connection by Luke Downes

My artistic side manifested itself very early in life, as is the case with you too. You know the kids: banging on tupperware and iron woks in the kitchen, coloring “masterpieces” on bathroom walls, that sort of thing. I once painted my whole face red with my mom’s lipstick because I’d decided to be a South American Indian.

Anyway, for me it started with reading and I read everything I could. My mom gets the credit there; she made me start reading around two and had me reading kindergarten books within a year of that. I owe her much gratitude for fostering my early development. When I was in kindergarten myself, we were made to keep journals in school of what our favorite part of the day had been. My entries were always long because I could never pick one favorite part. I was looking through this journal when I was home a few weeks ago (my mom wouldn’t let me take it though; “you’ll just lose it,” she said) and I was struck by how interpersonal I was as a kid, how I’ve never been shy to write down exactly how I’m feeling. I’ve never been a particularly emotional person (I mean, there was puberty, but I doubt that counts for much) and I guess I’d never thought about when I’d started writing a feeling out and letting it go. But I have a hard time actually saying it, because I don’t want other people to be plagued by own small doubt or confusion or some little demon who sneaks himself from the abyss that is my thought pool. Also my mother wasn’t a particularly communicative person with me on a more personal level. I don’t think of it as a bad thing because she was just trying to allow me to be me and she was very young. I didn’t imagine that she’d want to hear what I had to say about something. I don’t imagine she’d have heard at all.

What is this all about? My love affairs with the arts. In a second grade journal, I wrote about being taken to see a movie called “Heartbreak Ridge,” an 80’s war movie starring Clint Eastwood, who also directed and produced it. I’m pointing the last bit out because I pointed it out as a 7-year-old in that journal. My adjectives weren’t great, but I tried to describe how the movie made me feel and what I took from it twenty-three years later, with a glass of wine and too many cigarettes, was that I have to connect. And that my second love, after writing, is cinema.

It’s the connection of sound and sight. Like all of us, I went through a period where I thought loving movies meant you had to see all of them. At thirty, of course, I know to stay far the fuck away from anything with Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz, which to my mind is the equivalent of adding sugar to an orange soda. I saw “My Stepmother Is an Alien” as a kid. And liked it. I liked everything I saw, actually. Every movie was my favorite movie if it took me away from my own scrabbled life.

Of course, you can’t really escape life and I don’t like filling my head with pointless dribble, so I don’t see too many movies anymore. And most of my favorites were made before even my mother was born. I need to be told something worthwhile or reminded of something I’d forgotten or given a new idea, full of hope and inspiration.

We’re getting there. Thanks for being patient.

This year, I haven’t seen much. Part of that is due to the fact that I live in a small dot on a map in Montana and there’s only one theater and Ashton Kutcher/Cameron Diaz movies are more popular than the ones I like.

I saw “Doubt” the other day, the Meryl Streep/Philip Seymour Hoffman drama about a priest and a nun who engage in a battle of wits. Fiercely acted, but these two could open cat food and make it interesting. Boring movie with a lot of potential. I think something more vital could have been said about suspicion, especially these days, in the age of concious racial profiling.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was a surprise. It’s my favorite short story, so I was worried about the subject matter, the pulling off of a life moving backwards, the director, the star. More to the point, they’ve never made a good Fitzgerald adaptation (if you’ve never seen “The Great Gatsby” with Robert Redford, count yourself lucky) in Hollywood. It didn’t quite capture the dark humor of the story, but it never veered too harshly into sentimentality and it never tried to hammer some point home.

Somehow, though, I was thinking the other day that “Benjamin Button” would probably be my favorite movie of the year, and the only other two coming close would be “In Bruges” and “The Dark Knight” (forgive me, but I have a hard time calling a comic-book movie the best of the year). This thought made me very sad. What’s happening to art? Why is it looking more and more like plain old entertainment? Maybe it’s just me, but I like substance in my art, I like a connection. I need to fall in love with it.

Ok, we’re finally there:

I just saw the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s called “The Visitor,” and it’s about a man, a widower, Walter, who seems to repress everything in his life but, through an unlikely encounter, begins surprising himself. He comes to New York, where he has an apartment he’s long avoided, from Connecticut, where he has a job and a house, to discover two immigrants, a young couple, living in his apartment. They’re renting it, actually, from a man Walter doesn’t even know.

At first, there is great strain and tension between them. But through a series of small, human moments, Walter invites them to stay and learns to begin sublimating his own pains in life through music and he starts living a life again.

I can’t say anything more without spoiling it. It’s one of those stories of the inherent goodness in all of us, if only we would see it; a story that celebrates life, for better or worse; one that reminds you that not every moment is about you and in fact, most aren’t; and, most importantly, one that remembers that no matter what small percentage of who we are separates us, the greater sum of our parts connects us.

It’s that connection that’s so important.