Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In The Color Purple, Shug Avery is estranged from her preacher-father. She’s a free-spirited woman who drinks, loves indiscriminately, and sings at a local juke joint. One Sunday morning while belting out a blues tune she hears the choir at her father’s nearby church. Shug then leads the revelers, musicians and all, down the road, and sings her way back into her father’s arms, literally. The movie is a deeply emotional journey. It’s one of my favorite scenes. It is sentimental.

My brother and I saw The Color Purple on a Sunday. We arrived just before its start. We sat in the first row. We strained our necks to look up and were totally engulfed by flickering images depicting rural Georgia in the 1940s. Something about the seating made the film even more intimate.

The Color Purple is a story about forgiveness and redemption. As someone who witnessed domestic violence, the movie was consoling and empowering. I heard muffled crying and sniffling throughout the theater behind me. I, too, teared up.

A friend once said, “Just because a movie taps into our emotions does not make it a good film.” I argued the purpose of art is to make us feel. He argued for films that made us think. Perhaps the best art balances the two.

Today’s poem whimsically plays with faux intimacy as an aesthetic experience, and with the value of cinema, how our psychic needs for understanding are either thwarted or are actualized.

One Shies at the Prospect of Raising Yet Another Defense of Cannibalism
by Josh Bell

“You can’t kiss a movie,” Jean Luc Godard said, and this is mostly true, in that you cannot
initiate the kiss. The Movie could initiate the kiss if The Movie wanted, as it is so much taller,
leaning in, no way to demur, you would be too polite anyway, and, as the Roman poets have
stressed, there is always something porous in the decorous. So there can be kissing between you
and The Movie, and it would be amazing, better the more incoherent The Movie is and the more 
you had to pay to see it, though in the movies it is said that prostitutes don’t like to kiss as kissing
is too personal, though I disagree, as sometimes the human will make a show of locating you
with a kiss, almost to prove to you that you are a real person with a face and that, absolutely,
they know where the face is and the face isn’t, and this is how you know, for sure, that both of
you have been paid. But I don’t want to make you feel bad here, and I apologize, for you are
entirely kissable, as I have watched you through windows and keyholes even though, up to this 
point, you do not appear in movies. Often you appear holding a book in your hand and with God
knows what playing in your head—I imagine you repeating yourself, over and again, “the
horse knows the way, the horse knows the way”—and remember: even someone as learned in
film as Jean Luc Godard got it a little wrong. You can kiss The Movie, if The Movie wants to
kiss you. It’s just that The Movie, finally, isn’t all that interested in your mouth.

“One Shies at the Prospect of Raising Yet Another Defense of Cannibalism" by JOSH BELL from ALAMO THEORY © 2016 Josh Bell. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Books.