Two college friends of mine, who did not know each other very well, helped me out with a task back at school, and ended up riding back to campus together in the same car. (I don't remember where I was, but I was not with them.)On that ride, the driver played the passenger a band he really liked, but whom the passenger had not heard. As the passenger tells it, while the first song was playing, the driver continually turned his head to the right to try to catch that ineffable moment when the passenger fell in love with the song/band. He checked in on the passenger an unnatural number of times, or at least enough that the passenger thought it was funny enough to mention to me.
Whether or not he actually gauged the other's reaction in words, a private joke between the passenger and me grew out of it, which is basically that the driver said "Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it?" When performing the joke, you say it quickly, like "Ja like it ja like it ja like it?"
It has lingered as a joke not because the driver's behavior was so unusual. In fact, it's probably because it identified a very real phenomenon:
It's so hard to be cool when trying to share something you love.
Since I am rarely introducing bands to people -- my current School of Rock lessons to my kids notwithstanding (see full discussion here) -- the corollary in my own life is movies. As a cinephile, it's understood that you are always recommending movies to people. It's what we do.
The more enlightened of us make the recommendation and leave it at that.
The more masochistic? We watch the film with them.
Using the "ja like it" story as a cautionary tale, I have learned over the years to try not to place so much pressure on a joint viewing, which is usually undertaken with my wife, as she is my most regular movie-watching companion. In fact, I clearly recall a few scenarios where I had her watch a recommendation without me present in the room, even though I was present in the house. My #3 movie of last decade, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, was one such example. And a good one, as my wife ended up loving the movie just as much as I did -- perhaps in part due to the fact that I was not there hovering over her and gauging her reaction.
More often than not, though, the occasion for me showing a movie to my wife is that I am dying to see it a second (or third, or fourth) time, and I don't want to waste the opportunity by leaving her out of the viewing. Such was the case with our Saturday night viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
If it is not clear that I love this film, well, it should be. Even though I saw it for the first time only two weeks before finalizing that best of the decade list referenced above, Portrait made it on to the list. Because of the ridiculously short turnaround, I installed it at #25, the last ranked spot before the honorable mentions, though it was clear to me that it should have been higher. I guess I thought #25 was a good compromise between its actual quality and the deleterious effects of recency bias. It may have been similar thinking that caused me to place it at #2 for 2019, behind only Parasite. Given another couple weeks to sit with it, I might have vaulted it over Parasite as well.
If you're looking for further evidence of my love -- as if telling you were not enough -- just look at my new banner at the top of this page, which I put up a couple weeks ago. If you haven't seen the movie, you might not recognize it, but this is indeed a shot from Portrait, with Adele Haenel as Heloise being an "audient." That scene is one of the best of last year -- of the last five years maybe.
Okay so you get it. I like this movie.
But ... I'm old enough and wise enough to show restraint during a viewing. I don't constantly turn my head to see how my wife is liking it. I've matured, as I'm sure my 22-year-old friend introducing that band to my other 22-year-old friend has also matured.
That said, my behavior still forced my wife to quip "Stop monitoring me!" at one point during the movie.
I'll explain.
When I rented Portrait of a Lady on Fire from iTunes, I knew my intention was to show it to my wife. But I err on the side of caution when putting forward movies for her consideration these days. Especially during quarantine, when we spend the week effectively home-schooling our kids in addition to working, everyone needs their free time to unwind. There's no better way to spoil a potential viewing than to make it seem like an obligation.
But I looked up on Friday and noticed that my rental window was down to just 13 days. It was time to at least mention it, so my wife had nearly two full weeks to put it on our schedule. As it turned out, she was pretty excited to see it, so she programmed it for the very next night. Okay, initial hurdle cleared.
But there was a second hurdle -- and third, and fourth -- still awaiting us. Because my kids had a Netflix movie party with their aunt, which didn't end until about 8:40, we got a late start on everything. Plus, we were all tired from having gotten out and exercised for a couple hours during the day. Plus, my wife found out at about 8 that her friend's son had broken his arm and was in "hospital" (you drop the definite article in Australia).
I should have probably called an audible on the viewing. I didn't.
So when we started the 122-minute movie at just after 9, my wife was not in her best shape to consume it. I shouldn't have been either, as I was already on my second glass of wine, but see many previous discussions of how being engaged in something you love keeps you plenty awake.
My wife did not yet love it, so she did not yet have the advantage I did. And the way it was going, she never would.
So yes, I was monitoring her -- not to make sure she loved the movie, but to make sure she was paying enough attention to it and not falling asleep. Which was, of course, for the purpose of giving her the chance to love the movie, so maybe it amounts to the same thing.
Like a good friend should, she continued to participate in a message thread about the kid who'd had the bike accident. I get it. And it's possible this did not prevent her from missing anything, as she speaks French so did not need to read all the subtitles.
But I just couldn't prevent myself from looking over, from silently judging her failure to watch the movie. She finds it no end of a distraction if I am on a device during a joint viewing, and I felt it was my right to feel the same thing, even with her mitigating circumstances.
I think the problem is that I was not always silently judging. At one point I asked, "Are you following all this?" I think it was my way of confirming that she wasn't rusty enough on her French to catch all the dialogue, but as you might guess, it came out wrong.
Once she was conscious of the attention I was paying to how she was watching the movie, it became its own thing, even when that's not what I was doing. For example, once I looked over to gauge how much wine she had left in her glass, which would tell me how much of the remaining bottle I could pour in mine. I think that's actually when the "Stop monitoring me!" comment came. (Oh yeah, and having wine was probably the thing that pushed the three other hurdles -- the late start, the exhaustion, the broken arm -- over the edge into full impracticality.)
In the end, she never fell asleep (that she would admit to), though she did say "I've been struggling to stay awake for the past two hours," which means the entirety of the movie, and which is no way to watch any movie, let alone something subtle and sophisticated. She did say that she thought it was "really good," though as you can probably imagine, that was not the reaction I was really looking for. She also didn't want to discuss any details of the movie, even when I was going to tell her a simple thing like the fact that Haenel was also in Deerskin, the Quentin Dupieux movie we watched together last year at MIFF.
See, that's the problem with people who love things, and who lose their ability to play it cool when it comes to them. We aren't happy with something being "really good" and with a person not falling asleep while watching it. We want it to redefine this other person's existence, and it's just never likely to do that -- even with a movie as universally beloved as Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
My wife has a more "live and let live" approach to these things -- a more cool approach, to use the parlance of my current argument. Whether I like something she shows me or not, so what? It doesn't affect her love for that thing. I mean, she's not so enlightened that she doesn't recognize when it was a bad time to do a particular thing we were both invested in, and have her regrets about it. But when that thing is in progress, she's not likely to "monitor" me for my reaction.
What can I say? When it comes to my love of movies, I am not cool.
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