Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist

Artist

Introduction:

Autist or Auteur, That Is the Question

Of course, the toxic bullshit of incessant advertising and show biz for nearly a century has stripped us of cognitive abilities for dealing with reality that used to be part of the normal equipment of adulthood—for instance, knowing the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen. We bamboozled ourselves with too much magic.

—James Kunstler

It’s ten days before Christmas, 2013. I have just returned from an island retreat (my sixth in two years) in Finland with enlightenment coach Dave Oshana. The effect of attending these retreats has been one of accumulative decrease: each time there’s less of me to comment, or even have an opinion, about the experience. The less of an I there is to tell, the less of a story.

Since I was an adolescent, my story included becoming a film artist or auteur. Ergo, my story is the story of a disappearing artist, unraveling the layers of his fake identity, stitched together out of a movie love that didn’t just border on autism but dove all the way in there. Through movies I was searching a realm of existence beyond the hell of I, a way to disappear and still somehow be there. Enlightenment.

What happened when I got back to my life after the sixth island retreat? A minor incident—I found out my wife had taken up smoking again due to the stress of a new job. In the context of Life Itself the incident was minor. But in the context of my story, it was a major trigger which catapulted me right back into the depressed frustration of an old, undying narrative. This is my life, damn it, and it’s exactly why I go on spiritual retreats: to slowly and diligently take out the garbage, until all that’s left is the empty space of being. A blank movie screen.

The only possible excuse for including any of this at the start of a book about movies, besides that it’s what’s happening (or was when I first wrote this introduction), is this. My desire to escape the confines of identity by training with an enlightenment coach, etc., is a dead match for why I am drawn to movies. Movies take me out of myself and bring my life-story to a temporary halt. They stop my world.

Movie-watching is a curious addiction, because what movies provide (like heroin?) is a desire-free state. Of course the movie in question, like heroin, has to be a good movie, uncut with talcum powder or milk sugar; otherwise desire will rapidly creep back in, even if it’s only the desire to watch a different movie.

Freedom from desire is freedom from fear. Freedom from identity is what movies provide, for an all-too-brief spell. But since they don’t make it better in the long run (they don’t help me to clear out the junk of my past), they probably only make it worse; a bit like my wife’s smoking.

On the last retreat Dave Oshana said something about how people who are addicted to movies are afraid of living.

Well OK Dave; but answer me this: who isn’t afraid of living?

I wonder if that comment could, and should, be extended to people who are addicted to making movies? What drives them? Maybe becoming an auteur is a step closer to having total control over living. To not only be able to choose the fantasy worlds which we escape into, but to create them and then lure others into them? Like becoming the Wizard of Oz. (There are sinister implications in this which will become explicit by the end.)

For the twelve days leading up to Christmas I have decided to stop watching movies. It’s a way to gauge the dimensions of my addiction, a bit like someone who fears he may be an alcoholic deciding to go a full day without a drink. Just to see, you know, how hard can it be? How afraid of living am I really?

I am only halfway through this book. I put it in quotes because, until it’s finished and published, it’s not really a book, any more than a fetus in a womb is a baby. I already have an offer of a contract, but it’s a small publisher and I’m not sure it’s really good enough. I want to reach a wide audience, to be reviewed by the major periodicals, to end up in the film section of major bookstores everywhere, to be read, praised, and adored. Of course I do—why wouldn’t I? It would make living so much less scary if life turned into a movie. Or so I imagine, in the movie of my mind.

Francois Truffaut said: I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. In full sympathy with this decree, I demand that a book express the joy and the agony of its own writing. It should describe the transformative journey undertaken by its author in order to write it. If the act of writing doesn’t involve some sort of transformation for the author, why bother? It will never amount to much for the reader.

I’m currently embarked on such a journey with this book about how movies shaped my perceptions of life, the world, and myself. This is my attempt to separate movies from memory (and from identity), and enter more fully into life. Enlightenment comes only when the last of our delusions is over and done. A bold claim. I am writing about movies as part of my deconstruction process—my daily decrease—in the hope, impossibly vain, of an artist who disappears into his art. Which is not quite the same as disappearing up my own—. Never mind, you get the picture. What’s the opposite of enlightenment, anyway?

It’s possible I wouldn’t have ever started this book if it weren’t for Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist. Before I was halfway through Lethem’s book, I was inspired to write the essay that became the first chapter of this book. Self-Engineered Autism is ostensibly about the many surprising correspondences between Lethem’s personal history and my own. In the process of writing the essay, however, I made a surprising discovery that became the central exploration of this book: how have I used movies to create a social identity, and how have I become a prisoner to that image-inary self? How??

All roads lead to enlightenment, or to the opposite thereof. Movies fulfill more or less the same function attributed to myths. They are blueprints for the soul’s journey, user’s manuals for the world of incarnation. With this in mind I decided to recycle my old writings from The Blood Poets into a new, briefer and punchier format. I wanted to focus on the ways movies matched and mapped my own psychological patterns. As soon as I began to delve into the material, however, I found more than I’d bargained for.

In writing about my favorite movies at the age of thirty, I had disclosed all kinds of unconscious information about myself without realizing it. Analyzing the movies I’d escaped into as a teenager and young adult meant exploring my own unconscious reasons for doing so, but indirectly, surreptitiously. If I’d become conscious of what I was uncovering, the books might never have got finished. Fifteen years later, in 2013 and 2014, it felt safe to look more closely at what I’d been doing. The Blood Poets was only superficially about movies and cultural studies. Underneath, it was an unintentional autobiography.

This is true of everything anyone writes, ever.

The current work, un-book or not-yet-book, is an attempt to finish what I started with Blood Poets. It’s a probably foolhardy and certainly compulsive attempt to do consciously what I was doing unconsciously fifteen years ago. There’s a risk I’ll see things I’m not ready to see, panic, and abandon the book. Probably more likely, I will unconsciously subvert my nobler intentions and skirt around the edges of the unbelievable truth without diving all the way in there. In either case the result will be the same. At best I will give up the project in despair and you will never read these words; at worst I will fool myself into thinking I found gold without ever digging all the way through the dirt, to the bedrock. In which case, what you are holding is fool’s gold.

If so, don’t worry, you will soon know it. Maybe you already know it. My advice if this should turn out to be the case is to put this book down and forget you ever saw it! Don’t be a fool! The only reason to read a book is to discover something about the agony or the joy of living, writing, and reading, and be transformed.

Transformation is the only real currency. Don’t settle for anything less.

So now you’ve been warned, why movie autist?

I was forty when I met my wife. She considers herself autistic, and early on she suggested that I might be too. I looked into Asperger’s syndrome and found I agreed with the diagnosis. Not only did it fit my current personality and nature but I found plenty of evidence for autism in my childhood behavior. I was a solitary child to a notable degree. I remember hardly anything from my first seven or so years, but I do know people often referred to how I would go off and be by myself all the time, and that I was seen as an unusually serious child who rarely smiled or laughed. I disliked being touched, or at least kissed, and it was a running joke how I would put my head down whenever anyone threatened to kiss me, offering them only the top of my head.

I was precociously intelligent, like one of the little professors described by Hans Asperger when he first described autism in children in the 40s. I even wanted to be an inventor, or mad scientist, when I grew up. I had night terrors which included bizarre, indescribable sensory perceptions. (One of the primary causes for autistic behavior is unusual perception.) I suffered from what’s now called depersonalization: the feeling that I was unreal or trapped in a dream world/state (or movie?). A lack of a clear sense of self is typical of the autistic experience.

I immersed myself in fantasy worlds such as reading comic books and drawing. I was extremely fussy about what I would eat. As a pre-adolescent I fantasized about being a robot with an on/off switch, as a way to deal with my insomnia. I was a compulsive nose-picker, and remain so to this day. While nose-picking isn’t considered an autistic characteristic per se, stimming is. I now think that nose-picking was (and is) a form of stimming for me, a way to feel more connected to my body. I was a day-dreamer. I lacked body awareness, and I had occasional shocking experiences of cognitive dissonance while looking at my body, as if looking down the wrong end of a telescope.

That pretty much covers the question of why autist. So what about movies?

There’s a curious correspondence between the word autist and the French word auteur, which means author (at your service) and was adopted by French and then US and British film critics in the 60s to describe a particular kind of filmmaker whose signature or stamp was clearly recognizable in his work.

The simplest definition of autism is self-immersion. As a child I had a huge collection of stuffed toys; all of them had names and super powers, or special abilities, and I would enact endlessly elaborate scenarios for them, like a film auteur working with his actors. I even made my own stuffed animals, and repaired any of my furry friends whenever they began to fall apart.

Not surprisingly, I was deeply involved in the world of Winnie the Pooh. I collected Marvel comics (all of them violent) from an early age, and at around ten I began to write and draw my own stories, inventing my own superheroes and villains. I played with action men, plastic figures similar to the kind of macho movie heroes I later heavily identified with, especially via the films of Clint Eastwood. Movies gradually replaced comics as my primary method of creating and escaping into a private fantasy world. Clint Eastwood became my role model. I collected every scrap of information and image I could find of him, tried to dress and style my hair like him, and bought a .44 Magnum replica.

Movie immersion was consolidated by an active, creative role and not just a passive one. I used my mother’s typewriter to make lists of all the films I had seen in order of preference, the ones I wanted to see, and my favorite actors. I began to review every film I saw, giving them star ratings and arranging them alphabetically in a filing system. This led to the idea of making my own movies. I wrote reviews for the films I would direct, complete with future release dates, and drew thumbnail posters. I wrote scripts (most or all of them violent), and got a super-8 camera for my fifteenth or sixteenth birthday. I was a budding Martin Scorsese. Movies were rapidly becoming my life.

If all this was my way of making the fantasy real enough to continue to escape into indefinitely, then I was the auteur of my own movie autism. I think one of the reasons I chose to write about film was that I wanted, needed, to confront an injustice in my past that I was unconscious of, and did it the only way I could: by addressing imaginary narratives. I wanted to restore some sort of order to the moral chaos I was born into.

What inspired me to write this book was realizing that the primary ideology I had adopted related to cinematic standards of excellence. Right and wrong for me are never so clearly identifiable, or so easily asserted, as they are with the question of what constitutes a good or bad film. It’s one area where I can feel sure where the ground is. I developed my critical faculties around film from a crucial age, about thirteen to adulthood, the same period my adult persona was crystalizing. To this day I get upset, angry, if a film I consider worthwhile is dismissed by critics (I watched one last night, Blood Ties, a wonderful film about two brothers that was largely ignored), and equally so when a crappy or dishonest movie is hailed as a great. It is as if unconsciously I have been trying to restore justice to the world.

In Autism and Spirituality, Olga Bogdashina offers an intriguing developmental model in relation to the idea of movie-engineered autism. Her model has six stages and it’s a bit complicated, and since I want to keep this work simple and straightforward I will try and paraphrase without destroying her subtler meanings.

The first developmental stage is between the ages of three and seven, during which the child develops imagination stimulated by stories (i.e., movies and comics). The child has authentic spiritual perceptions but has neither language nor cultural imagery to represent it. Imagination gets together with those perceptions and sense-impressions to create faith images. Since culture provides stories (fantasy narratives) during this period, these narratives act like clotheshorses for the child to hang otherwise shapeless perceptions and imaginings onto. Hence the child’s worldview can easily be manipulated by cultural doctrines. This is also the period in which the child develops self-awareness.

Self-awareness goes hand in hand with a loss of spiritual perceptions as the child’s experience is translated into cultural images, between ages seven and twelve (stage two). In the third stage, from adolescence to adulthood, we start to refer to the past as a way to understand our experience and to make plans for the future. This is the start of continuity, when the narrative of identity takes over our awareness. We find our identity by aligning with a certain perspective … without reflecting on it critically. We adopt an unconscious ideology based on the cultural images—the narrative or movie—which best match our spiritual perceptions and allow us to function socially.

Like an actor entering into a movie, we become an image, an assumed role, a false identity, created by the script of our received conditioning. It’s an ironic fact that I was escaping into movies—false realities—as a way to try and feel more real, by creating a fake persona that matched the pseudo reality of culture that surrounded me. Movies exist to alert us to the fact that all human existence has been reduced to a movie: a series of frozen images from the past, playing constantly before our eyes, simulating movement, posing as life.

The difference with autistic types is that they don’t adopt cultural images to the same degree or submit to an unconscious ideology, so the mask of the false movie identity doesn’t fit them quite so well. One symptom of this is that they tend to overdo the business of cultural imitation, such as Trekkies who dress up as Mr. Spock, or my clumsy attempts to remold myself in the image of Eastwood. Autists don’t do instinctive imitation, they imitate the act of imitation, and so they get it subtly (or dramatically) wrong.

In Autism and Spirituality, the fourth stage described entails leaving the group mind, which means shedding the fake cultural identity, stepping outside the movie and looking around the theater (or shifting the gaze from the screen to the rear projector). This depends on our becoming conscious of a hitherto unconscious ideology. It implies sorting the seeds of our conditioning to discover which can be planted, and which ones accurately represent our experience, and tossing out the rest. The desired end of this process is relative autonomy—a crucial step towards the ultimate goal of enlightenment.

The book then describes a fifth stage involving ironic imagination. The now autonomous individual still participates with collective images (movies!), but now sees them as relative rather than absolute: as fiction. The unconscious submission to external ideology has become conscious and is replaced by the willing suspension of disbelief. Ironic imagination means moving from mere passive recipient, or garbage collector, of cultural imagery, to the shaper of culture—from moviegoer to moviemaker, autist to auteur.

That’s about where this book and its author come in. The sixth stage, I suppose, is the one that corresponds with full enlightenment, whatever that is. But the less said about that the better. After all, that’s life after movies, and you are here to hear about movies.

We are both still inside the darkened theater. The projector is still turning, the images are still flickering up on the screen. And while we may no longer be captive to them, there is still time, and opportunity, before the lights come up and we leave the theater, to discover just how and why they captured us. To really understand how the movie ends means going all the way back to the beginning.

Describing how this book began is a lot easier than knowing how it will end. I want—need—this book to be an account of its own writing. This is no mean feat because writing a book is at least 50% rewriting, and my relationship to the material changes with each new act of writing, rewriting, or not writing.

You can’t step in the same river twice. You can’t read the same passage twice. Everything is in constant flux. If that doesn’t quite make sense, good. Writing a book to find out why it needs to be written is a nonsensical task, like marrying someone to find out who they are.

Come to think of it, I did that too.

Self-Engineered Autism

Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist & the Revolting Development of Culture

I want what we all want. To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

—Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

Flashback to three months previous, mid-September, 2013. I’d just written a long piece about Philip K. Dick and autism and I was trying to get people to read it. I’d emailed various names involved with Dick’s Exegesis, and after some difficulty, I managed to contact the book’s co-editor, Jonathan Lethem. I’d heard about Lethem from my wife; she’d recommended Motherless Brooklyn months before, but I wasn’t much of a novel reader and I hadn’t got around to it. I’d found out somehow that he’d written about my all-time favorite album, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, so I’d ordered the book and read it in a couple of days. My wife thought Lethem might be on the autism spectrum, and Fear of Music seemed to implicitly confirm this. When I contacted him, I mentioned that we had at least these three things in common: Byrne-mania, Dickophilia, and spectrum-dwelling.

Lethem replied promptly and said he’d be happy to look at my piece. I sent it and a couple of weeks later he came back with a glowing response. Thrilled, I ordered his two non-fiction books online, The Disappointment Artist and The Ecstasy of Influence—naturally I was more interested in reading Lethem now that he was reading me. The books arrived and I delved right into the first, shorter one. The Disappointment Artist begins with a short essay called "Defending The Searchers." I wrote about The Searchers in The Secret Life of Movies, so I was hooked at once. Reading the book was like bumping into an old friend whose existence I’d all but forgotten, and then diving right into fond and fevered reminiscences. Before I was even halfway through, I was fired up enough to write a response to it. What follows is that response.

What Lethem says about The Searchers in his essay:

Wayne’s character, Ethan, is tormented and tormenting. His fury is righteous and ugly—resentment worn as a fetish. It isolates him in every scene. It isolates him from you, watching, even as his charisma wrenches you closer, into an alliance, a response that’s almost sexual. You try to fit him into your concept of hero, but … it doesn’t work … John Wayne’s a fucking monster!

What I wrote in Secret Life of Movies:

It is possible (or at least once was) to watch the film with only a cursory, peripheral awareness of the lead character’s psychotic tendencies, and to see Ethan as merely a more ruthless and unsympathetic version of the standard John Wayne figure. For this is what he is. But The Searchers reveals the isolation, fragmentation, and self-loathing at the heart of the Western hero … With The Searchers, the American hero became a psychopath and—most intriguing of all—nothing had really changed.

The theme of the movie, for me at least, was isolation and loneliness. And isolation and loneliness seemed to run like twin streams through Lethem’s essay, his book, and maybe even all of Lethem’s writing (based on what I’d read so far). But then maybe isolation and loneliness is the theme of all real art, anywhere, anytime? All impressions are subjective, but for me at least, there was a plaintive note of isolation and loneliness in Jonathan Lethem’s writing that was so sharp and yet so far from bitter that it was impossible not to love it—or him.

In The Disappointment Artist, this melancholic note sounds most clearly and brightly in his ode to ode-ious teenage devotion, 13, 1977, 21. The piece describes how, as a thirteen year old in 1977, Jonathan Lethem saw Star Wars twenty-one times. Although I was never obsessed with the movie, I did have a poster on my wall as an adolescent—the only movie poster I had during the period (I think I was mostly obsessed with Princess Leia)—and movies would soon become for me what they were for Lethem: a necessary refuge in the face of the incomprehensible trauma known as childhood—in Lethem’s case, cruelly punctuated by his mother’s death during adolescence.

Reading the passage about his mother was the Turning Point in my relationship to Jonathan Lethem as a reader. It was the point at which I knew he was speaking directly to me. My earliest memory of my mother is of watching a sci-fi movie together, The Day of the Triffids. I also clearly remember her taking us to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which came out the same year as Star Wars but wasn’t released in the UK until the spring of 1978. I didn’t sit next to her, but I remember how, in the final moments, as the Mother Ship was landing, my mouth fell open with the required awe-response and she leaned forward in her seat and looked over at me. I could tell she was as moved by the sequence as I was and wanted to check my own response, to share in it. It was a little like the reverse of Lethem’s experience of seeing Star Wars with his mother in which she didn’t get the film. But for me at the time (around eleven), I experienced it (or remember it now) as an unwanted intrusion, a bit like being caught masturbating. The Spielbergian bubble of fantasy was burst by my mother’s gaze.

Still, despite my uncertain boundaries, in later years movies became a kind of shared language for my mother and I: something we could always talk about. I suspect it was because we both shared a need to retreat into the disembodied psychic space of waking dream which movies provide (my mother was an alcoholic, and she continued to drink while I was in the womb). Above all that meant the shared dream space of the mother-child symbiosis. (And of course, I was staring at the Mother Ship when she leaned over to make sure we were together!) We continued watching movies and discussing them right until the last year of her life: they were a way for us to get into that space, both alone and together.

So when it came to describing a formative obsession with fantasy worlds, and how movies become a way to withstand isolation and loneliness, I could write the book on it. Wasn’t Jonathan Lethem talking about engineering his own autism—dictating the terms and creating the conditions of his withdrawal into inner space by assembling a bricolage of pop cultural borrowings to make the space cozy and inviting and more or less indistinguishable from the real world? It was my own story as much as his.

Naturally, I wanted to also see this as a Turning Point in Jonathan Lethem’s Evolution As A Writer. The moment in which his mother leaves him to watch Star Wars a second time (that day, actually his tenth or fifteenth time) struck me as a rare snapshot of psychic formation as it happened. It was the point at which immersion in make-believe worlds became a conscious necessity and Lethem became a born writer—whether he knew it or not. The name Lethem was perfect too, it evoked Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. (I knew Jonathan would forgive me for creating my own version of him. It’s what all born writers—self-engineered autists—do.)

As this stage, I responded much more warmly to Jonathan’s non-fiction than I did to his fiction, which left me mostly lukewarm. This opinion was in constant flux and had changed subtly even a day after I wrote it. I suspected my lack of a hot response to Lethem’s fiction could be due to my own failure as much or more than his. I felt guilty for having skipped over portions of The Fortress of Solitude to get to the stuff that interested me, especially when it really did interest me and made me aware of the bits I’d missed. It seemed like the supreme disrespect of an author’s craft. But an hour or two later, I came upon a quote by Lethem online: I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction—by skipping the parts that bored me. It was like a direct response: as if we had a moment.

When Lethem spun stories to convey his inner world, I felt almost resentful; I felt impatient of the buffer of make-believe which he put (as every fiction writer must) between his psyche and mine. I didn’t want to be kept out with the other neurotypicals. I wanted IN. I wanted total connection, total eclipse, vesica piscis, a meeting and matching of lonely souls across space, if not time. (We were very nearly contemporaries—are, I mean—his three-year seniority is a piffle now, though it was a crucial difference back then, or would have been. My own brother, now gone, was four and a half years older than me, and we hardly ever got along. Even so, we were like soul mates who somehow landed on opposite sides of the battlefield. My first movie preferences were largely influenced by him; as an adult, he used to call the movie theater, the Forgetting Chamber.)

I knew I probably shouldn’t let myself be fooled by the arbitrary line between fiction and non-fiction; but there was no doubt in my mind that Lethem had two distinct voices as a writer, and that, while one spoke directly to me, the other (so far) did not. But then, the fiction which possessed me was the sort of fiction in which the