- You have not been born; therefore,
none of your friends are sick, dead or in trouble. - If the movie ends, it can begin again. What you are watching has the illusion of a beginning, middle and end, but it’s really a loop.
- If the movie from 1944 is, say, two hours long, you know, in the last five minutes or so, what’s likely to happen has to happen soon. There’s only so much time.
- In this movie, there are no insurance companies, no double billing, no dedicated service teams, no issue resolution experts, no hierarchy of obfuscation, inefficiency or cruelty.
- No one inside this movie is going to correct your grammar, fire you, suggest you find another place to live.
- No one inside this movie is going to call and call, and put you in the position of not picking up for as long as the phone keeps ringing, because you know, without knowing, this is not a call you want to receive, and you actually think if you don’t pick up the call, you can keep it from happening. The “it” cannot happen, will not happen, cannot have happened. Even if the caller hangs up and keeps calling back, you will not have to answer or willfully ignore this phone. If the phone rings, it’s safe to assume it’s not you they want.
- Nothing you know can harm you now. Not here, not inside this movie. The movie is the pre-existing condition, and we are the condition not yet in existence.
- Nothing bad has happened yet.
- Not that wind-knocked-out-of you feeling; not that abrupt lack of desire for anything in the present or future tense—unimaginable state. No tears at inopportune moments—the airplane, the department store, the cross-town bus—the tears that are endless. The body, the heart, the mind, would, if it could, cry forever.
- Only, if I watch this movie from 1944, if I can somehow enter the movie, the way, for example, L. could and did—could not help but enter each movie, pass through to the very inside—it means, even now (now that I, too, am inside this movie)—no matter that it is 1944—we are both alive.
- It’s a little like breakfast in childhood. No one is drinking yet; no one is screaming or crying—not at 7:00 a.m. Not in 1944.
- I haven’t met you yet or been born; therefore, you can’t have died, are not now dead, especially since I don’t think I ever really believed—apparently not—even when it should have been obvious—inescapable cold fact—not even then did I think you were dead. After all, I didn’t see it. Not the end. Not with my own eyes.
- But I’ve seen you enter a movie. And when you told your film professor you believed every movie was real, how whatever was happening on the screen was also happening to you, he said, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that—which means you are inside the movie I am watching now, which means you are the movie I am watching.
- I leave your phone numbers and address intact. I will not update, I will not delete. I will remember.
- The way, in that hushed auditorium, you shouted, Don’t drink that glass of milk! The way you stood in that theater in Times Square, announced: I am Spartacus.
- If I watch a movie, then am I anywhere nearer? Are you?
- When I see something I know you’d like to see, I lose control.
- It’s the opposite of the way a friend of mine, pregnant, would muse, when crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, Oh, this is a view my child will one day see. You see, it’s like that, a little, only in reverse.
- But not with the movie from 1944. You could be sitting right here beside me, watching every frame. Even now. And if I watch what you have watched, am I not watching you? Am I not being watched by you?