Why I Started Watching Movies
My Post-Mormon Education, starting w The Godfather
When I turned 21 I considered myself officially not Mormon. There is a problem with doubt — there is no ceremony marking a threshold moment in the way baptism does for belief —so I roughly knew what I was not, and that I had a long way to go before I could say what I was.
There are a number of things you experience when you shed an orthodoxy and start to navigate the formerly forbidden. The movie rental section at the Tower Theater, an indie theater in Salt Lake City, became my first post-Mormon terrain.
The DVDs were arranged by director. The first time I browsed I recognized maybe 10 names, and one of them was Spielberg. I bought a book of essays on movies and began renting a handful (it was the late 90s) each week, and watching whatever was showing on weekend at midnight. I’d also just began to drink coffee. It was bliss.
Rental standouts would be Kieslowski’s Blue White Red trilogy. His gentle suggestion that humans, rather than systems, should be our repository of faith was a lifeline as I struggled to think about what goodness might look like outside of the proscriptive behaviors of Mormonism.
One midnight, I watched The Godfather on the big screen for the first time. It was in the winter, I had biked to the theater and covered my seat with a plastic bag before going inside because snow was likely.
The violence of the baptism montage was one of the first time I felt a movie link me into a large chain of culture, even one as foreign to me as Catholicism. Pacino blesses his baby while baptizing himself via a bloody coup. I was a willing audience for the metaphor. I suddenly felt I was not the only person who had been pantomiming goodness.
(Bear with me, I was 21 and having big thoughts. I soon discovered the joys of R-rated comedy. Gene Wilder appreciation post TK)
I left the theatre just before 3AM that night. It was snowing a dry powder of large quiet flakes. I rode back to my apartment. I remember looking behind at the thin single ribbon my tire made through the snow, as though something tightly wound was unspooling.
Finding a place in the world is the work of living; welcoming others into it is the grace we give to each other. It is also the grace of movies. When you are Mormon, you are taught that every readable signal in the knowable universe is God speaking, and that most of that conversation is supportive. When you leave, when I left, I felt for a long time the negative: that the world continued to communicate directly, but now to convey its explicit displeasure with myself, personally. At times, this felt unbearable. So, I watched more movies.
