Why film? 

The question occurs to me on the streetcar as I’m heading to the movie theatre where I sometimes work, a casual arrangement I have kept up as other freelance work has waxed and waned. It’s one among many jobs tangentially related to film I have had: working at the loading docks for a film festival; costume assistant on a reality TV singing competition; copywriter for a streaming service where I wrote one-sentence descriptions for rom-coms and b-movies; a teaching assistant for Film 101 during my graduate studies; and finally, as a film critic. But I haven’t published a piece of film criticism in a year, instead, I'm commuting across town to sell tickets at a movie theatre. Why did film, of all subjects, endeavours, and artforms, become the thing to orient my world? Especially since this thing I loved didn't seem to love me back. 

The theatre is the second oldest in the city and one I frequented as a kid. A story I like to tell, that I told in my job interview, is that I saw Titanic here four times when I was eight. It’s an impressionable age, when the fantasy of film is maybe its most convincing. And what I was specifically gripped by, and convinced of, was impossible love. Rose jumping from the lifeboat to die on the ship with Jack, Belle and the rose in a bell jar. I'm 36 now, past time to move from the realm of fantasy to the realm of reality. I'm ten years older than many of my coworkers. I try not to think about it. 

Instead I focus on worrying that the projection will fail, maybe the lamp will burn out or the wrong film will play off the server, and the audience will angrily walk out while I watch from the booth. I also focus on the centre of my back, which has developed a dull but persistent pain. At first coming on only at the end of my night, after counting the tills and vacuuming and unplugging the neon sign, but it twinges earlier every shift. 

When the pain comes, I put my hand to my chest, something I learned through a guided meditation on an app. The idea is that the physical touch sets the intention to provide care to your emotional centre, to the thing that is wounded and needs love. It’s not just a metaphor. You feel twinges in your heart when experiencing all kinds of emotional pain or pleasure. Throughout the day, it protests with a tug. Asking you to tend to something: a painful memory, a dormant desire. I often feel like I’m separate from my heart, operating like two different beings: one, the mind, who has to move and pursue, and the other, the heart, who wants to wait. It’s strange to give my own heart reassurance, not only because it is mine, already me, but because we are so often at war. 

Months ago, I was heading to the theatre when my heart seized, like it was being vacuum-sealed. I got off the streetcar and walked, thinking it would calm me, but the slight bit of exertion made my heart pound and my throat light up, hot and tight. It was my second panic attack that week. When I got to the theatre, I sat in the dark, dusty projection booth. It seemed like my heart was exacting revenge on me, roaring back after months of ignoring its pangs. 

This estrangement from my heart was ironic considering my long-standing love of the shape. In middle school, I started to obsessively draw hearts. Not anatomical ones, but the symbol with the curved top and the point at the bottom. I drew it on my clothes, in the margins of textbooks, below the corner of my eyes with marker, and once on the back of the pleather school-bus seat. I was addicted to the shape well into high school when at seventeen, I made myself an outfit for Valentine’s Day, a hot pink skirt with little red hearts and black tights. I liked how obvious and cheesy it was; it felt almost punk rock. But looking at the photos I took on that day, I don’t look camp, but rather delicate, and thrumming with a sincere romantic desire: Someone love me. 

Of course, it makes sense that I would love the pretty, potent symbol and not the ugly, squishy, demanding real thing. I love film after all, a medium of illusion and fantasy, where falseness looks true and the mess can be left out of frame. But this is too simple. When I consider the many films that I love that feature hearts, literally and metaphorically, they are often gorgeous and stylized, but sometimes crudely real. And hearts were, the more I thought about it, all over my own history in film, and maybe through them, I can get to the heart of the question: Why film? 

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