A puzzle: why is it that we can listen to a record repeatedly, but can only view a film once? Of course this takes some liberties with “can” but let’s grant the obvious point that there is a crucial categorical difference vis repetition within certain modes of aesthetic experience.
And now let’s sidestep that question altogether and talk about repeated viewings of ridiculous things. When I was very young my neighbors owned a VHS copy of Ferris Buellers Day Off [1986]. They were a bit wealthier than my family, and so had various video games and films that I would frequently borrow, albeit with some shame as I wasn’t really friends with my childhood counterpart: at best she and I tolerated one another as the only children close by, but I mostly just wanted her media. Anyway, I watched that film at least 30 times before I reached high school, and another dozen before I finally had a car to skip it. And skip it I did. I didn’t have a Sloane in the same school though I did have a Cameron of sorts, but mostly I would just to go state parks by myself, mid-day/mid-week, where I’d be the only person for miles, with the occasional exception of the distant industrial hum of a parks worker mowing a lawn cutting through the early spring ambience.1 No baseball games. No Ferrari. No dead grandmother or Decatur, Illinois day-trips. And my principal didn’t know me, much less care that I was 34 miles away on the cliff-edge of a waterfall, so long as I didn’t fall and she didn’t have to deal with the aftermath.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the museum: as I changed the movie changed. After those fanatics chased their imaginations into the sides of sky scrapers, I managed a hard turn left turn for a bit, and when I next watched it Ferris went from an ideal to an eventual contemporary, to a privileged little yuppie twerp that betrayed the worst of Reagan’s dawn.2 A little while after that I found Bresson’s A Man Escaped [1956] and, I apologize for the crassness here, found so much of the appeal in bucking institutional constraints that I smiled a little at such low-stakes, slapstick shenanigans. Most recently I found the kiss in front of the Museum’s stained glass window to have conditioned my romantic sensibilities. It’s just so…sweet.
Now if a silly film can do this, imagine what Rochefoucauld could do for a spirited young man encountering that perennially destabilizing Heraclitian flux? Like carrying around a box of razor-blades, each maxim opening new fissures in the ever-expanding membrane…
There were profoundly happy moments, and really established a sort of spiritual stability that has remained so simple I can scarcely put it into words.
Although I must say the bands depicted on his bedroom wall are spectacularly odd and great, and seemingly out of touch with his general persona, and inspired a drunken freeze-framed playlist construction at one point.