OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: The American behind me

NEW YORK--"Are you guys filmmakers?"

Uh-oh. It appears the guy in line behind us wants to talk. Which shouldn't be a problem given that I spend a considerable part of my working life talking to people and regularly engage in public speaking, but still kinda is, because I'm what we used to call a "shy person." If I were one of those people who posted the results of data-harvesting quizzes on my Facebook profile I would no doubt identify as an introvert.

(A surprising number of people in my profession are; being an introvert--or as my wife Karen says, making a Seinfeld reference, a "no talker"--helped me as a reporter. I could sit drinking coffee in a detective bullpen for hours without anyone noticing I was there. My superpower is that I can become part of the furniture--a filing cabinet with a hungry notebook.)

But if there's anything I like less than making small talk with strangers, it's appearing rude. So I answer him, making a mild joke. No, I'm the opposite of a filmmaker, I say. They make 'em, I tear them apart, I say. (Then I add that some of my best friends are filmmakers.)

He smiles at the deflection, but somehow he doesn't find me completely uninteresting. So he asks me about my job--"So how does one get to be a film critic these days?"--and switch strategies, applying one Karen often employs in small talk situations: I start to interview him.

And, as it turns out, he has a story.

He was born in India and came to this country in 1993 to study mathematics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. He picked up a doctorate, then moved to New Hampshire, where he picked up another. Along the way he became an American citizen. Now he spends his days writing code to defeat hackers and protect our online security.

His business must be good these days, I say. He shrugs. It's a living. But what he really wants to do is make movies.

And he's written a screenplay. It's in development. Or maybe it's been optioned--I wasn't taking notes. Anyway he's like a lot of people I know; he has an inchoate movie to think about. It might become something; it might fade away. And even if it does become something, well, my new friend is realistic about its chances of changing his life.

"You have to be crazy, you know?"

Yes. Yes, you do.

Because we're not in a play where artistic integrity is remuneratively rewarded. At the moment, the market doesn't care much about your heartfelt story on the untidy truth of human relationships. At the moment, if your hero doesn't wear tights or isn't represented by a string of ones and zeros, we don't see the point.

His wife thinks he's nuts. He should just write the code. He should just take the money.

He knows she's right.

But hey, people dream. And maybe, after having come halfway around the world, uprooted yourself and remade yourself into a mongrel being unmoored from history or culture, the thing we call an American, it's not so big a deal to imagine that you might also succeed in shopping your dreams. Maybe you can be an artist, too. Maybe it's not too greedy to want what you want.

He took the train to the festival, he's standing in line alone, because he wants to be among people who are similarly addled, who strive in similar ways. He has a script, and someone wants to try to make it into roaring light and trembling sound and he thinks that's what he wants as well.

Even though I tell him I know there are "famous"--to us anyway--directors who cannot buy a house, he thinks he might be happier if he told the story that has interrupted his sleep. He thinks the world might be better off with another movie in it.

He says he never personally experienced any racism in this country before this very day, on the train in from Jersey, when loud boys wondered where he was from and what he had to do to afford the (admittedly very fine) Italian loafers he was wearing. They called him names, he says.

He moved away from them, he says. He didn't want any trouble.

He changed cars. They didn't follow, they just spit their vitriol at his back.

OK, it happens. Once in 24 years to him. More to other people, undoubtedly. He just wants to talk about the movies.

I tell him I am sorry for all that, and he smiles in that patient way some people have that let you know you are absolved, and he allows that sometimes in colleges the Indian kids tend to be insular, hanging out only with the other nerds in math and sciences, which means mainly Asian folk. But he made good friends of Cajuns down in Lafayette, and when he moved to New Hampshire the people there marveled at the distance he had traveled.

For New Hampshire is a long way from Lafayette.

And I try to make something of the fact that a lot of Americans never feel compelled to travel very far from wherever they were born or raised, that there are plenty of Arkansans who wouldn't come to New York City because they worry that things are too different here. I tell him there are Arkansans who wouldn't even come to Little Rock because they fear that it is different, that it is dangerous. I tell him Americans aren't very brave, because we live in relative ease and comfort, that few of us would ever think of tearing ourselves away from what we find comfortable to try to make a life on the other side of the world, in a foreign country.

I tell him that we cover our fear by telling ourselves that it doesn't get better than we have it, that we are the last best hope for a blighted world, an exceptional tribe of achievers maybe specially blessed by God.

I tell him we talk big, but we don't always live up to our rhetoric.

And he wants to talk about the movies, about the dreams distilled and splattered on screens everywhere, and how he might someday make himself as fine as the splendid creatures we celebrate in our darkened temples.

This is an American by choice. How shameful it is that some of us think there's something in his aspect or his skin that makes him lesser than those of us who, like me, have done nothing more adventurous than blinked ourselves awake under an American sun.

But I don't tell him that.

I tell him I will watch for him in the movies. And that I look forward to the time when I can pan one of them.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 04/25/2017

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