Cinephiles
I won the ugly Christmas sweater contest at my friend’s sister’s birthday party that I was invited to on a whim. The prize, it turned out, was a gorgeous notebook, carefully hand-bound by the sister. I felt bad taking the gift — I barely know this new friend, let alone her sister — but my sweater was essentially woollen holiday vomit, so I won it fair and square. It’s been a week now and I still don’t know what to do with the notebook. I can’t draw and I have other notebooks for creative writing that I already neglect. I ask my girlfriend what I should use it for. Eventually one of us proposes that we use it to keep a physical list of the movies we want to watch together.
It’s the perfect idea.
Even before we started dating, movies were our shared language. I invited her over to my place to watch Sean of the Dead and Pulp Fiction with another friend. She invited me to her place to watch Ed Wood and then actual Ed Wood movies. Halfway through Plan 9 from Outer Space we decided it was more fun to watch the movie whilst upside-down on her basement’s couch, and that cemented for us the notion that watching movies with each other was the most fun we could have. I was living in Etobicoke at the time, though, which was far from her place, so at times we had to settle for watching movies together online. We watched Evil Dead and Evil Dead II by using the same links and counting down on MSN Messenger when to hit our play buttons.
When we started dating, watching movies became a little difficult. The urge to hook up is hard to overcome for the duration of a film. Still, we didn’t stop trying. I’ve missed entire scenes from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and (I’m not proud to admit) Coraline because the warm body beside me was too distracting. To this day I don’t know that she ever finished watching The Nightmare Before Christmas. When I tried showing her The Mummy Returns she paused the movie, went to her room, and came back wearing black thigh-high stockings, a black thong, and nothing else. I guess she wanted to distract me from Rachel Weisz, and as much as I love that movie I had no objections.
We never stopped trying to watch movies together because we have the same tastes. It’s fun exploring those tastes together. Thanks to her I got to enjoy the mind-fuck that is Old Boy and the amazing horror that is The Descent. With her help I crossed The Big Lebowski and Memento off of my list. Together we watched Alien and Aliens in preparation for Prometheus, a non-prequel we discovered we both equally disliked and made fun of the whole time we were in the theatre.
During the course of our third time dating we’ll watch more television shows than movies, but the shared language aspect remains the same. I still have her DVD set for Pushing Daisies from the last time we dated, and she still has my DVDs for Spaced. She’ll introduce me to more British television, like Broadchurch and Peepshow, which I’ll take to immediately. I’ll introduce her to The X-Files and she’ll finish the entire nine season run over the course of the next two or three weeks. Really, that’s the only difference between us when it comes to shows: she binges harder than I ever thought was physically possible for a person to do.
In the three years we spent apart I realized my only escape fantasy consists of sitting with her in her basement, watching movies. Now that it’s not a fantasy I eagerly ask her what movies we should put on the list. A year and a half from now I won’t remember what movies we write. I won’t know if she even kept the notebook. I won’t keep in contact with the friend or the friend’s sister who I got the notebook from. I’ll watch movies on my own and I’ll be happy that way, but in this moment I’m really happy to make this list with her.
Way It Was is a writing project and ongoing attempt to work through a lot of relationship related shit. Find out more about it here.
