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Our lives: the movie

Print | Comments () Posted by Mark Feeney August 24, 2010 10:14 AM

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William Gibson has a new novel coming out next month, "Zero History," and it's very good. A sort of sequel to his 2007 novel, "Spook Country," it's about . . . well, what it's about doesn't really matter for our purposes. What matters is a throwaway moment early in the novel. The heroine is sitting in the restaurant of her London hotel and notices two Russian men in dark suits. Without any effort, a description comes to her. They're like "extras from that Cronenberg film," she thinks. That Cronenberg film is, of course, "Eastern Promises," which also came out in 2007, and stars Viggo Mortensen, left.

The actual movie doesn't matter (though "Eastern Promises" is a fine film). What matters is the habit we have acquired over the past century or so of seeing the world in movie terms. That habit takes two forms. There's the generic one of having some unusual yet somehow familiar event happening to us, in which case the usual response is to say, "It's just like a movie" or "It's just like something in a movie." The other form is the superimposition of a specific movie over a bit of experience, as happens to Hollis, Gibson's heroine, in that London hotel.

The gravitational pull of narrative on human beings is vast and perhaps ultimately unplumbable. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion once wrote. She sure got that right. A key way in which epic poetry and plays and novels differ from movies -- all four of them being forms grounded in story -- is how much freedom the first three leave to the imagination of those who experience them. When I read a Dickens novel, say, my idea of a certain character is likely to be phenomenally vivid (Dickens' powers of description and animation being what they are), and so might yours. And our ideas will have a fair amount in common, but they also can't help but differ to an enormous degree. That's where the inevitable imaginative freedom of print fiction comes in.

The movies altered the equation. What we see, even when it's a story that predates the movies, is what we then imagine. When Alec Guinness plays Fagin, in David Lean's adaptation of "Oliver Twist," that's it. He is Fagin -- and that would be true even if his performance weren't so shrewd and powerful. The movies have a capacity to superimpose themselves on actual human experience as no other art form can. Next time you're in a deserted parking garage, try not to think of "All the President's Men." Or if you visit the observation deck of the Empire State Building, try not to summon up a certain scene from "An Affair to Remember" or "Sleepless in Seattle." You can't, really, which is a tribute to the power of the movies. And also maybe an indictment.

As yet, no movie has been made of any Gibson novel. So as you read "Spook Country" or "Zero History" your vision of Hollis is wide open. You get to cast anyone you want as her (making the movie version in your head as you read a book is another imaginative act unique to the movie age). Hollis is an intelligent, attractive, somewhat high-strung American woman in her 30s who used to front an edgy rock band. Until there actually were a movie version, there are as many feasible mental candidates as there are readers' conceptions of her. Myself, I think Naomi Watts (speaking of "Eastern Promises") would do just fine. But your own version could be most heavily influenced by her career history. So you might picture her as someone like Tina Weymouth, or a non-Euro Nico, or perhaps Exene Cervenka. Exene offers an "Eastern Promises" angle, too, seeing as how she and Mortensen were married once. They met on the set of a film they were costarring in, "Salvation!" The movies, you see, infiltrate everything, even matrimony.

As God, or maybe it was Thomas Edison, might once have said, "I now pronounce you, movies and life."