The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Page B

this for my friends, with great severity: John Williams’s score was
really pretty good symphonic composition
.
    The movie itself, right: of course, I must have enjoyed it immensely the first few times. That’s what I least recall. Instead I recall now how as I memorized scenes I fought my impatience, and yet fought not to know I was fighting impatience—all that mattered were the winnowed satisfactions of crucial moments occurring once again, like stations of the cross: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope,” “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” “If you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” and the dunk shot of Luke’s missiles entering the Death Star’s duct. I hated, absolutely, the scene in the Death Star’s sewers. I hated Han Solo and Princess Leia’s flirtation, after a while, feeling I was being manipulated, that it was too mannered and rote: of course they’re grumbling now, that’s how it
always
goes. I hated the triumphalist ceremony at the end, though the spiffing-up of the robots was a consolation, a necessary relief. I think I came to hate a lot of the film, but I couldn’t permit myself to know it. I even came, within a year or so, to hate the fact that I’d seen the movie twenty-one times.
    Why that number? Probably I thought it was safely ridiculous and extreme to get my record into the twenties, yet stopping at only twenty seemed too mechanically round. Adding one more felt plausibly arbitrary, more
realistic
. That was likely all I could stand. Perhaps at twenty-one I’d also attained the symbolic number of adulthood, of maturity. By bringing together
thirteen
and
twenty-one
I’d made
Star Wars
my Bar Mitzvah, a ritual I didn’t have and probably could have used that year. Now I was a man.
    By the time I was fifteen, not only had I long since quit boasting about my love of
Star Wars
but it had become privately crucial to have another favorite movie inscribed in its place. I decided Kubrick’s
2001: A
Space Odyssey
was a suitably noble and alienated choice, but that in order to make it official I’d have to see it more times than
Star Wars
. An exhausting proposition, but I went right at it. One day at the Thalia on West Ninety-fifth Street I sat alone through
2001
three times in a row in a nearly empty theater, a commitment of some nine hours. That day I brought along a tape recorder in order to whisper notes on this immersion experience to my friend Eliot—I also taped
Also sprach Zarathustra
all six times. If
Star Wars
was my Bar Mitzvah then
2001
was getting laid, an experience requiring a more persuasive maturity, and one which I more honestly enjoyed, especially fifteen or twenty showings in. Oddly enough, though, I never did completely overwrite
Star Wars
with
2001
. Instead I stuck at precisely twenty-one viewings of the second movie as well, leaving the two in a dead heat. Even that number was only attained years later, at the University Theater in Berkeley, California, two days after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. There was a mild aftershock which rumbled the old theater during the Star Gate sequence, a nice touch.
    I’ll never see another film so many times, though I still count. I’ve seen
The Searchers
twelve times—a cheat, since it was partly research. Otherwise, I usually peak out at six or seven viewings, as with
Bringing
Up Baby
and
Three Women
and
Love Streams
and
Vertigo
, all films I believe I love more than either
Star Wars
or
2001
. But that kid who still can’t decide which of the two futuristic epics to let win the struggle for his mortal soul, the kid who left the question hanging, the kid who partly invented himself in the vacuum collision of
Star Wars
and real loss—that kid is me.

Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn
    Here’s where I am: in the subway, but not on a train. I’m standing on one platform, gazing at another. Moaning trains roll in, obscuring my view; I wait for them to pass. The