I am the enemy

Last night I was out for a beer with my old friend Stas, and at one point we went outside so he could smoke. There were a couple young women handing out flyers for the new "Che" 4-hour opus by Soderbergh, and Stas struck up a conversation with them. Turns out they work at the Lumiere theater, and told us that their manager had been fired and that there were cuts happening all across Landmark theaters in SF so they wouldn't have to shut any theaters down. I said that, as a filmmaker, it was always frightening to see screens shutting down. She gathered up all of her 19 or 20 years and said "Well, you can just show your movies at art spaces and outside and have music and stuff. That whole stuffy 'You sit here and we'll entertain you' crap is all dead anyway. It just gets in the way of real art."

I think that was my first bonafide moment as the old guard. Not that I'm against new ways of showing movies, not by a long shot! We had a great screening against the side of a building in Temescal (Oakland), but we certainly did show our movie in stodgy old theaters. Stas (who is Russian by birth) got to talking about Chekov's "The Seagull" (one of my 5 favorite plays of all time), and I remarked how funny it is that with great works of art as you get older they shift in meaning. When I was younger, I identified strongly with Treplev, the young and passionate and terrible playwright, full of anger at the old forms. And now, with one conversation, I had become aligned with Trigorin, the mature, skilled, but complacent writer. And there are echoes in there of the very real conflict between Dostoevsky and Turgenev, whose relationship had a similar tension, though Dostoevsky is obviously not the shapeless mess that Treplev is.

Talking to Stas in general was bracing, as we were joking about girls or something, and he teased me by saying (he had read this blog) that of course I thought that, because I was just overflowing with complacency. Reminded me of the whole paradigm of generational tension, the conflict between comfort and revolution that flavors so much of the Russian literature that I love. I think my generation (or maybe just me) has had such a slow maturation that those lines have been blurrier...it took until I was 40 to finally be brought up short by a firey young woman.

I was like that about theater when I was younger. I used to rail against the tyranny of comfortable seats, how old folks needed to be taken care of so they could have a nice snooze while your play was going on! I literally felt like I was suffocating in a normal theater, like they were trying to cram their soft cushions down my throat. And yet I never managed to turn that disdain for being treated nicely into a watchable piece of theater. At the end of my first year at NYU, in fact, when I stopped railing and awkwardly experimenting and actually just directed a fairly realistic scene from Sam Shepard, it was a real thrill.

And yet who do I love more in the end, Dostoevsky or Turgenev? Old Fyodor has owned entire years of my life.

It occurs to me that arguing for the grace of maturity is a very comforting thought...Not much of a challenge to ones spirit.