works of wanderlust

Two weeks of blur, waiting for professional stuff to happen while July slips away into the heat. We went on a road trip to BC and I loaded up my device with a bunch of movies and books and it turns out I barely had time to read the news, let alone finish a novel. But I squeezed in some down time and stared at a screen when I got tired of the beautiful mountain views.

The last couple of weeks I watched:

films: all the matricies

I was there in 1999. And again a few years later when the sequels hit theatres. Films were still events back then, and trilogies building on universes were rare and precious gems worth queuing up for at the local megaplex. And it’s not like I haven’t gone back and watched any of the Matrix movies in the intervening twenty-five plus years… but it has been a while, and never have I ever sat down and over the course of three days watched all four (yeah, even the 2022 Resurrections instalment.) Until recently. Summer. Vacation mode. Heat wave. Laziness on the couch. Call it whatever, I unplugged from life for the duration of four movies and plugged into the oh-gee mind-bender of philosophical cinema. This isn’t a review, of course. You can read opinions of any or all of them online, and like all online opinions many are shrouded in rage and bias and unrealistic expectations, particularly following the unlikely masterstroke of storytelling-meets-special-effects-meets-brain-melting-concepts that was the original The Matrix. Spoiler alert: what if we were living in a computer simulation? What would that tell us about free will and emotions and personal agency and choosing blissful ignorance over gritty realities? The Wachowskis were telling a story that was as open to interpretation as any piece of art, and I ate it up along with half the modern world fitting a skewered worldview though the lens of a reality that I would now forever question, even just a little bit. I recently heard someone suggest that the reason everyone hated the ending of Lost so much, remember that show?, was that the build up and hype did not align with the final result. I think the same could be said about other shows like Battlestar Galactica, another long run show that was dissected on the fly online and could never have filled the spaces of anticipation and imagination of eager viewers waiting to see the ending. The Matrix fell into the same trap, and even when the four-quel arrived in 2022ish it was met with a kind of collective what-was-that-groan. But The Matrix extended universe had already been scoped by the unbound imaginations of millions of critical viewers and fans leaving a space of expectation so big that no story could ever hope to rival the vague perception of what it should be. That same Lost theorist suggested that a modern “binge watch” of the show held up so much better because there was no anticipatory collapse: that it was just a good story with a reasonably solid (if weird) ending. And having just binge watched the four Matrix movies I think I would suggest the same for those films. Watching them all in a row with no expectations beyond it as a piece of interesting film and art, they are far from perfect, but they are interesting and entertaining and hold up.

film: cast away

I saw this flick for the first time in the theatre a few weeks before I moved to Vancouver. (That should put some dates onto my timeline for those of you doing research on the matter.) It is one of those sort of core memories stuck in my head because I had been hanging out with a small group of friends from my summer job of the year before and a few of us met at the theatre and went to see Tom Hanks yelling at a volleyball and a couple of the people were trying to simultaneously wish me well while selfishly suggesting that Vancouver was going to “eat me alive” and that I should just stay here and look for a job locally. I wont say that it made me upset, but those words always kind of haunted me, particularly three years later when (without much regret) we bailed on Vancouver and moved back and I always sort of wonder if those friends were astutely correct about my fortitude or just generally cynics about moving abroad. I can’t help but flashback to that conversation whenever I watch Cast Away so entangled are those two things, which is strange because the movie is a story of resiliency and personal fortitude in the face of overwhelming powerlessness and even creeping hopelessness. Hanks loses everything but anchors himself in the tatters of that hope and survives being stranded on a deserted island for four years only to return hope to learn that most everyone else lost hope about him long before he escaped and was rescued.  There is something parallel there to the journey I have been on personally lately wherein I ejected from the flight of my career and dropped into the wilderness of wherever I’ve been wandering for the last two years. I often feel like despite the seeming agency I imparted myself in pulling the ripcord and jumping that to do so from a burning plane is not so much agency as it is playing a forced move and convincing yourself it was a good choice. Hank’s character made choices to survive and fight against the powerlessness but those things were less choices as they were playing well the poor hand he was dealt and trying not to crack under the pressure when it seemed that all was lost, that he was lost, and when everyone back from where he came had assumed he was gone forever and so they had moved on. Nearly every time you take a run at the wave it is gonna toss you into the reef and mess you up, but you only need to break over that barrier once to get back to civilization.