An interesting phenomenon of the moviegoer lifestyle is the half-watched movie. When you dedicate yourself to movie-watching, you quickly fill up your chunks of time large enough for movie completion. If you’re employed, active, or social, you rarely even have two such opportunities in a single day. But one movie a day is plenty, isn’t it? The problem: we were all born sometime after movies started being made. Even if we manage to keep up with notable current releases (at least two or three a week), there’s a seemingly unending canon of movies which, when left unseen, taunt the self-aware “movie buff” with his or her own glaring, consequential ignorance.
We all have that one movie–maybe “The Third Man” or “Seven Samurai” or “Once Upon a Time in the West”–that people talk about as if everyone’s seen it. Because, of course, everyone should have seen it. (Mine’s “Schindler’s List”.) Still, you haven’t, and every time that it’s mentioned, you recoil back in pained recognition of your own conversational irrelevance. Sometimes, we know enough to stay afloat: “I actually liked ‘The Magnificent Seven’ better…” or “The shot where Orson Welles’s face is illuminated in the alleyway has stuck in my mind ever since…” But even then, the emptiness of those unsupportable comments eats at our insides like acid.
It’s at this point where one movie a day doesn’t cut it. There are movies to be seen, dammit, and we’re each only given so many days. To satisfy our fix, we get creative.
“I can watch the opening scene of ‘Rear Window’ while I’m brushing my teeth, and if I put it on my iPod,and extend lunch by a few minutes, I can almost finish it.”
“I’ll TiVo “Key Largo” on TCM tonight, then I can watch half of it today after work and the rest Saturday morning before traffic school.”
“I’ll play “12 Angry Men” on the big-screen while I finish this blog post–it’s almost all dialogue, anyway. Hell, if I finish before the movie’s over, I can play “Birth of a Nation” on my computer, because it’s silent. I am one brilliant sonofabitch.”
The result? An endless list of half-watched movies, filling our restless minds with their unresolved conflicts, aborted plot-lines, and purgatoried characters. I know F. Murray Abraham kills Mozart, but I don’t know how. I thought “Full Metal Jacket” was a good movie for six whole weeks, before I finally got around to watching the second act. I watched half of “Lawrence of Arabia” four months ago, and now it’s lingering stalely in my DVR queue. I can’t delete it, because I haven’t finished it, as I can’t remember what happened in the first half and I wouldn’t know what was going on. But I do remember that I didn’t like the first half enough to spend two hours watching it again. It is a complicated existence that I endure.
And so we all move forward, haunted by not just the ghosts of the films we’ve been meaning to watch, but also by stumpy-limbed, deformed, fetal creatures–those characters conceived and ripped from the womb of active memory before reaching full development. Neither saved nor damned, these unchristened monstrosities follow us around, pool around our ankles, and tug at our shirt-sleeves. But no matter how we try to free them from their ignoble, unfulfilled state, we’ll never get to them all. Because, alas, there are so many. And I, my friend, am but one man.