COMMENTARY: '30x30': A critical change of heart

Critic Piers Marchant decided to fill in some gaps in his cinematic education by watching 30 important movies he’d somehow missed over the years while recovering from a heart transplant.
Critic Piers Marchant decided to fill in some gaps in his cinematic education by watching 30 important movies he’d somehow missed over the years while recovering from a heart transplant.

Episode One: A New Hope

There is a widely held perception, possibly even an accurate one, that you should never begin a written piece, be it fiction or non-, with the proverbial "life-changing" phone call.

Back when I was getting my master's of fine arts, one of the many maxims drilled into our heads as callow fiction writers was how amateurish and cliched it was to open a story with such a device, but, in this particular case, I don't see a way around it.

We will shortly get to that fateful phone call, but first, some necessary background: About a year ago, I was put on the transplant waiting list for a new heart. My own heart, after five decades of doing its best to keep up with demand, was rapidly winding down, like a grandfather clock approaching the length of its weight pulley.

Initially, I was put on the lowest priority list (there are three), but in March, I got bumped up to the middle level. No doctor could ever say conclusively, for obvious reasons, when a suitable new heart would become available. During a weeklong stay for observation at the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), I was given wildly divergent timelines by different doctors, from days or weeks up to a year.

Released, and back home, I was left to become appropriately paranoid about my phone ringing. That Monday, at a screening with my daughter, I could feel my phone vibrate plaintively in my pocket several times, and had myself pretty convinced I was going to have to leave the theater when it was over and head to the hospital. It was no small relief to find out it was just a persistent friend with a question. To quell my growing unease, I had to send a mass email to friends and family, asking them to send texts instead of calling in the evenings.

Ironic, then, when the call did come about a month later, on the very early morning of April 19, I idiotically had the phone on my nightstand set on vibrate, and remained dead asleep when it buzzed. Fortunately, they had an alternate number -- my partner and medical point person -- who was smart enough to have left her phone audible. After assuring the hospital that I would be there in time, she rushed to my apartment at 2:30 a.m. to rustle me up with the news.

We were at HUP by 6 a.m., as we had been advised, but from that point, the rest of the day was a blur of waiting around in anticipation of my life about to change dramatically, one way or the other. I was relatively calm about my chances of surviving the operation.

Heart transplants -- which would seem one of the more dangerous and challenging surgeries imaginable -- are relatively routine now, with about 3,000 being successfully performed in the U.S. each year, at least in high-ranking hospitals (such as, blessedly, HUP).

But beyond the operation, I couldn't know what to expect. I had consulted pretty thoroughly with a small platoon of doctors, nurse practitioners, medical liaisons and social workers about what came after the surgery, and had done as much research as I could stand on the long-term aftermath of a transplant. But nothing can really prepare you for what your body goes through after such a traumatic experience, nor can you know for sure what the effect of post-transplant medications are going to have on your system.

The surgery was an ephemeral blur. I wasn't allowed to wear contacts or glasses, so being wheeled down to preop and going under was like traveling at some speed underwater. And coming-to the next morning in the Intensive Care Unit, I was still half-anesthetized and hugely spacey. I was given a thumb-operated Dilaudid dispenser, which I unwittingly kept infusing until I was having hallucinations that everyone I was speaking with was posing for glamour head shots in mid-conversation.

Thus doped-up and summarily addled, it wasn't until I got out of the ICU and to the post-transplant ward that I began sorting through my various body traumas and unhappy medication reactions. The worst side effects for me, by far, came from one of the more important drugs, Prednisone, a steroid absolutely indispensable for its anti-rejection properties, but with a staggering hit list of side effects, including insomnia, nightmares, jitters, stomach upset, and temporary diabetes, which left me largely sleepless, and more than a little unhinged.

Several times a day, the ever-patient nurses would come in with a galaxy of medications for me to take, and I would spend the rest of my time talking with my family and partner, taking hesitant walks up and down the hallways, and, in the evenings, watching NBA playoff games. In this endeavor, my timing was exceptional, coinciding perfectly with the opening round of the Sixers' first playoff appearance since 2012.

Sleeplessness was an issue, as was the body trauma and pain, but there was also another, vastly more positive component to my post-surgical experience: a stout clarity to my life, cutting away all the bits and pieces that I suddenly realized didn't matter so much, allowing me instead to focus on those things most essential and true.

It was a bit like Tolstoy's protagonist at the end of the brilliant The Death of Ivan Ilyich, though in reverse: I was so grateful to be alive, and to have had things work out so relatively cleanly -- there were so many advantages I had, I realized, from living in a city with a decent transplant hospital, to having a partner smart enough to leave her phone on, to having an insurance plan that would cover the enormous cost of this sort of surgery. It was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, one I hope with all my (new) heart, I will be able to hold onto the rest of my life.

So, on to the business side of things: While anticipating my convalescence, I realized I was going to be restricted in my ability to attend public screenings of films. I'm essentially on limited public quarantine through the end of July, so I devised a plan with the help of my editor, Philip Martin, to keep writing about films despite those confines.

Here's the project: As critics, we are constantly tasked with watching as many films as possible. This helps us by broadening our context and giving us insights into actors, writers and directors, as well as a greater sense of the vast, essential archive of cinema.

As there have been thousands of feature films since the days of D.W. Griffith and Georges Melies, most of us, even those well-seasoned and highly educated film scribes, have gaps in our knowledge, films we know we should have seen years ago, but for various reasons, have simply not. Some of these are explicable -- despite my mother's near constant exhortations, I have never been able to commit to watching the nearly four hours of Gone With the Wind. And I can't tell you why, but somehow, I have still never seen Being John Malkovich.

In any event, I reasoned, since with so much time on my hands stuck at home, why not watch a bunch of these films that are "missing" from my knowledge bank?

Thus, we have arrived at what I'm calling, simply 30x30 (with all apologies to ESPN): For each day in June, I'm watching one of these films and writing a quick capsule response to it, collecting them with some prose tissue, and presenting it as a limited-edition weekly miniseries essay over the next few weeks.

Now, while there are decidedly more than 30 such films I need to see, I wanted to have a range of films from which to choose, so I broke them down into three categories: Classic Hollywood (including -- shudder! -- musicals), Canon (think Bergman, Fellini, Akerman, and Antonioni), and what I'm calling Contemporary, which includes the aforementioned Malkovich, along with a host of other films that I somehow haven't seen.

Mind you, this is only an entry point to the massive backlog of incredible, older films I need to take in along with all the new stuff. If you ever want to get a sense of just how many more cinematic things in heaven and earth are out there, check out Sight & Sound magazine's comprehensive top 1,000 film list, updated once every decade, or even their top 50, available online here: bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time.

I'm just so incredibly thankful to the dedicated surgeons, RNs, and support staff at HUP, and my loving friends and family, that I have the opportunity to do this.

So, with full respect to my old MFA professors, perhaps this particular phone call was worth the lead-off spot.

photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette/AMANDA HALL

Film critic Piers Marchant lies in a Philadelphia hospital after receiving a heart transplant. While recovering from the operation, Marchant watched classic movies he’d missed.

MovieStyle on 06/15/2018

Upcoming Events