NO
MORE TEARS
It's six A.M. I've just spent the last four hours holed up in
my bedroom in my house in Ann Arbor, watching old, battered VHS
tapes of myself, thirteen years ago, holed up in a bedroom in
another house in Ann Arbor maybe twenty blocks from here, crying
over two girls (depending which tape is playing), one named Rachel,
one named Maggie. In these tapes, I'm not only crying, I'm...
well, it's a little embarrassing... my twenty-year-old self is
sobbing, staring deep into the camera—looking directly
at myself right now—and singing along to a song on the radio:
Ozzy Osbourne's “No More Tears.” Watching these old, forlorn tapes
is deeply eerie and painful and uncomfortable; there's also something
weirdly captivating and pretty fucking funny about it all. Even
though I've been logging these tapes all night, it's hard to tear
myself away.
But let me back up a second. I never planned to make a movie
about love, especially a personal documentary about my own love
life. What happened, though, was this: I invited my friend David
Meiklejohn along with me and my brother Peter for a couple of
our cross-country FOUND Magazine tours in the fall of
2005 and spring of 2006, and asked him to bring his video-camera
along, with the idea of taping some of our FOUND events
and other adventures on the road. Like any dutiful documentary
filmmaker, David kept the camera running, even when the FOUND
shows were over. We ended up with 150 hours of footage, the lion's
share, it seemed, revolving around my continual struggles with
love and relationships. As we pored through the tapes, we realized
that what we had was not a documentary about FOUND, but
a documentary about my fucked-up love life. We decided to call
the movie My Heart Is An Idiot, and got to work editing
it.
But it was harder than I'd thought to work on a personal documentary
when the people featured in the film were an ongoing part of my
life. My relationships continued to shift and evolve; the story
kept changing. The project itself became an issue in my relationships.
For a while, it was easier to focus on other work that wasn't
so damn intertwined with everything.
Then one night, digging through the attic of my parents' house,
I found an old box filled with VHS tapes—World Series games from
1987, James Bond movies taped off of TBS, and a bunch of unmarked
tapes, which I soon discovered held dozens of hours of footage
I'd shot during high school and college—footage of me, for the
most part, sitting alone in the basement of my parents' house,
or in a sad dorm room or college apartment, bawling my eyes out
over a girl (okay, a couple of girls). It struck me that I'd been
documenting my struggles with love for nearly two decades, and
that there was something in this old, bedraggled footage that
was critically linked to the stuff that David had shot with me
recently. I began sifting through the tapes one at a time, logging
each strange, haunting moment in a little composition book. Yeah,
I've got good friends who teach at inner-city schools, work as
public defenders, and fight for environmental justice across the
globe, and here I am, every night, watching ancient videotapes
of myself crying and taking notes. It's one thing to spend your
nights staring at pictures of an ex-girlfriend, it's another thing
to spend your nights watching decade-old videotapes of yourself
staring at pictures of an ex-girlfriend.
And yet I've become oddly transfixed. I can't look away. There's
something disconcertingly similar between the footage of me crying
over girls in 1993 and crying over girls in 2006. You think you
learn something as you get older, but shit, not so much.
At some point, I end up sharing some of the old tapes with David,
and we agree that bits of them belong in My Heart Is An Idiot.
One phenomenon I notice: when I watch the VHS tapes alone, they
seem really sad; when I watch them with David, they seem really
funny. In fact, we discover a few favorite, strangely hilarious
crying moments within the river of tears—moments when my crying
is momentarily derailed by some other thought or something in
the room. There's a moment from 1992, an early morning in my freshman
dorm room, where I'm crying over Rachel, my high school girlfriend;
in the background, my clock radio is grinding out traffic reports
and blizzard warnings from an AM talk station. Then, mid-sob,
I suddenly take notice of some cornball pun from the morning DJ,
and seize into a smile, then immediately resume crying. It's a
small but amazing little moment. There's another one from 1995:
I'm on the sofa in my parents' living room, wailing—I mean flipping
the fuck out—still over Rachel (we'd gotten back together and
broken up several times). I'm beating my chest, pounding sofa
cushions, screeching, when all of a sudden I pick up a copy of
Sports Illustrated and stop crying just like that; I
flip through the thing for about thirty seconds, then drop it
and start crying again as though I'd never stopped. It's good
shit, no doubt, another golden moment. Then, in our recent footage
from the FOUND tours, there's a matching sort of moment:
A relationship of mine has just come to a surprising and devastating
end, and I'm stumbling with David down a weedy, overgrown street
in Baton Rouge, sobbing so hard I can barely breathe. Then all
at once I spot something in the distance and wade free of the
darkness for a second. “See that tower?” I say to David. “That's
the only non-domed State Capitol building in the country.” “What?”
David asks. “Did you say that's the only non-domed Capitol in
the country?” “Yes,” I manage, melting back into tears.
It's horribly sad and at the same time fucking hilarious.
Why, though—why did I fill so many videotapes in my late teens
and twenties, filming myself crying? Who was I crying to? A lot
of the time I'm addressing Rachel or Maggie, begging them to come
back to me, or to understand that we're meant for each other.
But there was no fuckin' way I was ever gonna share those tapes
with them. And yet, there must have been some kind of comfort,
some kind of sympathy that the camera was doling out—a sense that
I wasn't crying alone in bed, but crying to someone, even if I
didn't know who that someone would be. And now it's come full
circle. The person watching those tapes—the person I'd turned
out to be crying to all those years—was me. And maybe even back
then some part of me suspected that this would be the case. Maybe
staring into the camera's dark eye, I'd sensed that gentle, compassionate,
sympathetic presence of myself, ten or fifteen years later, barely—but
noticeably—wiser, a bit more stable, and definitely healed of
the heartbreak of that time, if not of all the heartbreak that's
socked me in the years since. Watching the tapes, I hurt for the
crushed kid I was back then, and reach out a hand of love and
support. And I know I felt that inexplicable wave of comfort even
back then, alone with the camera, because every crying episode
caught on tape—no matter how intense—after a time subsides. It's
rare that you get a chance to reach into the past and give a gift
to yourself; it's almost like the moment in Bill & Ted's
Excellent Adventure when Keanu Reeves hides his dad's jail
cell keys for himself to find when he goes back in time.
Meanwhile, David Meiklejohn and I have continued to plow ahead
with our documentary. We're not finished yet, but we're within
striking distance—it'll be done this year. Questions never quit
popping up—filmmaking questions, and questions about love. If
the secrets to finding true love are often elusive, well, so are
the secrets to making films about love. How do you inject humor
into a film about heartbreak? How do you portray a happy romance
without being too saccharine and oversentimental? What's relatable
about our own stories? How do we make the personal feel universal?
I rarely know the answers to these kinds of questions, but I
thought if I asked a bunch of my incredibly talented and wonderfully
demented friends to produce short films about love, I could learn
a lot from the approaches they took and the choices they made.
I holla'd at a bunch of folks and gave very few guidelines, simply
challenged them to make a 1- to 10-minute movie illuminating some
aspect of romantic love. Narrative or documentary, actors, animation,
claymation, whatevs—I left it up to them. And the films they came
up with—in their beauty, sadness, sweetness and wild variety—are
simply stunning.
Academy Award-nominated director Jessica Sanders profiles the
relationship between actor George Takei (Star Trek's
Captain Sulu) and his husband and lifelong partner by chatting
with them in bed on a Sunday morning. Singer/songwriter Jenny
Owen Youngs interviews fellow musicians about the practice of
injecting stories of their own romances into their songs. Brett
Loudermilk, sideshow phenom, discusses love with a pair of death-defying
sword swallowers and legendary photographer AJ Wilhelm investigates
the cures for a broken heart, while Kel O'Neill and Eline Jongsma
trace a love that endures even after death. Carson Mell and Lev
Yilmaz contribute striking animations, punk rock wanderer Chris
K bumps into the newly-in-love at an American Idol audition,
and my friend David Meiklejohn creates a new piece, observing
strangers as they plan out the things they want to tell their
loved ones but never have. These and a dozen other short films
will be featured at apexart in a show we'll call
Kick My Heart's Ass.
Watching these gripping (and often quite funny) films, it's clear:
The personal is universal. Other people's stories are our own.
The joy and heartbreak that comes through the characters in each
of these films is in tune with my own joy and heartbreak. When
I extend a hand of comfort to a stick figure cartoon whose relationship's
gone belly-up or a gutsy transsexual mourning the passing of her
soulmate, I'm really reaching out to myself, because, fuck it,
I've been there, too. We've all been there.
Thank you so much for checking out this exhibition. I've been
so thrilled by the films that folks made for this show, I've decided
to extend a wider invitation to everyone out there: Yup, that's
right, I want to see your short film about love. We'll
find a way to share it with everyone. Check out www.KickMyHeartsAss.com
for lots more details.
Okay, it's back to work for me—I've got plenty more footage to
watch of myself crying, and right now my twenty-year-old self
is singing along to Smashing Pumpkins, which means I better sign
off. My advice to all the lovers out there: Be brave, never stop
falling in love, and if your heart's ass gets kicked, look for
the nearest non-domed State Capitol building.
And I'm out.
DAVY
©January 2009
Davy Rothbart is an author, filmmaker, contributor
to This American Life, and the editor/publisher of Found
Magazine. The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, a collection
of Rothbart's short-stories, was published in August 2005 by Simon
& Schuster. An Italian edition, Il Surfista Solitario
del Montana, was published in 2007 by Coniglio Editore. In
2008, actor Steve Buscemi optioned the book for film adaption,
to be developed by Olive Productions. When Fred Rogers of the
PBS television program Mister Rogers' Neighborhood died in February
2003, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed by Rothbart about
his childhood encounters with Rogers similar to his story on This
American Life. Rothbart also writes for GQ, The
Believer, SLAM Magazine, and The Sun. His
films include the documentary How We Survive about the
punk rock band Rise Against, and Easier With Practice,
a film based on an article Rothbart wrote for GQ about
his life on tour, to be released in 2009. Rothbart is also the
subject of an upcoming documentary, directed by David Meiklejohn,
called My Heart Is An Idiot. Additionally, he has appeared
twice on the television program The Late Show with David Letterman
on CBS.
apexart's exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Edith C. Blum Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., The William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. |