The Disappointment Artist Read Free Page B

logo, a strum of acoustic guitar, the familiar credit sequence—today’s movie was
The Searchers
. Sure, why not? Sitting there anonymous among the murmuring, notebook-rustling students, I stifled a laugh. I’d been watching the movie regularly on video, in private trysts. This would be the first time in the company of others since my early disasters.
    Other films can live in the tunnel-vision light of video, but
The
Searchers
aches for the air of a screen large enough so that Wayne can loom like those distant towers of rock, and for the air of an audience. A ragged slice of American
something
, it wants to be met by another slice— to be projected, ideally, on a canyon wall, for a crowd of millions. The Cal freshmen at the Pacific Film Archive that afternoon were just forty or fifty shapeless new minds, there half willingly, dreaming of dates or Frisbees, yet they gave the film the air it needed. Or maybe after five or six watchings I was ready to respond to every frame of
The Searchers
, to meet it completely. Maybe there was something freeing about my place there as an official ghost, voiceless. As the lights came up I wept discreetly.
    I stayed for the professor’s talk. In his lecture he gestured at the film’s deep ambiguities without ever reaching, apparently with nothing to prove. He might have seemed a bit perfunctory, enclosed in a bubble of weariness, but if I noticed I blamed the bubble on the students. They were slightly interested, slightly more vague and restless. The vibrant ridicule of the Bennington students had been replaced here by automatic, spaced-out respect—sure it’s an important film: It’s
assigned
, isn’t it? In the professor I grokked a fellow obsessive. But I mistook him for an unfulfilled obsessive, instead of the vanquished one he turned out to be.
    The next day I tried not to be self-conscious, waiting in the English Department corridor behind a couple of his students. When my turn came I apologized for sneaking into his class, described the book I was writing, praised his lecture, then fished—he’d written about
The
Searchers
somewhere, yes?
    What I caught was an old boot of pride lodged at the bottom of a stagnant lake of academic ennui, that reflexive self-censorship of real enthusiasms. I dragged the boot up to the surface, if only for a second. “My article’s about the iconography of Monument Valley,” he said, with unguarded brightness. “I only published an excerpt. The long version’s much more—I’m still working on it, actually—”
    “I’d love to see it.” I scribbled my address.
    “Yes, yes . . .” But he was already slipping back into those opaque depths. He’d noticed that he ought to be bewildered to have me in his office, that he didn’t really need a wild-eyed autodidact tugging his obsessions into the light. By then I was familiar with how so many grad students, hunkered down inside their terrifying careers, spoke of
teaching loads
,
job postings
, anything but the original passions at the cramped secret center of their work. Now I saw it was the same for the professor. Or worse. Armies of yawning undergraduates had killed that part of him. Long or short, published or unfinished, I never saw any version of that essay.
    Defending The Searchers
    I surrounded
The Searchers
, ambushed it at every pass, told it to reach for the sky. In my pursuit I watched hundreds of other Westerns, studying
the tradition
, looking for glimpses. I studied Ford, learned his language, first in good films, then in rotten ones. I watched Scorsese’s
Taxi Driver
, Paul Schrader’s
Hardcore
, those unofficial remakes, wanting to triangulate my obsession or feel the pulse of someone else’s. I read biographies of Wayne: What made him ready to play the part? Did he understand or was he Ford’s tool? I mowed through scholarship, hoping to assemble a framework that would free me to understand all I felt. And I wrote my novel; like a child with dollhouse figures I