modern myth-making
reaching towards a life in 70mm
My life is a movie, I say often, think even more often. I have always loved this phrase, even when it was corny, even as it has been bathed in irony and overused. What I love about film is how it can make anything beautiful. In a well-made film, the camera's lens shows us the world anew, with an intentional focus that is rare in life. We can be presented with the wicked and the virtuous, the chaotic and the serene, love and apathy, but with the right lighting and writing, we are jolted by its magnificence. When I declare that my life is a movie, I am the happiest person in the world — finally able to achieve a feeling that once required the work of a great director, cast, and crew to evoke.
I imagine that people have always been like this, trying to imitate the stories that defined their time. Didn't the Ramayana and the Epic of Gilgamesh capture the multitude of human experience, too? Was there a bard who told the stories with such detail that every little boy or girl imagined wielding a divine bow like Rama or destroying a monster with their best friend like Gilgamesh? Did medieval knights seek to copy the legendary Knights of the Round Table, the Athenian warriors attempt to fight like Achilles? Did they envision that there would be stories passed down about them?
We're all kind of dedicated to a sort of myth-making, our personal myths. The myth-making is the way that we live our lives, the stories that we tell ourselves, and the people that we want to become. In both the actions that we take and the stories we make out of them, we are influenced by the stories that we're exposed to. We decide to do an action for the plot or to imitate the actions of a character in a novel or a movie just because it adds something novel to our lives. And since a story is only something we can tell in retrospect, we look back at what we've done and attempt to find a cohesive thread that ties it together, referencing all the other stories we've consumed. And those stories come from everywhere: from music, from movies, from shows, from sports, from literally every aspect of our lives. Our personal myths come from our modern myths.
I wonder what myths I am crafting for myself. It's clear that I mimic the media that I consume — our modern myths to draw from. When my parents were in town, I was inspired to go buy pastries so we could all have them for breakfast together with coffee. The idea came to me as I was reminiscing on reading Katie Kitamura's Audition, a beautiful novel that is perplexing and winding and strange. A small part of the work features the ritual of fetching pastries and coffee for breakfast — first between a couple, and then with their son.
In other instances, I look upward at the trees when I walk through the park and how the light filters through them; I can't help but think of Hirayama from Perfect Days (2023). I make faces in the mirror and pretend I'm a character in a Wong Kar-Wai movie; I watch people play tennis and imagine that I'm watching Challengers (2024).
As I try to identify the through-lines in the stories I make from these actions, the Postal Service's song “Clark Gable” comes to mind. The speaker of the song realizes that he has “been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie.” In order to find this love, in order to achieve this dream, in order to finally live out what he had always been seeking, he decides to make a movie. He gets a camera crew, an actress, writes a script, and brings everything together just so he can kiss someone in the way that the actor Clark Gable would have in a film.
Just like the speaker of the song, I'm chasing the feeling of movie-like moments. I reach towards these with my mimicry, but even more so with the ways I decide to spend my days — seeking artistic experiences, meeting new people, eating new things. Attempting to live a filmic existence, I want to make everything in my life beautiful, even that which is sometimes ugly. To make it beautiful in a way that lasts forever in 70mm, the way that it does in the movies. I know it's not possible, just like so much that happens in these fictional stories, but that won't stop me. I still want to hold on.
I can picture Ben Gibbard from the Postal Service like a troubadour, reciting the oral story as old as time. We all want to believe that our lives can be spectacular, just like the myths we've always known. The chorus of “Clark Gable” echoes in my mind:
“I want so badly to believe / That there is truth, that love is real / And I want life in every word / To the extent that it's absurd.”
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Fancy That by PinkPantheress - this album is good but too short
POEM - “Our Lady of the Snows” by Robert Hass - I am standing at my older brother’s closet / studying the shirts, / convinced that I could be absolutely transformed / by something I could borrow.