The Disappointment Artist Read Free

pawnable books and records. Our friendship became a room we’d both abandoned.
    Then D. came to share a large apartment in San Francisco with three roommates, one of whom was my girlfriend. There I’d edge past him in the corridor and kitchen, exchange pleasantries, try not to get caught alone. His method-actorish comings and goings for “cigarettes,” his jittery, sweaty jags, all were made awfully plain there. The three roommates and I were a microscope D. was under, and we took too much satisfaction from watching our sample squirm, nodding and rolling our eyes at one another to excuse our collective failure, the fact that we’d let someone rare and fragile plummet into depravity on our watch. It was a terrible place, and we were all locked into a terrible stasis.
    One day I rented a videotape of
The Searchers
and brought it to the apartment. This was seven years after the screening at Bennington. I hadn’t seen the film since, though I’d prepared plenty, read about it anywhere I could, gathered evidence of its greatness. I needed to justify being stirred that first time, to prove that the force of that moment was more than a neurotic projection, that it resided in the film, intrinsic. In the process, of course, I’d repeated my mistake: this second viewing was already overburdened. (In fact I was about to begin a novel I’d predetermined should be influenced by
The Searchers
.) Armed with cribbed defenses of various aspects of the film, I was ready to lecture my girlfriend as we watched: See, Wayne’s the villain of the piece until the end; see, it’s a film about racism, obsession, America; John Ford was made an honorary member of the tribe, you know—he actually
spoke
Navaho. She: Gosh! So went the fantasies. I was plotting to remake my scene in Tishman Hall, only this time the audience would be completely under my guiding hand. We would enter the temple of
The Searchers
together. Her awe would confirm and justify my own.
    D. paced into the living room about ten minutes into the running of the video, and my heart sank. I hadn’t known he was home. When he joined us I hastily, despairingly sketched the start of the film’s plot to bring him up to speed. D. couldn’t keep still, but between mysterious time-outs behind his bedroom door he gave the film what he could of his slipshod attention. I went back to watching as hard as I could, hell-bent on preserving the sacredness of the moment, feeding my girlfriend just as many interpretations as I thought she’d bear. We both pretended D. wasn’t listening.
    D. was smart enough to detect my near-hysterical reverence, and it irritated him. The veneer of civility between us was thin by then. Seizing an advantage, he began picking at the film.
    “Come on, Jonathan. It’s a Hollywood Western.”
    I wanted to reply that any film became generic if you reduced it to a series of disconnected scenes by flitting in and out of the room. Instead I bit my tongue.
    “You’re giving it too much credit.”
    What
The Searchers
requires is focus, patience, commitment, I thought. Things you’re now incapable of giving.
    “You don’t really think John Ford was conscious—”
    A thousand times more conscious than you, I thought. My heart was beating fast.
    Then he burst out laughing. We’d come to the first battle scene, where Indians forgo a chance to ambush Wayne and his party from behind, only to be slaughtered in a face-off across a riverbank. For D. the scene was gross and malicious, calculated to make the Comanche look like tactical morons. The film had become contemptible to him, and he let me know. He’d missed the contextualizing moments that make the scene ambiguous—the other characters’ dismay at Wayne’s murderous fury, the bullets Wayne fires at departing braves as they carry off their dead. Nor would he happen to be in the room for the scene half an hour later when Wayne is elaborately censured for shooting an opponent in the back.
    I began a defense