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And then it got even better: in a quintessenially Spielbergian cinematic fillip the massy monster shifted his awesome bulk and was suddenly and impossibly on two legs, the better to reach the more tender—one presumes—foliage at the whippy tippy-top of a verdant Jurassic tree. This primordial ballet was a kind of cinematic perfection, because the mundane physical act of a hungry vegetarian reptile reaching for food became holy and sublime. It was like watching an angel cough. For those few moments it was as though we, like fairy-tale Jack, had just poked our head through the hole in the top of the sky and were staring, agog, at a land of gold and giants. Lo! we had ascended into the heavens and were mingling and cavorting with gods and monsters.
Of course I had wanted to groove on this terrific otherness forever, to stay in this holy otherworld outside of time for as long as possible, at least until the credits rolled. But this, alas, was not to be. You see, Mr. Spielberg had a wide load of plot to extrude, and there was only 90 minutes left! The next thing I knew Jeff Goldblum was storking around with Laura Dern and people were getting munched by Happy Meal Raptors and the once billowy fantasy was shadoobily in tatters. The balloon had been pricked—bang!—and instead of staring dreamily at a golden age of gentle monsters I was suddenly zooming headlong toward the credits, propelled by the tackily-decaled dragster of Spielberg's plot. Holy Crichton Page-turner, Batman! It was over before it began, as though Jack's mother had peevishly chopped the beanstalk out from under him because dinner couldn't wait. Well, you can't have everything.
Still, it's a pity. So few current movies seem to be able to take me to another realm that I often find myself renting old movies just for this purpose, just for a hit of pure unadulterated otherness. Usually the older the movie, the better. I am especially drawn toward silent films and some of the earliest talkies. The faces and make-up hearken back to nineteenth-century theater. The acting is stagey and stylized. The villains are Villains, with black capes and longish hair and high eyebrows. And everyone exists in a jerky grey-toned amber, in a sun-starved under water realm, staring at us from the depths of the past, from the other side of the mirror. There is often a creepiness to it. One knows that everyone in such films is long dead, and yet there they are, smiling and talking and weeping. They are alive and dead at the same time. They are ineluctably Other.
The death-in-life or life-in-death aspect is at the essence of all of this somehow. A corpse is horrifying because it is a semblance of life, a mockery of it. It is dead life. Merely inert matter is not frightening. It's the unheimlich, the uncanny of Freud, that spooks, that awes. The thing/not thing. Following this thinking, one sees that the image of a waking dream is at the heart of this as well. We are sleeping and conscious at the same time. Subject and verb, Earth and Heaven, are impossibly and wonderfully conflated. This impossible conflation is the true and mystifying and secret magic of Art: an otherness that somehow points you to something even more Other beyond it, ultimately to that ultimate Other, God Himself.
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