Looper Reels.

Today I experienced something in a movie theatre which I can honestly say that I have never experienced before. The film skipped.
   It didn't stop rolling, it didn't break free and burn up in a dramatic tangled display of light and billowing black smoke, it simply skipped, maybe three times, froze for half an instant on Bruce Willis's drooping cheeks, and continued through the rest of the film. It was a brief and confusing instant, fleeting in every sense, and really had no effect on my enjoyment of the movie at all, it was great, but in that microscopic moment I found myself staring at the wrinkles on that great big cheek and I thought for the first time in my movie going life that I am, in fact, not watching a film, but I am watching a digital projection of a movie.  This is the future of movie going but in the here and now, and I am sitting in the front row with a big stupid smile on my face soaking in every lie. It looks great, it sounds impeccable, and until this moment I seriously never gave it a first or second thought as being at all a different experience than seeing movies as a younger me. But the truth is, the movie going experience is not at all the same as we remember from yesteryear. Long gone are the days of fixed lengths of film rolled into continual loops and measured in inches, clacking away behind the backs of the crowd. Today what I felt behind me was not the presence of a FILM as a tangible, definable object but more an abstract concept. A series of numbers representing information.
   The truth is that the moment we arrive at the theatre long absent signs from film history are transmitted into our psyche, from repeated representations of movie projectors, camera tripods and film canisters printed on tickets, on posters, and on 80 oz. soda cups to often forged vague resemblances of stars, like a sock puppet in a trench coat and a fedora watching a plane fly off into some clouded distance, or Joseph Gordon Levitt with a smushed nose and a fabricated tough guy brow sitting across the table from the real deal John McClane.
    Levitt puts forth an impressive physical and educated performance, and it's not long before you forget about his natural look, his sleek approachable features which young girls swoon for and Mothers find unthreatening, have absolutely nothing to do with the sophisticated sleaze of Bruce Willis's god given, road tested movie star mug, and even that does not much to mimic but still owes everything to the gentle grimace which the sock puppet really only attempts to parody. We see Levitt, we think Willis, we imagine Bogart, and suddenly the present has substance. We see Reels, we think Stars, we imagine Hollywood, and suddenly we are taking part in History. As they say early in the film, and of course I paraphrase, "don't you realize that the movies you kids are watching are just copies of other movies?"
    Of course they don't, at least not yet, this is a bit of knowledge that only comes from age and experience, something that may seem less and less important in the age of the internet. The age of instant gratification, instant and constant entertainment, and easily attainable information and technology. like digital cameras, and digital projectors. Where once, magnificent shadows were cast upon the wall through film stock, now a projector creates from data. Where once, man fought for his right to create and experience life, now man fights to preserve memories from the past. Memories which never existed in the real world, but were only represented internally and expressed in the action of the present. Like the 1s and 0s or what have you of the digital world. They come to life on screen as a stream of sequential images and sounds and maps of color and texture, they inspire rises and falls and genuine shock and excitement and horror, but then a finite ending, a place where it stops. We are no longer reanimating an existing still image, and giving it new life, we are now simply reliving the same bombardment of sensations, tailor made to cause subliminal representations of emotions based upon preconceived concepts of living, and a working knowledge of history. It's the difference between studying a film, and experiencing one. In the later, the building blocks don't matter as much as the impression.

    In the movie the young Loopers use BLUNDERBUSSES, loud and shocking weapons that create an instant of devastating chaos. But only at close range, and not at all with precision. While the older and more experienced characters arm themselves and their armies with "gats." Weapons of precise ability and long range, they represent a fine point to the broad stroke of the Blunderbuss. When a Gat takes a life it alters the time line for all who follow and redirects mankind, whereas a Blunderbuss has no power to change the future, and only effects the lives of those who are meaningless. It's impressive and it's cool, but it's not an affecting presence in the long term. Though both do hold the ability to inspire.
    I struggle still though my own broad strokes as I attempt to scribble down a few thoughts from this experience, and can only hope to someday look back and see the purpose, use these created and filed away memories with a more pin point and practiced hand for some kind of greater good if such a thing exists. This is a hero's story, or a villains if the story should head that direction. Because men do not make Super Heros, they only make decisions based on previously encoded concepts of right and wrong, selfish and not, and of the importance of the idea of a greater good. We look to history for answers to these questions, we recall older men or older films and act accordingly, so that future men can make future decisions based on the ones we've made in the present. So that when the past is sitting across the table from the future it can see the folly of its ways, and find a path worth following, or something like that... but for now, im glad to see that in the year 2044 they still listen to Warren Zevon on the radio.