Yellow Brick Road
A quest for Big Love
I don’t know exactly how long the phase lasted but I tell people 3 years. At the time I’m sure no one thought to note the phase’s timeline because it probably didn’t seem noteworthy. Nevertheless I say 3 years. For three whole years I watched The Wizard of Oz every single day.
Every. Single. Day.
The next phase was equally as obsessive and whose exact timeline equally unclear. One thing is certain, it was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Every single day I had to watch at least part of Gene Wilder’s brilliant and classic movie. It was nonnegotiable.
My family can corroborate these claims (with only slight cringing). I wore the hell out of those VHS tapes. Oz was recorded off of a TV broadcast (I’m pretty sure it was the handiwork of my Aunt J). I knew those commercials by heart (they were very 90s) though I would often fast forward through them. Willy Wonka came in a bright technicolor case of thick shiny plastic. Day after day I played them on the small 12” TV that was inexplicably put in my room.
Those movies sparked in me a wildly vivid imagination, a lifelong love of storytelling, and a perennial sense of play. They planted seeds of things to bloom later. As the years rolled on, I would have similar obsessive spells - Buffy, the Charlie’s Angels reboots, Homeland, Parks and Rec, Kill Bill, Veep, The Walking Dead. These movies and shows would take on huge significance at various points in my life. Sometimes they were simple escapism, sometimes a lifeline. Always a passion project of sorts - consuming them was both a journey and a destination.
I’ve often thought that this uncontrollable watching and rewatching of the same thing was/is a sign of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I get emotionally and mentally enmeshed in these worlds. They become real to me. I intimately know the characters as though they are close friends. My heart breaks with them. I relish in their fictitious joy as if it were my own, no matter how many times I’ve seen the same moment play out.
It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to another realization about my movie/TV consumption. In addition to living in these worlds, I would also rewrite them. With every show or movie that hooked me, I would place a Patrick-like character in the mix. He was usually a sidekick, a total scene-stealer, and always hilarious. In my mind’s eye, I would make space in the fictitious world for a type of character I could legitimately portray as an actor. Maybe it’s some brand of narcissism. Maybe it’s an attribute of that OCD. Maybe it’s a way to compensate for seeing a world that didn’t really include Patrick-like characters.
My movie-watching habits have become family lore, albeit semi-embarrassing. We all laugh when we recount how I needed to come home from school and go straight to that little TV for some Willy Wonka, how everyone in my family could recite lines of dialogue just through osmosis. The embarrassment of it is a little more complicated to untangle, the shadow of shame underneath it. Perhaps it’s the nerdiness of it all. There was full, unbridled, energetic passion for a made-up thing. I was decidedly uncool and this obsessive love of movies felt like a byproduct of that uncoolness. Perhaps I will always be that uncool little boy, seeing as I still fall into passionate affairs with TV and movies, still obsess over them, still write myself into them even as an adult.
In my wiser moments, I’m able to look at those patterns in a different light. I wasn’t uncool so much as I was deeply and profoundly in love. I was in love with the images on screen and the feelings they invoked. I was in love with the inner world, that richly complex playground in my mind, that resulted from those movies. I had a child’s heart, a heart that unwittingly stood before a lifetime of aches and bruises and pains, and chose to love with abandon.
No matter how hard life can be sometimes, and it can be brutally hard, no matter the messiness that being human can bring, I hope to retain a sliver of that child’s heart. I have to believe it’s still there, under the cynicism and regret, the tough skin and defense mechanisms, the dashed dreams and the unfulfilled promises. Beneath the shame and embarrassment, there must still be a heart capable of not just love but Big Love. Whole body Love. All enveloping Love. Molecular and total Love. Because at the end of the day, a life without that kind of Big Love might be ‘cooler’ but it will definitely be a little less magical, a little less fantastical, a little less technicolor.