We were miserably unhappy young men, prone to these outbursts and threats, and thankfully our third friend, who was slightly less miserable-or at least seemed to be-shouted “I want to live!” from the backseat, jerking us back to our senses, resulting in laughter and apologies and a false sense that we wouldn’t be thinking about that moment for the rest of our lives. I’ve no doubt the film was on my mind a few months later when, after an opening night viewing of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves at the same theater, I sped my grey-blue Bonneville down the wrong side of an empty Victory Boulevard, mid-dispute with my best (and, miraculously, current) friend, threatening (promising?) to direct us into a telephone pole. Expressway from the racket ball and tennis facility deftly named “Courts of Appeals,” and adjacent to the then still-active and very pungent world famous Fresh Kills Landfill.
Nevertheless I’ve carried the concept of the film with me since that spring 1991 viewing at Staten Island’s UA Theaters-at the western edge of Victory Boulevard, across the S.I. The days are a double helix of coping and disemboweling.ĭefending Your Life came out when I was in high school, which means I was old enough to understand what was at stake, to have experienced regret and anxiety, but not old enough to have accumulated a U-Haul’s worth of the stuff. Day upon day of solitary subsistence, self-reflection, and self-reckoning, and general futurelessness funnels quite naturally to mortal regrets and doubts, to thinking jags that systematically strip away each layer of one’s accumulated self, leaving one naked to the bone and alone at night with only themost mortifying memories as a duvet, and maybe, if one’s lucky, terrestrial television, with its balmy reruns and corporeally grounding catheter commercials, as an intervening sheet. It doesn’t take a master shrink to figure out why I might be reaching for Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life at a time like this.
This ongoing column will be in the spirit of many past Reverse Shot symposiums, in which writers found connections between seemingly disparate cinematic works, and it will also help us maintain personal connection among our writers and our readers at this uncertain moment. In this new weekly column, Connected, one writer will send another a new piece of writing about a film they have been watching and pondering over, in the hopes that this will prompt a connection-emotional, thematic, historical, or analytical-to a different film the other has been watching or is inspired to rewatch.