Thomas Edison is the father of modern movie making. Up until his time, standing around gawking at ordinary motionless pictures was pretty much all there was as far as entertainment was concerned. But with Edison's kinestoscope, all that changed. Edison's first motion picture was entitled Fred Ott's Sneeze and it was about this guy named Fred Ott who was sneezing. Of course nasal congestion was a rather dull subject even for the 1890's. Edison, however, soon began to film other subjects such as vaudeville acts and Spanish dancers and bits and pieces from Buffalo Bill's wild west show. These herky-jerky black and white films eventually transcended the medium and became a trope on how we remember the past today. I'm pretty sure Edison existed in color, but in our collective memory there he is, flickering in poor light and in varying shades of gray.
(Edison's ultimate invention was to be something he called the kineophone, linking moving pictures with the phonograph. Alas, it was never to be. He never quite perfected the machine, but he came up with something close. Today we've combined electronic media with the internet and have come up with a cell phone-video camera, texting, music downloading thing. Now that's progress.)
The Italians perfected operas; the Germans became obsessed with symphonies, and the Irish invented various and sundry drinking ditties. The United States fell in love with the movies. places It is our national art form. (Given such movies as The Whole Nine Yards, The Whole Ten Yards, and Oh My God I'm Trapped In Another Pointless Bruce WIllis Movie, it's pretty obvious that ninety percent of the films that come from our studios are total crap. But then, as Harland Ellison observed, ninety percent of everything is crap.)
We always make a big to-do about movies. We give awards to the assistant hair-dresser who was somehow tangentially involved in a movie, preferrably not about yardage. And we even confuse the actor with the role he played. We really, really want to believe that that honorable looking twenty-foot head on the screen is a hero who just saved the world, not some psychologically damaged fruitcake whose only accomplishment to this point has been to successfully memorize words written for him by somebody else.
The earliest movie I can remember seeing is Forbidden Planet. I must have been five at the time and though the plot was too difficult for me to digest, I loved the flying saucer and the robot. So much so that for the next twenty years of my life I went on an unbelievable science fiction binge. I watched every sic-fi movie I could.
Invaders from Mars: One of the most creepy kid movies ever. Here's a life lesson for you. Never trust an adult human with a dart sticking out of his neck or martians wearing green long johns.
Invaison of the Body Snatchers: Even today, I'm not sure exactly how the pod people replaced the regular people. But by the end of the movie, I was convinced that I was not the original me, but an exact duplicate of myself.
Planet of the Apes: There's this planet, see. And instead of people running things, it's apes. And all the apes speaks perfect English and for some reason Charleton Heston is surprised he's been on earth all along.
Fantastic Voyage: A miniaturized subamarine with a surgical team are injected into a patient to remove a brain tumor from the inside. All manner of bad thins happen, including sabotage and close encounters with antibodies, but the team completes the surgery and exits the body by swimming out through the patient's eye. At the end of the movie, as the crew get larger and larger to heroic symphonic music, the only thing I could think of was "What the heck happened to the submarine?!"
Spartacus: Okay, it's not a science fiction movie. But Tony Curtis in a gladiator movie? You don't get too much more wigged out than that. During the whole summer of 1960 the playground was full of fourth grade bully boys screaming "I AM SPARTACUS" while forcing us third graders into involuntary slaphand matches. It was hell.
The Blob: The only movie I have ever walked out of. Make that ran out of. I had begged my mom to let me see it, and barely lasted through the opening credits. Somehow the thought of being absorbed by gelatinous red space goo was, at that time, was the most frightening thing on the planet. I get the same sense of foreboding unease today when I recall the Carter Adminstration.
It's pretty clear that Hollywood is, to some degree, in charge of our national memoy. Future generations will look back on the movies made today and think that they somehow represent us, how we lived and what we thought. And I, for one, do not want to be remembered as an Adam Sandler movie. Does Mr. Sandler, with his lackadaisical mind set, his infantile sense of humor, his limited vocabulary, his sponge like personality, represent today's Americans?
Don't answer that.
