Now Look What You Made Me Do

Yesterday morning I spent a bit more than an hour revising my list of favorite movies. I'm still dizzy; I have papers to grade; I'm really into this idea for a new course; I've got three meetings coming up to plan; I have course descriptions to write for the department; and I actually have a short story sitting here for revision. But I worked on my favorite movies list for over an hour. Why? Because you, my public, all two of you, heckled me about it.

This officially makes me a blog nerd. Without any possibility whatever of getting rich off of it.

Cat People, Of Course, Cat People. But No David Fucking Lynch.

When I looked at my list, I was shoked--shocked--to discover I'd left a ton of my personal favorites off. I quickly revised my list to include: Cat People, La regle du jeu, Days of Heaven, If . . ., Man with a Movie Camera, Rashomon, The Searchers, A Matter of Life and Death, L'Atalante . . . I revised the order, too, but I'm not going to post the whole list now because:

I Don't Want to Get Started on This with You, Dude

But I have to say that I have an auxiliary list of movies I have to see again sometime before I decide whether they're among my absolute favories, or movies I've never seen but imagine will be among my absolute favorites once I get around to them, including:

A One and A Two . . .
Andrei Roublev
Belle de jour

Celine and Julie Go Boating
Close-Up
Daisies
Day of Wrath

Fanny and Alexander
Gertrud
La Belle Noiseuse
Les dames du Bois du Boulogne
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Mirror
Notorious
Oharu
Ordet
Pierrot le fou
Sansho Dayu
Silence of the Palace
The Curse of the Cat People
The Home and the World
The Innocents
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums
Z

There is probably nothing so interesting as a list of someone's favorite movies. I went through the Sight and Sound 2002 survey of directors' and critics' Top Tens yesterday, too, and they were often interesting, often irritating. (Irritating: People who put Schindler's List, Gone With the Wind, Jaws, Blade Runner or The Piano on their Top Ten lists; people who leave off Citizen Kane because it's "the definitive white male movie"; and really, is there anything as pretentious as pretending that Rope is your favorite Hitchcock movie?) There's just this very clear line between people who like movies because they're good movies, and people who like movies because they approve of what they're saying, or want to be perceived as approving of what they're saying, whether they actually do or not, or want to be associated with some specious glamor, aura, or depth they imagine the film represents. I could just spit.

But nobody, including me, really much wants a list of actually, really, seriously good movies. It's more interesting to do a list of movies you know not everyone likes or even sees but that are somehow to your taste. And this is the thing about criticism in the recently morbid age of theory: the totally dumb smart-guy pose of supposedly avoiding the vicissitudes of personal taste while at the same time establishing an if-you-have-to-ask-why-you'll-never-understand Canon of Cool. (There's not a thing wrong with jazz, for example; it's academic talk about jazz that kills all the joy in life.) And that is why people like Dave Hickey: He elaborates on his taste, like Baudelaire, or Frank O'Hara. Oh, but you knew that.

Oh Crap, I Left Off Rosemary's Baby

My short list of movies not everyone loves that I can watch over and over again--the personal sensibility list:

Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Bride of Frankenstein
Imitation of Life
The Gang’s All Here
Hiroshima mon amour
The Celebration
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
RoboCop
Shadow of a Doubt
Week End
Providence
Ohayo
If . . .
A Slave of Love
Love Me Tonight
Law of Desire
Mon oncle d’Amerique
Targets
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
All That Heaven Allows
Topsy-Turvy
Cat People
The Devil, Probably
Thundercrack
A Matter of Life and Death
Trash
The Idiots
The Long Day Closes
Double Suicide
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
The Terminator
The Dybbuk

Theatre of Blood
Boggy Depot
Talk to Her
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills
God Told Me To
The Uninvited
The Crime of M. Lange
Last Summer in the Hamptons
Black Moon
The Haunting
Die, Mommie, Die
Devi
Scotland, PA
Sex and Zen
Dracula’s Daughter

And now I'm going back to work.