The Great Escape

I've read about cinematic masters who were awed by their experiences in a darkened theatre. The lights go down and a career is born. They escape to celluloid, saving every penny to buy a ticket. They vow their lives, they focus on their dream on a story you not only want to tell, but must tell. Something that you want people to hear, that resonates in your life. For me, it was a means of communicating. Something I could throw my entire being into. I was absolute. I was focused. But I was not awed.

Yesterday I found myself in a movie theater. A rare treat these days. Watching "The Orphanage" - Guillermo del Toro's suspenseful homage to Peter Pan. Not the most amazing film, but as the credits rolled and the music held me silent in an empty theater, it hit me. It wasn't another Saturday night that I had filled with a movie where I was running off to the next bar. It was my escape. I wanted to be here. I wanted to stay here. I wanted to live here with the stories in my head being twenty feet tall. I could finally see what I had not seen before.

Why now? What had changed? Perhaps it was too easy to see a film or a theater piece when I was younger and I took it for granted. Perhaps my Saturday nights were too chaotic to stop and breathe in what I had just seen. Or maybe I never had the means to express myself behind a lens and communication is a two-way street. Ultimately, I defer to how the intangible is described in "The Orphanage": sometimes seeing is not believing - it is the other way around.