We all have at least one person to thank for fostering a personal interest that becomes a part of our personality as an adult. My pops is a film expert, and probably showed me way too many films that were age inappropriate (I saw Me, Myself, and Irene in theaters. When I was 11).
Pops had a stroke in April. The day it happened I drove to L.A. from northern California. That night I applied for my first job in L.A., knowing certainly that I’d start making plans to move back in with him. At least for now. Really, it was the easiest decision I’ve ever made. A no-brainer.
What that has led to is: watching movies. A ton. Of movies.
A trend I’ve noticed is that I’ll get him to watch a new (ish) film, something from the past year or sometimes two. And then he, being an encyclopedia of films that are 20 or more years old, will think of a film made before I was born (statistically, he’s likely to bring up an early or mid-80's film) that I’ve never heard of nor seen but that he can recall with a strange precision. He will think of this film that the new film has reminded him of, and then we’ll watch it.
The first time this happened was when we watched Gone Girl (2014, dir. David Fincher). Gone Girl was one of the first “new” films we watched together, in late May, right after he got back from the hospital (what a feat of focus it was for him, making it through this one. We might have done it in two sittings). I had it on DVD so it was an easy choice. I had found his feeble handwritten list of films-to-see, because he never saw anything in theaters alone and he’d been alone for several years since I left.
So we watched Gone Girl. He thought it was, I think, “all right.” As the credits rolled he said, “Have you ever seen Missing? With Sissy Spacek.”
Nope, never heard of it. But there it was on his shelf, had been there every year I’d lived here and all the years in between. So we watched Missing (1982, dir. Costa-Gavras).
This is a great film about young, idealistic white people who think they want to go to a dangerous country and be young, idealistic, and white. — Pops
Missing’s score is done by Vangelis, which is truly amazing. Overall, the film shocked me and moved me and I’m better for seeing it. It’s based on the true story of the journalist Charles Horman, who disappeared during the U.S.-backed Chilean coup in 1976. But I didn’t see it as a cautionary tale about getting involved in dangerous countries — I saw a young person trying to make a difference, who didn’t fully understand how to protect himself when he got a hold of valuable information.
I can see how my dad would have made the connection between the films— which is not always the case in our train of thought — but he didn’t walk away from Gone Girl with the same impression that I got, either. When I saw it for the first time in theatres, I had made a point to go into it without knowing much except a vague idea of who was in it, and the title. Fortunately the press for the film was excellent, in my opinion — very little information is given in the trailer, which, you find, is a necessity. Ben Affleck’s character is set up as being pretty sinister by the press and the first part of the film. Which is an interesting thing to think about — how much does the press affect our experience? How would I have experienced Missing if I had seen press for it leading up to its theatrical release?
I don’t know the answer to that question but it’s an interesting one to think about, especially as we see more and more plot given away in trailers because that’s what audiences are demanding. I watched both films knowing very little about them, and loved them both, but I think a film and pop culture junkie like myself doesn’t really count when looking at the general public’s relationship to films.
I love Gone Girl. I love Gillian Flynn, now. I am in some emotional turmoil over the character of Amy — she killed someone. But the Cool Girl speech is one of my favorite speeches of all time. Of all time. For both Amy and Nick I feel some sympathy with their case, while at the same time clearly repelled by some of their behaviors. Amy is brilliant AND batshit insane, but as a woman who has dealt with some pretty skeevy men in the past, I can kind of relate to her line of thinking, even if I would never do what she did.
Missing is about politics, and Gone Girl is about the politics of being human. Motives and outcomes are messy, confusing, and sometimes dark in both films. Sissy Spacek and Rosamund Pike play complex, interesting women in films centered around their men. Both do what they need to do very well, and made for an interesting pair of films to watch in tandem.
