The Taco Traveler

It's been a long time since I've read this, and some of the things could really use some editing / updating. Mainly, these things bug me:

1) I reveal way too much sappiness with the whole Nora Ephron thing. Jeez, was I that soft? Yes, it's been verified that I was. Blech. Some may say I still am, but I'd argue, a bit.
2) My programmer friend makes 45k and I say it like it's a lot? Well, 4 or 5 years out of college, and in 1990 or so, it probably was a lot. I don't remember now.
3) I unfairly group "Seinfield" in with later "Star Treks" and "Melrose Place." Sorry.
4) Only one guy gives that advice to Dustin Hoffman (not "everyone"), and the way I say it makes it look like I wanted to go into plastics or something. Where were my editors in 1994?

Anyway, I'm going to resist the editing thing and just throw it out there, with the explicit reminder that it was written in 1993 or 1994.

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Learning to Love Casablanca

At the risk of sounding like an uncultured dolt, I've never quite felt the magic of Casablanca. The first time I saw it I had rented the tape with someone who, at the time, was my fiancée. It was a cloudy (and hung-over) Saturday afternoon after a late Friday night, the perfect time to lie around the apartment watching movies, and my fiancée was excited to share something with me that was so close to her. It's the only movie I ever heard her say she "loved." In fact, it's a movie that everyone seems to love--everybody but me.

I've loved many movies, though, and having them in my video collection means I'll never want for the certain feeling that each movie provides. I've got the three greatest Chevy Chase movies, Caddyshack, Fletch, and National Lampoon's Vacation, which are always funny, and pick me up even on the fortieth viewing. Fast Times at Ridgemont High makes great background noise at parties, and always brings me back to the first time I saw it: drinking a graveyard mixture of booze in a salad dressing jar in the parking lot behind the theatre, sleeping through everything until my friend woke me so I wouldn't miss seeing Phoebe Cates in a sexy scene. I watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly when I want to feel like a man's man, because there's nobody like Clint Eastwood for making you feel cool, like you could handle anything. And when I'm worried about my future, which is often, I pop in The Graduate for the advice everyone seems to want to give Dustin Hoffman--"Just one word: Plastics."

But on my first viewing of Casablanca that Saturday my fiancée and I lay down on the couch in the spoon position, with me behind so I could rub her back, and the last thing I remember is Rick playing chess by himself--his first scene. For some reason my fiancée didn't notice I had fallen asleep until my drool traversed the fabric of our shared pillow to where she could feel it on her ear. She elbowed me hard in the stomach as Ingrid and Humphrey were in a Parisian café, nearly half-way through the movie, and I was conscious enough to hear Ingrid say such things as: "Is that cannon-fire or my heart pounding?!" and "Kiss me! Kiss me as if for the last time!" There were tears in my fiancée's eyes as she turned to glare at me, though I'm not sure if they were caused by the sad scene in the film or my disappointing her by falling asleep. A few minutes later I tried to make up by mimicking Bogie, gently pushing her nose and saying: "Here's looking at you, kid," but it was too late. I had made a huge mistake in our relationship.

So now my list of therapeutic movies includes a few sappy romances, because, since the world's biggest Casablanca fan is now my ex-fiancée, there are times I need to be convinced that there is some cosmic chance I'll find love again. On those lonely nights and for that particular objective there is nobody better than Nora Ephron, and whether I watch "When Harry Met Sally" or "Sleepless in Seattle," Nora always sends me off to bed dreaming of my next love, who I imagine, coincidentally, will look a lot like Meg Ryan.

To many people, though, television and movies aren't so much therapeutic tools as they are necessary wastes of time. There were days, I hear, when people read books to waste time, but I saw a statistic on the news that said ninety-seven percent of all novels are purchased either for reading on an airplane or in the bathtub--places where, for a person of average income, a television cable doesn't yet conveniently reach. While the "wasting time" scenario might fit the masses who sit down each week to watch "Roseanne" and "Silk Stalkings," there are certain shows--like "Seinfeld," "Star Trek: The Whatever Generation," and "Melrose Place"--that seem to inspire more passion in their audience than maybe they deserve. The notion of "wasting time" is offensive to a television addict, and it seems they often feel more passionate about "their shows" than their own lives.

To inspire that kind of passion is to shape (or at least reveal and accentuate) a person's ideals. There are certain groups of people for whom this television brand of social conformity is something you fight against simply because nobody else does. Essentially, they strive to be individualistic, just like all their friends. They want to be different, just like all the other different people. I was talking to an idealistic friend the other day who, to combat commercialism, refuses to use his TV for anything but Nintendo. I know a lot of people like this who like to think of themselves as impoverished bohemian idealists. They recycle, they eat granola, they listen to reggae, and they've all read Kerouac's The Dharma Bums at least twice. They're the type of young adults who grew up and rebelled against wealthy parents and the "American Ideal" by dressing badly and drinking cheap red wine while still driving really nice cars on their parents' insurance. I've asked a few of the TV-less ones how they manage to survive without "The Simpsons" (I have forty seven episodes on tape), and they usually answer with tirades against commercialism and laziness: "When you watch TV, man, you're buying into all that bullshit middle-class Americana. You're being brainwashed by Tide commercials and Ivory Snow." That could be. I do use Tide though I have no clothes worthy of the gentle softness of Ivory Snow. But I've never claimed to be resisting the mediocrity of camp, kitsch, and commercialism. Many of these people, however, claim to be untainted in those respects, and they get so angry when I point out that they now sell their exact same style of Doc Martens at Nordstrom. My Nintendo friend, though, didn't even attempt to reconcile his anti-commercial, anti-lazy bohemian ideals with his video game addiction. He's a computer programmer who makes forty-five thousand a year and gets at least that much stress. He uses video games like I use my sappy romantic movies--as therapy. When I asked him about Nintendo's commercialism, though, he just shrugged his shoulders and, because he had just sent the count full against Ken Griffey Junior in the bottom of the ninth, said: "Can you wait 'till after this pitch?" But he never answered because Griffey hit a home run and my friend kicked the power switch before The Kid rounded the bases, because the loss would have ended his electronic season, and his season is important to him.

T.S. Eliot once said of television: "It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome." He said that in 1963, five years before I was born, but I think the same could be said of the medium today. There will always be lonely people, and those lonely people will always be suckers for the imaginary love stories that conceal the equally lonely lives of actors and actresses. But for the short time during and just after a good movie I am truly engaged; I believe in something created by a bunch of people being paid to create that believability. I take comfort in thinking there's someone out there who can relate to me, like Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle searching for love again after losing his wife to cancer, or Humphrey Bogart sitting in a corner of his immensely popular bar playing chess with himself, and that comfort makes television worth my time. Other people have different views of their media of choice, but everyone is equally self-righteous about the universal quality and importance of their own particular experience:

My parents can watch QVC, the shopping channel, for hours and listen to any stupid sales pitch. They insist they're saving the earth because they're not driving to the mall.

My Nintendo friend spends sixty dollars every couple of weeks on a new game cartridge because he needs a new challenge; after two weeks he's beaten the computer at every level of Griffey Baseball or Mortal Kombat. No human beings will play him; he's that good. And when he beats you he rubs your face in it--not by talking trash, but by seeing how high he can run up the score, or how quickly he can kill you. It's embarrassing, really.

I asked my ex, recently, whether or not that day I fell asleep during our first Casablanca together was the turning point in our relationship. She looked kind of perplexed at first, like she didn't even remember. When it hit her she feigned annoyance: "Oh, come on! Do you think I'm so shallow I'd let a movie influence my life?"

"Well. . . ?" I said. "Do you remember how, later that night, when I was taking out my contacts, you handed me hydrogen peroxide instead of the saline solution? Was it some kind of 'If he can't watch Casablanca then he'll never watch anything again' idea?"

She just frowned.

So I bought a copy of Casablanca, and I think I'm finally beginning to see why it's so appealing to such a large audience. Despite all its clichéd sentimentality it does posses an artistry somewhat beyond the level of a Danielle Steele novel. Its humor, too, kind of grows on you. Like Humphrey Bogart saying he came to Casablanca for the waters. "Waters?" says Claude Rains, "What waters? We're in the desert!" And Bogey's casual reply, which I imagine myself, in trench coat and tweed hat, using as an excuse for all future Saturday afternoon lapses in media-correctness: "I was misinformed."