Kapiolani Community College
Diamond Journal 2003Fall

Flickering Memories
Jason Ordenstein

The memory begins just like a movie. A boy walks out of an old movie theatre clinging desperately to his father who walks out with him. He looks to be about five years old; he is still too young to stray away from the immediate vicinity of either his mother or father. Up until this very moment his entire world has revolved around his parents. The boy has a dazed expression on his face. He looks as if he has experienced something that will forever change him. The boy seems to walk in slow motion, unsure of his steps, moving more by reaction than anything else. He turns back slowly, his eyes searching for something, back where the theatre is. His gaze stops at the row of movie posters on the wall near the entrance. One seems to stand out more than the rest. It shows a boy like him. The boy in the poster is standing behind a fence. The two boys, both fictional and real, seem to be looking at each other. They both seem to have an understanding that the rest of the world will never know. The real boy, still clutching his father’s hand, flashes a small grin at the imaginary boy in the poster . . .

I have no memories before the age of five. My very first recollections are in fact a series of events both real and unreal which seem to fade in and out in my mind in no discernible order, like a black and white newsreel playing in an empty, smoke-filled theater. The reason for my difficulty in distinguishing the truth of my memories stems from the first experiences I had with movies.

My father first began to take me to see movies at the age of five. These movies seem to have left such a strong impression on my subconscious mind that anything that was previously inside my head was subsequently pushed out. Looking back, I see that the type of movies that my father first began taking me to were either very mature or very much beyond the presumed intelligence of a normal child of that age. Why did he think that I was mature enough to view them? Till this day, I don’t know the answer to that question. The first movies that I saw-I have forgotten what the first was-were very adult-oriented films from the 80’s, films like: Conan the Barbarian, Excalibur, The Last Emperor, Platoon, and Alien. He also took me to see “classic,” older films, like: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now!, The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, and The Seven Samurai.

The thing that I remember most clearly, that resonates with me even today, is the feeling that I had watching those first movies. It’s difficult to describe. I remember walking out of the theater as if I was immersed in a living dream. I would walk out into the piercing, overwhelming, virginal-white light, feeling a profound sense of loss. Yet underneath my sadness, there was also anger, a seething type of anger that bit just below the surface. I was furious with the world. All the colors, and shapes, and outlines of the “real” world seemed to be fake and meaningless. I would yearn to return to that dark sanctuary of dreams that I had just left. I preferred that world, the one that provided me with those living, breathing illusions, to the plasticity of the one I would have to live in. It was here that I first began truly to think, as if a kind of fog that was in my mind had magically been lifted. Before, I would merely look at the world. From this point on, I would begin to “see” the world. Now, I would look to see the true face behind the mask in everything and in people as well. It was here that the creative urge first began to flicker deep inside me. The flickering sparks would—over the years—eventually grow stronger and stronger, building, feeding themselves into the raging inferno it is today.

A few movie experiences are particularly strong. I distinctly remember the feeling of having difficulty concentrating for weeks on end after viewing the movie, The Last Emperor. The movie Platoon shattered my entire world view. It was like every single concept I had about the world at that time—limited though it was—had suddenly crumbled into something I couldn’t recognize anymore. Previously, I had thought people were only capable of being either extraordinarily good or maliciously evil. I learned that the world was different from most of the cartoons I watched then at that age. I learned that there were a lot of things that are not so easily categorized. The number of secrets the world contained now seemed to multiply by a thousand. I would now start to look beyond the previous simplistic views of the world, and instead begin to see a more complicated view of the world. I would see a world that was not going to give up all of its secrets so easily now.

One movie-going memory stands out more than the rest. It was after I had seen a French movie called The Four Hundred Blows for the first time. The movie is a simple story of a boy named Antoine who is growing up wild in Paris. All he seems to know how to do is get into trouble. All he wants to do is go to the movies and to see the ocean one day. After the movie, I was in a state of disbelief. There was something inside me that clammed up, something that did not want to face the “reality” that the movie presented me. I refused to speak to anyone immediately after I had seen that movie. I remember that my father asked me if something was wrong with me, but I honestly couldn’t answer him.

There was something in Antoine that I immediately connected with. I related to how he felt uncomfortable around everyone that he met, yet didn’t really know why. When I saw how everyone clearly treated him differently, as if he was some strange, aloof creature, it was myself that I saw in him.

Antoine runs away at the moment that he seems to have found some kind of peace. He runs and runs, running so far that it seems that he has run to the other side of the world. He runs so far that he reaches the ocean that he has wished to see for his entire life. He edges right into the oncoming waves that lap eagerly at his feet. He gazes out at the vast ocean. Then in one of the most famous endings in movie history, he stares straight into the camera and the screen freezes on his face, his blank, ambiguous expression hidden away like an undecipherable puzzle for all time.

After the showing, my father and I walked out of the theatre. My stomach felt empty, but I knew it wasn’t because I was hungry. The details of my memory are not so clear but I remember suddenly realizing that my father had gotten into a discussion with a complete stranger who had also seen the movie. They were discussing why they thought Antoine had such a fervent longing inside him to see the ocean so badly, and why he subsequently ran away to see it. They both attributed it to just more quirky, impulsive behavior from Antoine. In the end they dismissed his actions as being very childish. At that moment I knew that out of the entire audience that saw the movie, a five-year child—myself—was the only person who truly understood it. I looked back one last time, hoping for something . . . something of what I had just seen, something more that I could take with me forever. I noticed that the walls near the entrance were covered with the replica posters of the old movies that the theatre regularly showed. In an instant, I recognized the poster for the movie I had seen. It showed Antoine peering out at the world behind a fence, grasping the fence with one hand. The look in his eyes on that poster has forever imprinted itself onto my mind. In the sharp softness of his dark irises, there is a deep yearning, a deep longing, like being immersed in total darkness and reaching out to a beacon of light but coming up just short, grasping only emptiness.

In a strange way, right then and there, I came to the realization that my life would unfold the same way as Antoine’s. Curiously though, I was not sad to know this. Instead, I felt an acceptance for the way things would be. I remember smiling at the poster. The face of Antoine in the poster did not smile back. I know it never will. In my mind it has become something else all altogether. It has meshed with memory and experience so completely that I have a hard time distinguishing it one way or the other. I will always see him that way now, forever grasping that fence, burdened with a desire that could fill several lifetimes. Perhaps it is truth, perhaps not. Personally, I like it the way it is.