s megaplexes. The Loew’s theater on East 72^nd Street had a fancy baroque interior with pinpoint lights like stars on the ceiling, and what looked like actual clouds moving across the sky. Sometimes that was more entertaining than the movie.

By that successful businessman’s standards, I guess I must be a miserable failure, but if it’s because I spend too much time at the movies, I think I can live with it.

Security Risks

How many times has our President talked about creating jobs? But on his watch, some 800 thousand federal workers, at this writing, find themselves unable to do theirs, at least temporarily, due to the government shutdown. Of course, some have been required to work without pay. Essential workers, they’re called. Excuse me, but there’s another name for that job status. If I were forced to work for free indefinitely, what might my attitude be toward that  job, however essential it is? How secure might I feel about my life going forward?

The President would like us to think of him as a champion of security by holding out for his border wall. Yes, it would protect us from a few gang members, drug importers, and the odd terrorist or two, among thousands of Central American women and children seeking to get away from such people back home. But what about the bad guys who come here through legal ports of entry every day? Or those who were born here and live here already? Pardon me for engaging in what-about-ism, but…well?

For someone so concerned about security, the President, his associates, and even members of his family, seem much too cozy with powerful figures in Russia. What kinds of security risks are involved there, and how did we used to handle them? Just go back a few decades, when Red was not a good political color. Consider what happened to Americans who took too much of an interest in the USSR, went to the wrong meetings, or hung out with what were thought of as the wrong friends or colleagues? What happened to those Americans who were found to have acted as agents for Soviet Russia? It was a bit more than just a few years in prison. And there were no cable interviews or book deals at the end of that road.

I wish we would have been more focused in recent years on building a cyber wall rather than a steel or concrete one. These days we have to be careful not to get too belligerent with our adversaries. I worry that all they have to do is click once, and it’s lights out here.

As for walls, I heard one wag on a British radio talk show who said he favored a US border wall, but not one limited to the border with Mexico. Put it around the whole thing, he said, not to keep foreigners out, but to keep Americans in. Sounds like we have an image problem with some folks right now, ya think?

The President we put in office not only represents us, but, whether we like it or not, defines us too -- something to keep in mind as we pick the next one.

R.I.P. Brûlée

After some 18 years with him, we knew the time was getting close, and it finally arrived a few days before Christmas, when Brûlée the cat collapsed on the living room carpet and died a short time later.

The calculation of a cat’s age in human years varies, depending on the veterinarian. One we know (not Brûlée’s doc) said that for the first two years, the animal gets the equivalent of 25 human years, and it’s four human years per cat year after that, which would have made Brulee 90, though his actual vet felt it was closer to 100.

My wife and I got Brûlée from the animal shelter in July of 2001, when he was said to be about nine months old. We had an early indication of what we were getting into when, on the way home in the car, we heard a scratching sound in the cardboard carrier they gave us at the shelter. As we crossed the railroad tracks, a white head popped through a new hole in the side of the carrier. He was male, though we used the feminine form of the name Brûlée for him after “crème brûlée,” which we thought was closer to his coloring. He was mostly what they call flame-point Siamese, cream-colored with orange ears and a tail with orange bands on it, reflecting another breed involved in his ancestry.

Anyway, we soon found that our house had a new supervisor, and we had to resign ourselves to our new roles as staff. Brûlée was not shy about making his demands known. Not shy about anything, really. When somebody rang at the front door, he answered it.

In his prime, Brûlée’s prodigious acrobatic talents entertained guests. Through the use of cat toys, we could get him to leap several feet into the air, even do 360-degree spins. This all happened well before social media and smartphone cameras. What we called “Cirque de Brûlée” would certainly have gone viral.

Now that he is gone, we are keenly aware of daily things we don’t have to do anymore, but still at least start to do out of long habit. Having a cat, as many of you know, can be like having a perpetual human toddler. Sometimes you have to close doors to keep the animal from harm or from causing trouble. Turning on hall lights at night so as not to trip over him in the dark, or step on his tail, was important. And then there was filling and cleaning litter boxes, more of which were needed around the house to accommodate an aging cat. I still can’t bring myself, at this writing, to throw out the last remaining box on the back porch. Finally, there are the daily rituals that have suddenly ended, like my lap time with him as I drank my morning coffee, turning up the heat in the house on cold days so he could sit next to his favorite furnace vent, or having him join us for dinner.

Though we have no children, a relative who’d had them tried to make us feel better by comparing the impact of Brûlée’s departure to an 18-year-old child’s heading off to college. No, not quite the same. Still, we take comfort in reporting to you that Brûlée remained Brûlée right up to the end, which I hope others can say about us when it’s our turn to go.