RE: OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES By: Michael McGriff & J. M. Tyree
A Book that I Just Finished
From: Travis
January 6, 2023
My fellow nerds might remember this better than I, but I recall a Monty Python sketch. Said sketch was a type of a literary gameshow, wherein the competing teams had to produce an analysis of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, but their answers had to be given within a certain time limit and HAD to be presented in the form of an opera. The memory of this sketch was triggered when I scanned the blurb about this book (that I found while perusing at Deep Vellum.)
The conceit of the book that was promised reads a bit like a new year's resolution, so now feels like a fine time to talk about it. That conceit being: the dual authors, McGriff and Tyree tasking themselves with watching ALL of the films in the Criterion Collection in a single year (that year, I gather, being sometime before 2014). After each viewing, the two of them went off on their own and wrote a short story in response to the film they'd just seen. The liner notes also suggested that the two authors' responses would weave together to create "linked stories follow[ing] two boys coming of age in the 1980s."
I mean, I can't think of a concept more directly targeted at me.
Exhibit A: this whole web site/podcast focused around movies and books.
Exhibit B: distinct memories of browsing through the new Criterion collection DVDs (the humble DVD being a medium that wasn't that old, itself) each week when they hit the shelves at Barnes & Noble (the classy bookstore in town).
Very early on in reading the book, I realized: I have seen a staggeringly small percentage of the Criterion Collection's catalogue. Of the 39 movies included in this book's exercise, for instance, I have seen:
1.) Blade Runner
2.) Carnival of Souls
3.) Donnie Darko
That's it.
AND I saw Blade Runner for the first time last year when we did it on the podcast.
AND I only saw Carnival of Souls because RiffTrax did it as a live show once.
I began to think I was not cultured enough for this book. But, I read on, and I found that these were more like micro stories. Some of the entries bordering on Haiku; a prose paragraph with the preciousness of a poem.
I tried to keep the thread of the two different storylines in mind as I progressed, a task made more difficult since neither response story had a by line, but either I am also too dumb for this book (a real possibility) or there isn't supposed to be any connective tissue between the stories, aside from the movie they are both responding to.
Come to think of it, maybe responding is the wrong verb here. For the VERY few cases where I knew the movies that the stories related to, it seemed more like the films had provided the terroir, set the mood for the written works that came after. It wasn't like either response to Donnie Darko had time travel furries telling people when the world was going to end, but both stories had a kind of feeling of inhabiting a life you weren't intended to, of side-stepping fate that seemed aligned with the spirit of the movie, if that makes sense.
In those cases where the film was familiar to me, I did enjoy trying to reverse-engineer what they had written; what idea their minds had clamped onto when they moved from the TV to their typewriters... but most of the time I could only really guess at what the movies had been about, triangulating using whatever similarities the two pieces shared.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy the book. In fact, I found that the micro stories were expertly done for the most part; minimalist, but as fleshed out as they needed to be. And if they didn't weave together to tell a single (or double) connected narrative, they still had that feeling of being part of a bigger story; of growing up in dying mid-west suburbs, of pubescent trysts, family trauma and secrets, and waking-life magical realism.
I wouldn't suggest just sitting down and reading it cover to cover. Much better, I would think, to treat this like a book of poems to be consumed in small chunks and mulled over for a little while -- especially if you know the movies they are responding to. I was constantly coming across plot points and prose that were surprisingly good and memorable (if not exactly an opera).
It might even be fun to pick a handful of the movies in here that you've never seen before, make a checklist, and turn reading the book into a new year's project of your own?