Arctangential

I love movies. I watch them all the time, sometimes 2 or 3 in a day. I love to think about them, make them (when I get the chance) and examine them in minute detail when I get the chance. What’s rare is for me to really identify with a movie; I find myself immersed in some (the better ones), but it’s not often that I really feel a connection of any kind of the character or situations portrayed.

There are, of course, exceptions. Recently I’ve noticed two major ones: The Station Agent and The Man Who Fell to Earth, I’m going to go into a plot synopsis here, but both films have, in some ways, very similar main characters. They’re both the other, both separated from society not just by choice but by their inherent being. This uniqueness and separation makes them both stronger than those around them and weaker by degrees. They can see more than others and are yet in many ways more limited than the rest of the world.

The two movies approach the topic in different ways, of course. Station Agent is a more typical movie; he meets a woman, falls in love, reconnects with society while overcoming his own personal barriers, etc, etc. Of course, the end is somewhat ambiguous, but the basic message is that he’s better off being connected instead of being apart. Contrarily, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, he is poisoned by society almost from the first moment he encounters it. Every contact he has with the world around him weakens and cheapens him. He does everything in his power to escape, but in the end is trapped forever, earning victory only by outliving his captors and sending a final nearly futile message out of his prison. I’ll let you decide which ending I liked better.

I took me almost 2 weeks to write this entry.