Swell Movie Quotes

April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass....but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind. At those times I would write to Naoko. In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a movie I'd seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me. I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one. I wrote any number of letters like this, but from Naoko or Reiko I heart nothing.

It's like we're in a movie and the music is swelling and waves are crashing around us.

But there comes a point in the speech where I find my cadence. The crowd quiets rather than roars. It's the kind of moment I'd come to recognize in subsequent years, on certain magic nights. There's a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together, like a movie reel, projecting backward and forward in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You've tapped into some collective spirit, a thing we all know and wish for - a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility - and like all things that matter most, you know the moment is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.

He loved her in a subtle kind of way. It wasn’t the kind of love you see in movies, with swelling music and giant gestures and running through the streets to catch a departing train. It wasn’t the kind of love that Byron or Shakespeare wrote about, with flowery language and hyperbole and iambic pentameter. It was still and deep, like water that you might mistake for shallow if you just watched the surface. It was entirely his, not dependent on her own feelings for him, and it would still be there whether she, or him, or everyone else on the world disappeared. It was a subtle kind of love, but it was true.

Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography.

God, could that dopey girl dance. Buddy Singer and his stinking band was playing 'Just One of Those Things' and even they couldn't ruin it entirely. It's a swell song. I didn't try any trick stuff while we danced--I hate a guy that does a lot of show-off tricky stuff on the dance floor--but I was moving her around plenty, and she stayed with me. The funny thing is, I thought she was enjoying it, too, till all of a sudden she came out with this very dumb remark. "I and my girl friends saw Peter Lorre last night," she said. "The movie actor. In person. He was buyin' a newspaper. He's cute." "You're lucky," I told her. "You're really lucky. You know that?" She was really a moron. But what a dancer.

Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud, but I walked numbly through the park, round and round, 40 times for 4 hours just wanting to make it through the day. There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got through and the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories, but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk tick tick tick me not making a sound and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind, but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine. This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely ways but you can not let it. I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use. the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness, thinking it will help but it only feeds the fire and I don't want to hurt myself anymore. I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all. And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again. It will always be spring again. And there will always be a new day.

And though it has been in no way a romantic evening, she embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead, the seventy-millimeter image of her lips parting and the subsequent murmur of “I want you” in Dolby sound. But my embrace is frozen and I realize, at first distantly and they with greater clarity, that the havoc raging inside me is gradually subsiding and she is kissing me on the mouth and this jars me back into some kind of reality and I lightly push her away. She glances up at me fearfully. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” I say, checking my Rolex. “I don’t want to miss… Stupid Pet Tricks.

This was an old-time, black-and-white-movie kiss, with the orchestra swelling in my chest, hot tungsten lamps carving out our shadows. My bones turned to air, nothing holding me up but the fierceness of my desire.

She said: “I’m so sick of this joint.” “Why?” “No freedom. I can’t go out. I can’t get drunk or gamble or wear swell clothes…” “They look swell to me.” “Shut up, honey. I’m trying to tell you something. I like to dance. I like good restaurants and night clubs, and movies. Here all I’m supposed to do is think about God. It’s getting me down.” “You don’t like God?” “I can take him or leave him.” I laughed.

The tide slackens and the swells lay down flat. In the barely perceptible distance, a chaos of whale blows hatches the horizon, dozens of towering white fountains. So much energy is being expended that from a distance the disruption looks vaguely industrial. Then, trying to fix the image in my mind, I write ‘looks like a scene from a war movie.’ The simile seems so right and yet it’s alarming how easily it comes to me, how estranged of the sea’s daily business I am that an image of war seems easier to visualize than burst of cetacean breath erupting randomly and rapturously into the air as the great mammals feast their way through the bay.

Yet this wasn’t like sports, let alone sports movies. The roles weren’t fixed, nor the meaning of the scaffolding. It didn’t have to be this way. They might have, for instance, all felt stronger. They might have felt stronger and come together. They might have decided that, rather than now, as they’d been mistaken before: that if their enemies cheered the same damage as they, then they weren’t their enemies after all. They might have concluded their interests were mutual, that some other force, earlier—some other enemy—had confused and divided them, and that all those who cheered were thus allies unmasked. Instead they felt bitter, tricked by each other, last-strawed underdogs, suckers on the mend. Their enmity swelled and they fought even harder.

In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on. All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line. Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night. No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs. Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don’t care. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can’t experience the performance unless they’re sending instant videos to their friends: Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this shit. You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope! Outside

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the power she was carrying some sort of project about World War II—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some poignant music, out is in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the poster board chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the poster she was carrying, some sort of project about World War Two—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration-camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel and steam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in the back of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing on it, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feels like my whole life is holding its breath. By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see the train. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’ living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. It is the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid. He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. I feel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches at my shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, the need to scream or cry rising in my throat. And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps falling out into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Out into the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows. And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of my spine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feel the deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones. It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome and inappropriate with her stories of our frolicking. And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. The darkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flat against the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place? Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I remember the problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with. But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images of the days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then, patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to be deciphered. Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep your eyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light of the stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in a rush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing of the telephone. When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a person sleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curl up on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse. Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in an attic. The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from the undercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all these noises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is a fabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feel as if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, or at least not just a train. The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak of shoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’s breathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past, rolling gurneys down florescent hallways.

Who’s the guy?” “What guy?” “The guy you’re dating.” That’s when I see him. Peter Kavinsky, walking down the hallway. Like magic. Beautiful, dark-haired Peter. He deserves background music, he looks so good. “Peter. Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky!” The bell rings, and I sail past Josh. “I’ve gotta go! Talk later, Josh!” “Wait!” he calls out. I run up to Peter and launch myself into his arms like a shot out of a cannon. I’ve got my arms around his neck and my legs hooked around his waist, and I don’t even know how my body knows how, because I’ve for sure never touched a boy like this in my life. It’s like we’re in a movie and the music is swelling and waves are crashing around us. Except for the fact that Peter’s expression is registering pure shock and disbelief and maybe a drop of amusement, because Peter likes to be amused. Raising his eyebrows, he says, “Lara Jean? What the--?” I don’t answer. I just kiss him. My first thought is: I have muscle memory of his lips. My second thought is: I hope Josh is watching. He has to be watching or it’s all for nothing. My heart is beating so fast I forget to be afraid of doing it wrong. Because for about three seconds, he’s kissing me back. Peter Kavinsky, the boy of every girl’s dreams, is kissing me back. I haven’t kissed that many boys before. Peter Kavinsky, John Ambrose McClaren, Allie Feldman’s cousin with the weird eye, and now Peter again. I open my eyes and Peter’s staring at me with that same expression on his face. Very sincerely I say, “Thank you.” He replies, “You’re welcome,” and I hop out of his arms and sprint off in the opposite direction.

Tom carried with him a glass full of wine, which clearly hadn’t been his first of the evening. He swaggered and swayed as he started to speak, and his eyes, while not quite at half mast, were certainly well on their way. “In my mind,” Tom began, “this is what love is all about.” Sounded good. A little slurred, but it was nice and simple. “And…and…and in my mind,” Tom continued, “in my mind, I know this is all about…this is all love here.” Oh dear. Oh no. “And all I can say is that in my mind,” he went on, “it’s just so great to know that true love is possible right now in this time.” Crickets. Tap-tap. Is this thing on? “I’ve known this guy for a long, long time,” he resumed, pointing to Marlboro Man, who was sitting and listening respectfully. “And…in my mind, all I have to say is that’s a long…long time.” Tom was dead serious. This was not a joke toast. This was not a ribbing toast. This was what was “in his mind.” He made that clear over and over. “I just want to finish by saying…that in my mind, love is…love is…everything,” he continued. People around the room began to snicker. At the large table where Marlboro Man and I sat with our friends, people began to crack up. Everyone except Marlboro Man. Instead of snickering and laughing at his friend--whom he’d known since they were boys and who, he knew, had recently gone through a rough couple of years--Marlboro Man quietly motioned to everyone at our table with a tactful “Shhhh,” followed by a quietly whispered “Don’t laugh at him.” Then Marlboro Man did what I should have known he’d do. He stood up, walked up to his friend, who was rapidly entering into embarrassing territory…and gave him a friendly handshake, patting him on the shoulder. And the dinner crowd, rather than bursting into the uproarious laughter that had been imminent moments before, clapped instead. I watched the man I was about to marry, who’d always demonstrated a tenderness and compassion for people--whether in movies or in real life--who were subject to being teased or ridiculed. He’d never shown a spot of discomfort in front of my handicapped brother Mike, for all the times Mike had sat on his lap or begged him for rides to the mall. He’d never mocked or ridiculed another person as long as I’d known him. And while his good friend Tom wasn’t exactly developmentally disabled, he’d just gotten perilously close to being voted Class Clown by a room full of people at our rehearsal dinner. But Marlboro Man had swept in and ensured that didn’t happen. My heart swelled with emotion.

Old movies already in progress, already passed over twice, watched with indifference until orchestras swell over happy endings, new beginnings. The images black and white, the lie white. (Ours is a world of heroes and of winners, and rarely are they one in the same.)

Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography. The images we seldom see are the aftermath of violent deaths. Your family newspaper will not print photos of the puddled suicide who jumped from the fourteenth floor. No car wrecks with the body parts unevenly distributed, no murder victim sprawled in his own juices. Despite the endless preaching against violent crime, despite the enormous and avid audience for mayhem, these images are taboo.

Ruby leaned in and kissed me. A big movie kiss that should have had swelling music and soft lighting and a torrential downpour. But it happened in a garden, in broad daylight, and then Oliver turned the hose on us. "Does that count as kissing in the rain?" Ruby asked. "Let's debate that after we murder him.

There comes a time in every story when the hero finally gets everything they ever wanted. And that's usually when the music swells and the credits roll or the last page turns or we just flip the channel. I believe there's a reason for that. We don't want to spend too much time with somebody once they've gotten everything they've ever wanted. They become insufferable. They become unsympathetic. They start using words like whom properly in a sentence. There's no more mountain left for them to climb, so we're out. We're underdog people. Get out of here with your all my dream already came true nonsense. Just take your football and go home, Rudy. Go live your happy life and let us be. We're already on to the next unlikely story. But what if success was where the real trouble began? What if we got everything we ever wanted, only to find out it doesn't change a thing about not liking this skin we have to do life in, this dirt still caked under our fingernails. That once we go home and tuck ourselves between the cool cotton sheets, where it's just us and the darkness settled in, it hasn't changed a thing about how easily we can lay our head down and fall asleep at night. ... The hero, it turns out, is flawed. Deeply, deeply, deeply flawed. And no amount of success is going to undo that. No relentless pursuit of more is going to erase what was missing. It's going to take digging in and doing the hard work of healing if there's any hope of changing all that. but how do e you gather up the nerve when it already feels so damaged? And is that the kind of story anybody will ever care about? ... We don't really make movies about what happened after someone got everything they ever wanted. About what happens when the hero at last has to come face-to-face with what no amount of success will ever fix. But that's the story we're living now.

My father fell hard for Spade. He was impressed by Spade’s fame and enjoyed having someone around who was as encyclopedic about old movies as he was. But their connection was deeper than that. They had both grown up bookish, lonely, only children with family roots buried deep in the Wisconsin permafrost. Both men had caught the big midcentury culture swell and ridden it to respectable fame and reasonable fortune. Both wrote in first draft, both were published by Alfred A. Knopf, both had questionable personal hygiene and an abiding love of processed meats. Both of them loved me devoutly. Whenever I brought them together, I could feel something knit together inside of me.

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

At some point I must have fallen asleep on the couch I’d been sharing with Chase because an explosion on the TV jerked me awake. “It’s just the movie,” he whispered in my direction and ran his fingers over my cheek, “don’t move yet Princess.” “Don’t move? Why?” “I’m almost done, give me another minute or two.” I heard his hand moving back and forth across the paper slowly and waited until he kneeled down in front of the couch so his face was directly in front of mine. My breath caught and his electric blue eyes glanced down to my barely parted lips. His tongue absently wetted his lips and his teeth lightly bit down on his bottom one as his gaze roamed my face. “Why couldn’t I move?” I managed to ask when he started closing the distance between us. He abruptly stopped and blinked a few times, “Oh, um. Well … here. Just don’t freak out, okay? I wasn’t trying to be creepy.” “You’re not supposed to tell someone not to freak out, those words alone cause them to freak out.” Chase smirked, “Okay, well then don’t hit me or use your pressure point training on me again.” Before I could roll my eyes at him, he brought his sketch pad up in front of me and my jaw dropped. I felt my cheeks burn and he took that the wrong way. Snatching the pad of paper back up, he cursed softly. “I knew it was creepy.” “Chase,” I breathed and shook my head in an attempt to clear my thoughts, “that wasn’t creepy. Can I see it again?” When he didn’t make an attempt to move I reached my arm toward the book, “Please.” He handed it over with a sigh and looked at me with a sad smile, “I’m sorry, but you looked too perfect. I couldn’t let that opportunity pass.” My stupid blush came back with force when he said that and I focused at his drawing. It was amazing, somewhat embarrassing, but remarkable none the less. With the shading and the detail he’d captured of my upper body and face, it almost looked like a black and white photo. It was perfect. From my chest, throat and slightly open mouth to the way my hair fell around my face and my eyelashes rested against my cheeks, it was one hundred percent me. He even had my hand clutching the pillow under my head that was resting on his leg, as well as the blanket that had been pulled up to the swell of my breasts. Goose bumps covered my body as I realized he’d spent however long staring at, and replicating, every part of me while I’d been completely unaware. He was wrong, it wasn’t creepy, it was beautiful and strangely intimate. “Chase, it–” I cleared my throat and tried again, “It’s incredible.” Incredible didn’t cover it. “Yeah?” I looked up into his eyes and smiled, “Yeah.” We stayed there staring at each other, my mind and heart completely torn in two. One half desperately wanted to act on the feelings his drawing had stirred up in me, and the other was screaming at me to sit up and scoot away from him. Before I could try to make a decision, another series of explosions came from the TV and we both jolted away from each other. My

And life isn’t like the movies: There’s no ominous swell to the sound track, no fatalistic overhead shot, nothing to tell you that this moment is the one your life will turn on; instead it’s like a train silently switching tracks, sheering off midjourney into a whole other part of the night.

Those movies taught a valuable lesson that has stuck with me for years: The moment you seek solace in a stranger, a man wearing a boxy leather jacket will break into your house and chase you around before you have to kill him in a swelling conclusion of self-defense.

Lies. Dirty lies.” I’m not fishing; I’m really not. Even my own mother—who has pretty much worshipped everything I’ve done since I was a fetus—used to put my class pictures on the side of the fridge. From kindergarten to senior year, I could never get my face right. Like my face was allergic to the snap of a camera and would swell into embarrassing expressions as soon as the photographer said, “Smile.

movie—that’s swell,” Jack said. “I like movies. They’re like plays with no ambition.