How about you? Did any movie divert your entire life in a wrong direction? Did any movie divert part of your life in an unfortunate direction?
November 26, 2023
"Going to watch that movie 'The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming' in 1966 diverted my entire life in a wrong direction."
Writes Mike Sylwester, in last night's "Sunrise — 6:50" open comments on this blog. (Life story at the link.)
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73 comments:
"How about you? Did any movie divert your entire life in a wrong direction? "
Sorry for the boring answer, but I don't think so. I didn't watch many movies, and I didn't attach much significance to those I did. They were (and are) not real.
The "Endless Summer" in 1964. Boom! My life's trajectory was decided by Mike Hynson, Robert August and Bruce Brown and 90 minutes of 16mm film being shown in the a rented hall in Jacksonville, Beach, Florida. Every thought and almost every life decision I made was only after consulting with my surfing muse first.
It changed everything in my life from 1964 through 2023. At 71 I still can't seem to leave it behind. So many of life's opportunities wasted because I was surfing, going surfing or planning a trip to go surfing. It's essentially a selfish endeavor. It's death to relationships.
Were there any positives? Yes. But as the late great caper and surfing artist Miki Dora once said: "Surfing is as good a way as any other to waste your life". And I wouldn't go back change a second of it.
There was a few drive-in movies that diverted my life in a different but not unfortunate direction. Back then we called it "getting lucky".
I saw “The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming” when I was 11. Alan Arkin instantly became my new favorite actor, and the first one who became my favorite because of his performance, and not because he was playing the monster in an old Universal horror movie. I don’t think it changed the trajectory of my life, tho.
"I never should have started studying Russian! I could have become rich if I had pursued my previous idea to study computer science instead!"
He was thinking about studying computer science at a time when the closest I came to either computers or science was watching Star Trek to see a black woman in space on TV. Reminders, of how disjointed American life is, are still jarring. So many careers, crippled or thwarted. So many lives abandoned. Amongst an abnormal, endless stream of vacuous "entertainment." And this is the best we can do.
I was watching an interview with Johnny Rotten, and he was reminded that, in 1978, he told the world Jimmy Saville was a pedophile. He reminded the interviewer that that fact got him banned by the BBC, buying Saville decades of time to keep his pursuits going.
It's no wonder suicide stays so attractive.
Oh, and after Bruce Lee movies, we kids knocked ourselves silly with nunchucks. That, too, was unfortunate.
What stood out for me as his career turning point in Mike's comment was the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Russia in the 1980's whom with he could not compete. Thus, Mike laments his decision not to go into computer science and become rich. One wonders if he had been a failed computer scientist, would he have subsequently blamed all of the Russian Jewish computer science and math wizards whom immigrated into the US like Sergey Brin?
I was always disgusted by Mike's casual racism. I see that hasn't changed.
I was a competitive swimmer & we had a house at the beach, but after Jaws, I never went more than knee deep in the ocean.
“The Right Stuff” convinced me to work at NASA, which I did for over a decade. Now I work in oil and gas, which treats engineers much better.
Original Mike is correct. It's a movie, not real life nor anything resembling real life.
I read Mike sylvester's comment early this morning and it seemed to me he described many more improtant influnces on his life choices than this fricking Alan Arkin movie.
I’d have to think on it. Weird Science prolly altered the course of my relationships in a bad way. The close friend but huge crush called me to make a real date with mashing at the end. I had to pick the movie. All crap at the time. The movie with Frankenstein Sting whatever had lots of nudity and I didn’t want to squirm through that so Weird Science it is for my hot but nerdy date. Never mind I just saw it with someone else- I lied. Who knew girls talk? It did not leave a good impression…
I was just reflecting to myself earlier this morning on how big an impact the movie Exodus had on me. I was a 12 years old girl when I saw it on the big screen. I developed a deep and fairly long lasting crush on Paul Newman and seemed to be forever after attracted to men with blue, blue eyes with a hint of a mocking glint in them. I was imprinted with a romantic admiration for the fight it took for the Jews to fend off their enemies, hold onto the land that was deemed theirs and how they rejoiced when the US recognized Israel as an independent country. Over 60 years later, I can still recollect certain scenes from the movie with visceral clarity.
Probably Music Man. Made me want to play an instrument and be in a marching band, when I was actually more bookish than that.
So I got the music life and I got it good and hard. Very difficult to get out once you're in.
Not a movie, but a LP. Specifically the firesign theater's Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand me the Pliers. So many lines from that record stuck with me (I probably listened to it a hundred or more times during college) that they became a part of my daily vernacular. Out buying a new car, closing the door as I stepped out - "Close the door, and the light stays on!" got a odd look from my wife and kids. I apply that one almost every time I run into a purchasing option of something new and shiny. "As we ford the Golden Hind" setting out on an an adventure, or "hit that Jew over the head with a bag of sugar" when faced with a choice always got some odd looks. So many others. The album became a part of me for some reason.
I played the album for my wife about 20 years after we'd been married. She laughed a lot when lines familiar came up, but I got a lot of weird looks too. I think friends think I'm a bit touched because of what they think are non-sequiturs but I just can't help myself.
Dr. Zhivago and Burnt by the Sun (a truly beautiful film, just to watch) reinforced what I had been reading since grade school, when one of those amazing Russian immigrant teachers (a professor of literature there, he taught grade school here) gave me Gulag Archipelago and other books. Larry Grathwohl's Bringing Down America showed me how the same evil and dangerous fascism came to America and is all powerful now.
I feel I don't find the movies and books that change my life: they find me. Most recently, I found Suicide of the West in a chicken house turned extremely short-ceilinged thrift store in North Georgia. It was 20 cents. I insisted on giving the woman a dollar. She said no. When I insisted it was an important book, she insisted on giving me pulled Christmas candy ribbons she had just made.
I discovered John O'Hara as I sat by my brother for six months in a transplant center in Birmingham. For some reason then, O'Hara saved my sanity. As my brother lay dying two years ago this week, I brought all the O'Hara books with me as I sat there for months again. This time I understood O'Hara: not so long ago, life was so harder and fragile: civilization is excruciating to keep going.
I hope Inga is OK.
I was in college and in a fraternity when 'Animal House' came out.
I thought it was a documentary about our house.
Althouse asks:
How about you? Did any movie divert your entire life in a wrong direction? Did any movie divert part of your life in an unfortunate direction?
Mike Sylwester wrote:
I never should have started studying Russian! I could have become rich if I had pursued my previous idea to study computer science instead!
Answer: Nope. For one thing even at a young age I realized that movies — even documentaries! — are fundamentally fiction. Secondly, my choices in life generally worked out very well for me.
Finally, I did major in computer science. Wife and I became comfortable, but not by any stretch of the imagination are we rich. A lot depends on luck. My area of expertise was large-scale data management. When I started that meant half a terabyte. At the end of my career it meant multiple petabytes. But the industry still needed experts, and if one engaged in continuous learning then one was still in demand. By contrast, at the start of my half century of employment the people who understood data communications were essentially demigods. By the end of my career firms were just slapping a VPN atop the Internet and didn’t much need people who did computer networking for a living. I was lucky; the comms guys weren’t.
BTW I still think Meade's comment "I think we're all Bezos on this bus" from several years ago is one of the best lines I've seen on the internet, and I'm a bit envious I didn't come up with it first.
And remember - whatever you do, don't take off your shoes.
Don't be hard on Mike. I know what it feels like to follow all the rules, put in all the work, and then the rules change. Pro-Israel as I am, and no matter how much I have been blessed with Jewish friends, I have met more than a few professors who told me that the clannishness of that generation of Jewish intellectual emigrees destroyed their work prospects, and not because they were inferior to them intellectually.
What, did someone put ecstasy in my oatmeal this morning?
One more. Sorry, can't help myself. My wife is Mexican. First time I met her family we were gathering for a group photo. I blurted out "what are all these Mexicans doing here". Bad move.
michaele said...
"I was imprinted with a romantic admiration for the fight it took for the Jews to fend off their enemies, hold onto the land that was deemed theirs and how they rejoiced when the US recognized Israel as an independent country."
I can understand that, though you have to know, by now, it was propaganda and a lie, right? Nothing about Asher Ginsberg telling Zionists to stop mistreating people or there's gonna be trouble? The Zionist's terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel? Theodor Herzl saying "the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly"? Einstein calling Zionists "misled criminals"?
Why people have to be slaughtered in the 21st century, for a romantic notion as silly as "We're the chosen people and God gave us this land," is beyond me.
I don't know about life-changing stuff but every time I walked out of a movie that featured fast cars or Billy Jack-type fighting, I was treated to cars laying rubber out of the parking lot or guys trying to do their best imitation of a roundhouse kick, respectively.
Some movies have a longer influence on people and that influence sometimes becomes a fad.
I cannot recall a movie that had any long-term effect of me (Debbie Does Dallas, notwithstanding) but I was driven into career choices by reading comic books. Exposed to Superman comics at a very young age, I knew I could never be the Man of Steel but I could be Clark Kent. I wanted to be a reporter since I was 5 and getting glasses at 8 years of age might have helped in my goal. I wrote or was editor of all my school papers from elementary to high school to college, was employed as a reporter/photographer at a weekly at 17 (then became Sports Editor and had my own column to write about whatever I wanted), and in 1980-81 started a weekly newspaper in Jupiter FL with an immediate circulation of 28,000. I was the youngest editor of a medium-sized weekly in the state at the time. We became successful and wound up (indirectly) selling the paper to Scripps-Howard.
I went into cooking and became a chef.
I never saw a movie about being a chef. Oh, well.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
One wonders if he had been a failed computer scientist, would he have subsequently blamed all of the Russian Jewish computer science and math wizards whom immigrated into the US like Sergey Brin?
This is stupid. 100 million new jobs have been created in technology since the path not taken. Not so in academia. Not comparable. …and the observation of Russian Jews is not only apt the significance is the Russian not the Jewish.
…the kind of thinking what passes as thinking in academia these days. Dollars to donuts that’s where the commenter lives…
Hey Tina, Which "Suicide of the West"? The original by Burnham or the more recent by Goldberg with the same title?
Tina: Your point is that antisemitism is as pervasive and invisible as air. Look at rehajm bending over backwards to defend an antisemitic statement by saying "Jewish" wasn't a significant part of the statement, we should pretend it wasn't there. It stinks of a clannishness of this generation of white folks.
He was thinking about studying computer science at a time when the closest I came to either computers or science was watching Star Trek to see a black woman in space on TV.
You saw people using computers once a week. Mike heard Russian one time in a movie. It sparked an interest in him and he went out of his way to pursue it. Did you have an interest in computers that was thwarted or are you blaming society for your lack of interest?
On a positive note, Used Cars paved the path for a 45 year career in sales for me. “So, uh, whatta ya say, wanna buy it” (Always ask for the sale).
"Beyond The Valley of The Dolls"
Saw this as a high school freshman........took me months to recover.
I was very upset by reading the Neville Shute book, "On the Beach." I think I was in second year of college and I almost dropped out. I was a Shute fan and had read two of his books that forecast the future. One was "No Highway," which predicted the metallurgical failure in the "Comet," the first British jet airliner. The book was fiction but Shute was an aeronautical engineer and a few years after it was published, the Comets began to crash. In the 1930s, he had written "Ordeal," which predicted the Blitz. Now he had written a novel that predicted the end of the world from radiation sickness after a nuclear war.
I later learned that he got a few things wrong, like ignoring the oil in Indonesia. But the effect on me was almost devastating. The movie came later and had less effect. I still cannot reread the book.
The Green Years. It motivated me to study really hard so I could become a doctor.
When I was 12 the cable channel began. HBO, brand new, had about 2 movies they played over and over. The first month was GWTW, and I watched it dozens of times. Then I found the book, which is a tome, and read it over and over. Nowadays, the movie is unwatchable. The racism is painful and the overwrought sentimentality has lost its appeal.
Thinking on it now, though, it is the moment I started wondering how characters are motivated, why they do what they do, and how an actor can portray that. Scarlett, no matter what else she is, is a complex, well-written character.
What a terrible movie.
What was considered funny in 1966 is unwatchable now imho...
But I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey as a young lad on a huge screen when it first came out.
I'm sure it had something to do with cementing my love of all things 'space.'
Mr. Forward @ 6:23am
Ha!
Entire generations have no idea.
It was a golden age : )
Bill: Burnham of course!
Howard: I was trying kindness for a change. Most of my friends are Jewish and have been since I was a child. I know, sadly, that I defend Israel more than they do, and have paid a much higher price professionally for not doing it blindly.
"The Russians Are Coming..."
Is this the regular version, or the one you can only see on those 'special' channels?
I can honestly say no movie ever influenced my life decisions in any measurable way- the same applies to books. There are certainly a lot of bad decisions that might have been avoided if I had relied on input from any movie rather than my own personal whims.
The evening news topped with editorial satire.
Not a movie, but a book, maybe a couple with the same theme.
After reading '1984', I became very careful about people knowing what I was reading. Refused to check out books from the library as there was a record. Bought books only with cash. It was a momentous change when I finally broke down to order a book from Amazon. Of course, since then, these "permanent records" have started to be used against people for "wrong-think". Only difference from the 1970s is that the threat is from the Left (Democrats) not the Moral Majority (I grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt)
Additionally, '1984' and a few other books made me want to develop internal knowledge and introspection to be prepared for solitary confinement if imprisoned. So I came to be able to get along quite well in isolation.
I may have been a bit too young when I read Orwell, but I don't remember what age I was.
The Last Picture Show got my adolescent self thinking about the importance of not being thoughtless in even simple interactions with others. Not just for their sake but for what it meant about what kind of person I was. Not life changing perhaps (I was never a huge asshole), but lodged in my conscience nonetheless.
What a terrible movie.
What was considered funny in 1966 is unwatchable now imho...
What?!? You don’t still get a chuckle from “E-mare-gency! E-mare-gency! Everyone to get from street.”? Was your funny bone surgically removed since 1966?
I can't recall a specific movie that influenced me but the book Report From Engine Company 82 by Dennis Smith certainly did. I read it a couple of years after returning from Vietnam while I was still in the service. His stories about serving in the FDNY in the Bronx during the "war years" launched my interest in public safety. It started a life-long avocation. I've served for 38 years on a police and fire commission in addition to a stint as a volunteer firefighter. I've also had the opportunity to do some intriguing ride alongs with the police while traveling for business in NYC, Chicago, LA, etc.
Another Bruce Brown film, "On Any Sunday." I have been riding dirt bikes ever since. In fact, I broke my leg on Oct 7, and my long suffering wife is begging me to give it up. After having it in mt life for 53 tears, I don't know.
"I hope Inga is OK"
I've been thinking that, too. Have we heard something, or are we noting her long absence from the comments?
"Animal House" also affected me. I was a bit self-abusive in my youth, and partied like Delta House.
Blade Runner. At the time I said "this is our future" and the artist/designer Syd Mead really was able to predict so many things! The first time I saw a large outdoor advertising screen on the side of a building (Hong Kong, I believe), my first thought was "Blade Runner".
The presence of Big Mike in this thread makes me wonder how big or small Mike Sylwester is. Ditto Original Mike.
If Mike Sylwester is both small and unoriginal, we'll have two lovely pairs.
I saw the "Russians are Coming..." when I was 10 and I remebered liking it alot. I also thought Alan Arkin was a real cool guy. A year or so after the film came out I moved to the NYC suburp as him, but never saw/noticed him or his son Adam who was a year behind me in HS.
When I graduated HS I had no idea what to do or where to go. College was out to the question as I hated school and only barely graduated HS. Staying at home with my parents was also not going to happen.
For some reason I decided to move to LA. I think a good part of that decison was because of the film, "The Long Goodbye". The film had a huge impact on me. There was something about the mood of the film that moved me to drive the beat up car that I got as a graduation present with all my savings and belonging to La. I drove that car as far as I could, ending up staying in a dump by the Santa Monica Pier and smoking copious amounts of weed for 6 months or so. I don't regret it. Had lots of good experiences in LA, though I'd never move back there.
I hear you Tina. I have several very close ex pat Israeli friends. They're liberal and hate Netanyahu with a passion but love Israel even more passionately. They all served in the IDF during war time. They are the remaining slight fractions of mostly exterminated large European families. They're a different breed. Don't ever mess with a strong smart hard working Israeli woman. I have zero tolerance for antisemitic hose nozzles.
'What?!? You don’t still get a chuckle from “E-mare-gency! E-mare-gency! Everyone to get from street.”? Was your funny bone surgically removed since 1966?'
Too young to see the original.
I put it in the same category as Mad Mad Mad World.
Madcap and slapstick with an all-star cast is not my thing...
I do recall, when I was about 18, I ran into an old girlfriend, that I had broken up with for no very good reason I could recall. She was sweet, and pretty, and smart, and I asked her if she'd like to go to a movie with me. Which, given our history, was an unmistakable invitation to spend a few hours flirting and then hop in bed. To which she duly agreed, and I don't think either one of us gave much thought to what movie we would see. Someone had told me that A Clockwork Orange was good, so we went to that utterly revolting technicolor abomination. When the wretched thing had ended, we stumbled out of the theater in a state of bewildered, nauseated shock and parted almost without speaking. I didn't see her again for twenty years.
Who made that thing, anyway, Kubrick? What a fucking asshole he was. What a jerk.
But I gotta say, Mike, I studied computer science at the University of Oregon at about the same time you were there. And I do OK as a programmer, but I'm hardly wealthy. There's a lot more to getting rich than knowing DeMorgan's Theorem.
I enjoyed many laugh-out-loud moments from these comments.
I would agree that A Clockwork Orange is not a good date movie. Come to think of it, few of Kubrick's are. Even the good ones.
No artwork has ever affected me the way that some report for themselves. My formative experiences involved stepping up to responsibilities when others couldn't or wouldn't.
OTOH, my Firesign Theater abuse began in high school, and I'm sure my old friends and I will embarrass our wives with the old favorites at the dinner next Saturday.
Thinking back on it, what Kubrick did with A Clockwork Orange was to make a nasty little piece of innocent-victim porn, with high production values, and bogus pretentions to cultural sophistication. There was, actually, some cultural significance to Kubrick's schtick, and the abject nausea and horror it induced in me and my date was a clue to that significance. That a thing like Kubrick wanted to make a thing like A Clockwork Orange is no big deal, any more than the fact that a thing like Anthony Burgess wanted to write the nihilist claptrap it was "based" upon. It was a fucking slasher pic. Sadism porn. But the delight with which our "cultural elites" assured us that this was high art and a thing worth watching was a first, faint indicator of the rot within.
For contrast, consider Cheever's The Swimmer. Cheever's masterpiece is much shorter than Burgess' nihilist manifesto, and much deeper. And the movie made from it was both more honest, and more surreal, than Kubrick's brutal, sadistic fantasies.
"I enjoyed many laugh-out-loud moments from these comments.
That's entertainment!
The USDA provided the bread, with the Abundant and Surplus Foods program. But Man does not live by bread alone. So Stanley Kubrick provided the circuses. Only a fairly small number could fit into the Colosseum, to see humans torn apart by wild animals, or hacked and speared to death by other humans. Stan brought the edifying bloody mutilation experience to the big screen, where millions could savor it. Stan was an auteur, and he must have thought he did it for love, although of what is a mystery.
So, yeah, I get it. You're saying, "Look, Jove, you wanted to get the tip wet, and Stanley busted your play. Too bad, so sad, but life goes on. Get over it."
Ok. But look. If you could take two horny young Americans, intent upon rekindling a fairly satisfactory previous romance, and show them Stanley's movie, and the result was that they abandoned that intention and instead separated, in a frame of mind rightly characterized as baffled anomie, what would be the effect of exposing tens of millions of Americans to that noxious and corrosive propaganda? Well, look around. What's not to like?
"I discovered John O'Hara as I sat by my brother for six months in a transplant center in Birmingham."
John O'Hara was one of the first authors I encountered when I began to investigate the Adult section of the Eugene Public Library. I think I was about 11 at the time, although it might have been 10. I read everything he wrote, and I think he was at least as good as Hemingway, 'though not as flashy. Nearby, on the same shelf, I found Edna O'Brien, and a book called Girls In Their Married Bliss". I did not realize this at the time, but this is the second book in a trilogy, called The Country Girls. It was quite an education to me. In retrospect, I would say, a feminist education, in an Irish Catholic context. God and all His saints help me.
Tina, have you read O'Brien?
I was about to write "none", then I read pacwest's post, so I changed my mind.
Not a movie, but an LP. Specifically the Firesign Theater's "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All", and not early in life.
"The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye" influenced the voice and temperament of my novel series. Not the related stories, just the series. Writing those put me in touch with Ogre (a fortuitous name for a fantasy editor) who became a good friend of almost twenty years.
Another thing of theirs I watch with some frequency is "J-Men Forever". Very funny nonsense movie. I saw it once in a college showing and spent twenty years looking for a copy. Finally ran one down. A guy in Minnesota had a master print and was running off VHS copies. Now you can watch it on YouTube.
Think I'm gonna listen to Nick Danger right after this.
Nick Danger was a parody of radio shows. My favorite snippet follows:
(slap,slap,slap,slap,slap,slap,slap,slap)
Nick: "Uhnnn."
Betty: "Nicky, are you all right?"
Nick: "Yeah, babe."
Betty: "Then stop slapping me!"
Several of my friends were into Nick Danger as well. I still greet them with (voice of Peter Lorre) "Hello... Mister Danger!"
Easy Rider. For longer than I care to admit, I idolized those guys and thought it would be a great way to live. How foolish.
Yes, I've read O'Brien. One thing I miss about libraries is looking for one book and finding another. That's how I found the weird "House of God" by Samuel Shem and A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard.
I couldn't agree more with Jupiter regarding Kubrick.
On a lighter note, I have an entire collection of older books I file under "Misogyny and Misandry." Note that "misandry" isn't in the computer dictionary.
I'm sure everyone here would find something to like.
And I believe I have the earliest Keto diet book, titled: "Martinis and Whipped Cream," both of which feature in most of the meals. It's not at all scientific, but the author seems to have stumbled (I'm sure a lot of stumbling was involved) on weight loss through consuming copious amounts of butter, eggs, celery, olives, steak, and vastly impressive quantities of dry martinis. Live fast, die young.
What will happen to my books when I die? I have a good and rare shelf on the dangers of New Age I'd like to send to Crack. I have hundreds of poetry books. A shelf of 19th Century gynecology manuals better suited for Halloween, received when Grady Hospital dismantled its historical library (I can barely crack the dental ones).
I've seen too many of my older friends pass and their children just dumpster the books.
So here's the deal. I have thousands and thousands of books. They are catalogued digitally. If I were to disappear, reach my husband here. He is vigilant. He will send whatever to whomever. That would give me peace of mind. I hate wasting books.
MASH. First year of med school. Donald Sutherland modeled my entire attitude towards the practice of medicine
Tell us what you really think, Jupiter.
BTW I never saw a reference to the best sources on the Frank-Phagan case if you posted one.
I took a first date out to dinner and a newly released movie, and learned that David Lynch's Eraserhead does not promote feelings of intimacy among viewers. The evening ended quickly. No second date after that film. No, none, zero, zip, nada, not at all.
@mikee:
I took my brother to see Eraserhead because I knew disturbing horror movies got to him.
I was not disappointed. He was shaking for a while after and wouldn't talk for a bit.
Then he cursed me and said he'd get even.
Never saw Eraserhead, and a lot of other movies outside the mainstream.
I've walked out of movies that revolted me, but at the moment the only one I recall was "Looking For Mister Goodbar."
How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All"
Over 50 years later and I still find myself singing that ditty. Occasionally to someone else, but mostly when no one is around. Sad.
And..Another one.
In the early seventies me and a couple of friends (who weren't really fireheads, but knew the material well enough) would take a few squeeze toys hidden in our pockets to the airport, spread out, and honk them at each other. Great fun! And yes, we are in fact all Bozos on this bus.
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