Oblivion, Iron Man 3, and Visual Storytelling

Movies are like comfort food to me, and since I refuse to eat American fast food the whole time I'm abroad, I'm subbing in moving pictures. In Madrid, after an effort  much more involved than I care to admit, I found a movie theater. I sauntered up to the counter, mousy and nervous, and said "Oblìvìoñ" with all the phony Spanish affectation I could muster. 

"It's in Spanish," she replied. 

"Okay," I returned. I figured as much, but no English subtitles or anything? And how many prints in how many different languages are struck? How many Tom Cruises are out there speaking French and German and Japanese? And all of those voice actors for every character? What a logistical and financial nightmare. There has to be some Swedish dude walking around Hollywood with racks in his pocket because be can vocally emote in a culturally pleasing way. "Who me, baby? I'm the Scandinavian Morgan Freeman."

Oblivion is pretty good. Alex Jones has already seen it twice and says it's an, "anti-Globalist tour de force." If that blurb was on the movie poster, well, I think the box office returns would speak for themselves. Visually, the film is decadent. Like ocular candy, where it tickles the senses, it's about as substantive as a belly full of Jolly Ranchers. The most revealing aspect of the film was how digestible it was even in a foreign language. Good guys with their jaws and teeth drawn out with a T-square. Pretty assistants/live in girlfriends who push years of theatrical training out through their wet, doe eyes. "Bad Guys" in their always chic post-apocalyptic black complete with form fitted breast plates and helmets festooned with bird feathers (on a ruined earth? Whatever, who gives a shit). It was all so familiar, you even began to telegraph the plot points. When Tom Cruise's character, Jack, begins to piece together his memories--shot in black and white, get it?--you have equation enough to write in the sum on the other side of equals sign. Oblivion is a film I'm sure prides itself on its late second act pinch and some SciFi wrinkles to really challenge the viewer, but alas, there was nothing left in the stew pot to chew on the next day.

A couple of nights later in San Sebastián, trying to keep from wasting my money (well, ALL of my money) on pintxos and beer, I went to Iron Man 3. Again, it was the same experience. Tony Stark, more like Tony Snark! And by they way, Spaniards DO NOT think he's funny. I've committed Robert Downey Jr's facial ticks to memory, and when he was quipping at defcon panty drop, the crowd didn't even change their breathing patterns. But the film is Pepper Potts, whiz kid helpers, Don Cheadle, plus a whole cadre of enemies and the sortie of Iron Man suits to fight them. There is a snub at the beginning that sits on screen like Chekov's gun. There are grainy, jump cut videos sent in from The Mandarin--a terrorist and foil to Tony whose storyline is wonderfully satisfying--where the anti-American bombast practically writes itself.

Is the measure of these films the overall quality? Well, it's summer fare you purchase at the concession stand as much as you do the ticket window. Instead, are the greater merits of these pictures the production of something at the heart of cinema? In film school they call it visual storytelling. In screenwriting 101 they tell young writers, "Don't put anything in text you can't put directly on screen." These films contain a complete, engaging narrative someone could walk into the theater and enjoy without even speaking the language.

 It's hard for me to pull apart how much of my enculturation is enmeshed with my understanding of these films. Iron Man 3 is part of a franchise, and Oblivion is built on a number of well tread tropes, but I think it goes to when you take a toddler--the tabla not completely rasa--to the movies and they can recall the broad strokes of an animated film. Especially when it's something a'la Pixar and there is as much content for adults as children. 

Perhaps this quality should be a total insult to the Shane Black and Joseph Kosinski. Maybe their films are like a flip-book, asinine pictures set in motion to make dummies guffaw. I could be the living emblem of the perpetual dumbing down of summer blockbusters. Or, there is a compelling argument, this is a very pure kind of cinema.

I ran a list of films I might not understand with the sound off, or in a foreign language. Big movies, not your 2001's and quiet dramas and Terrence Malik films, and I couldn't come up with a clear cut winner. Maybe a Nolan film? Prometheus? Crank 2? And even if it is the case, is it really a higher form of film making? We've come along way, but the men from long ago who set a camera on a tripod knowing the images had to speak for them have rightfully etched their code on cinema's DNA.

Crash Landing/Fever Dreams/Holla' Madrid

Madrid Not Pictured

When I got off the plane, I already understood what this was. I was sick. Bad sick. Like, "I haven't been this sick in years," sick. The density and color of what was coming out of me was only slightly more convincing than the millipedes of pressure bubbles worming their way through my eustachian tubes. All of my big ideas from an afternoon in NYC had been incinerated by bouts of uneasy sleep and high temperature. Something about the fashion of politics? It was the May Day protest in Union Square and I saw a 50+ woman wearing faux-alligator Naturalizer slip-ons and poly-blend pants gleefully holding an "Occupy Queens!" banner while having her picture taken. Protest tourism? Was that it? Anyway, you get it--it wasn't going to be a very good essay.

Once my feet were on the ground, I knew what had to be done. I found the airport's pay as you go Internet terminal, went to Orbitz, and booked a daily-budget-decimating hotel. I had already booked a hostel, but I knew I couldn't get well in a room with three other people. A couple of little girls went to the computer terminal next to me to scavenge the remaining minutes from the last user. They went to YouTube. I finished my booking and found a nice looking hotel away from the city center. I copied the information provided me, and found a taxi cab. Here you go girls, fifteen minutes left.

What do you mean you don't speak English? I thought that's why we went to Europe, so we didn't have to learn another language. The address? Avda Pio XII, Madrid, 28016. 

Pio Dose is the street, what is the number?

This was all the information I had. "It's a hotel," I wheezed through the saturation hearing the words thump in my head like I had my fingers in my ears. 

He seemed concerned--in what little pidgin we could piece together--about my hotel selection. It was a nice hotel, but it was far from everything. "You take a bus, you take a taxi," he puffed a little breath as he motioned toward the city drifting past us. And what a city Madrid is from the view of a taxi cab window, snow capped mountains, and lush foliage, deciduous and evergreen. Sunlight dripped off the cones of spring blossoms heavy in the branches.

Like a pro, he found the Hotel. Not on his "first try," that belittles a man and his craft, it was all instinct. He knew where this beleaguered American tourist well beyond his depth belonged. 

The Confortel Pio XII was nice and clean and quiet. This was all I required. I went to my room, dropped my bags like a thoughtless child home from elementary school, and guzzled two of the four free bottles of water in the mini-fridge. I have to let someone know where I am. I have to get medicine. I have to shower. In a fortuitous bounce, there was a pharmacy, a corner store, and a sandwich shop a short walk away.

The pharmacist talked me into the sublingual homeopathic remedy because, "It take one, two days. No chemical. Other one take...five, seven day." And if the looks I'd been getting since NYC were any indicator, I was already edging into 'he might be making bathroom meth' territory, so no sudafed for this guy. I wanted to make jokes about needing a bunch of matchsticks, but pharmacies in Spain don't really appear to work in the--I'm gonna go get Maw-Maw's scrip, sun tan lotion, and four packs of after season Peeps--kind of way.

I bought my meds, the most precious little grilled bread sammie stuffed with 'Jamon Y Brie,' and a bottle of Spanish Gatorade. The only indicator was the Olympic Rings on the side, and it wasn't soda. I bathed my awful stench, ate my delicious, darling sandwich, and vanished into a cragged fault of fevered sleep.

Floating high above Madrid, my clapboard coffin was four walls of full color projections. Images shot through the heat of my mind manifested in distorted images with no continuity. As I turned myself over in bed I was in an all brick apartment, one with distinguished modern features. There was a woman there I once knew. She was the best friend of an ex-girlfriend. I thought we understood each other. I was young and mixed up. I saw her in line at the movies once, but this was not that time.

 My mouth so dry, she looked at me with something beneath contempt, I wasn't worthy of even her disdain. It was pity. It was the well of indifference where you drown the things not worth hating. "But you never answered my friend request," I croaked out, sweat beading on my forehead. "Then your FB page was gone."

"Yeah."

I could charm this thing another direction. "What, did you purge me from your memory?"

Her glance slid all the way down her famously aquiline nose. "Not purged."

"Deleted?" As the words came out of me, they echoed with how much of my fear her answer carried. Her smile was dense with satisfaction.

I descended down a miles long tunnel of sheets. I heard the back wall roll away and in the distance, a dog barked. Immediately, I snapped to. I jumped out of bed and in the dark scrambled for my dog. He was horrified as I collected him in my arms. If he had heard the other dog, he would have run away. A woman crossed through the dark with her dog. She remotely locked a luxury sedan and had on a gaudy silk scarf, all paisley and anchors and bright colors draped over a dark overcoat.

"He would just run away like that? He's not a very good dog, but there are no bad dogs..."

Just bad owners. I sat up in bed. Still in Madrid. Still in this hotel. It's dark out. I need to drink more water. 

When I was a child there was an incident where I was sick and didn't hydrate. My parents woke in the middle of the night to find me ranting and raving. My bed was a battleship and a fire truck and they had to keep moving me between beds as I would sweat through sheets in about half an hour. I have no memory of this. If my parents hadn't been there, I would have died. This is my biggest fear. I didn't want my first memory of Spain to be waking up in a prison hospital because I walked naked across the Pio XII Confortel lobby. I filled my water bottle in the sink, drank the whole thing, and laid back down.

No TV. Don't check the time. These things will defeat you. Get through the night. This was my mantra,  like a healing spell over and over again. But, they're not mine.

"They're not mine! They're Houston's."

She held the pack of Marlboro lights in her hand. Forbidden, unspeakable contraband he'd forgotten to properly conceal in his backpack.

"You lie, you lie!" his stepmother charged. "Don't lie to me."

Heat rising in their faces, both trying not cry, they could barely choke out words.

"You know the rules. If you wanna live like that, it's not gonna be in this house."

A car horn honked out front, his ride to school. He grabbed his backpack and turned to storm out.

"This isn't over. When we get back to San Angelo were going to talk about this."

He'd already decided another outcome. He was moving out. That way he could smoke all the cigarettes he wanted. He got into his friend Houston's car, Houston not knowing he'd tried to sell him out moments before. He was flushed and tears finally broke the dam of his ducts.

"Woah, dude. What's wrong?" Houston asked.

"I just got kicked out of my house."

"What? No way."

"Just take me to buy a pack of cigarettes."

"We're late. Can't you just take one of mine ?"

"Take me to buy a pack of fucking cigarettes! Please..."

The fever pressed its crooked fingers across my brain into nooks where forgotten fears and self consciousness lived. I kept drinking more water. My gold water bottle like an illuminated cistern with all of life inside. 

I had to put my mind another place. I started talking through the many houses and mottos and alliances in my head at a screaming pace. House Stark, House Lannister, House Bolton, House Baratheon, House Targaryen, House Tyrell, House Greyjoy. I started naming other houses I hadn't heard of before, but I knew they had to be in there. I was the grand maester. I was in a tower in my tunic recording this great record. Wedged between my bed and this world of fantasy, I could feel the ramparts of the many kingdoms emerging from the white cotton threads. My brain howled down the King's Road until it could go no further. The alliances, the names, none of it made sense anymore. I was afraid to shift in bed as I could feel the gears all around me. The many pieces of this complex puzzle where all of my answers could be found were laid out in perfect order at all sides. I cracked my eyes open. It was light out. My bed was just sheets and pillows.

I staggered out of bed. I sat in a chair. I filled my gleaming gold water bottle. The rest of the day I listened to Radiolab podcasts. 

By Sunday I'd been in my hotel room for so many hours straight I was afraid to leave, but wanted to do nothing more. I showered, shaved my face, put on some clothes, and charged out the door like I was going to have to break through it.

I walked around the neighborhood until I found a metro stop. I descended into the belly, bought my ticket, and passed it though. The gate swung open, a major victory. I walked down the stairs, and immediately a Madrid cop shouted after me. No, not this. No on my first day. I turned back, he scowled, and handed me my ticket. After you insert the ticket, it shoots through the machine and you collect it. Why? Do I need it to get out of the subway? I thanked him in my best "Gracias," a word I still haven't gotten right by Spain's standards. In Spain it's said with a lisp. Gra-th-ias.

I'm not a man who looks for symbols in his life, but the subway floor was decorated with chess pieces. Could I get to the heart of town and back with out losing myself? Icy, still sick sweat poured down my back. Your move Madrid.

The subway let out and my only goal was to make it to the main city park. I followed the iron filings in my blood like a compass. I saw it and almost wept. But I was hungry. I'd had perhaps one meal in the last 36 hours. I walked until I found a Burger King. I know, what a sad American with his disgusting burgers in the heart of all this delicious Spanish food. Flame broiled and French fried, I made my way back to the park. 

It was a beautiful day. The sun hung around the trees and reclined in the grass and ran its fingertips through the water spilling from fountains. As we are its children, we did the same.

Fathers nervously calling after daughters who scurried a little too far into the bushes while he wasn't watching. 

Crowds gathered around a street performer whose overgrown goatee must have been forced from his chin by his outsized charm. He even had a bit where he used one of those plastic grabber hands to flip off the crowd. Middle fingers are funny in every language, in case you'd forgotten.

Long lines of people waited to play in little blue and white boats crowded onto a huge man made pond. 

Statuary and nature, man and woman, dogs and runners, it was a park on planet earth.

I did stumble across a manicured promenade with shrubbery groomed into an impressive spectacle. They stood tall and in oddly fitted bulbous shapes, almost in contempt of nature. A statue stood between them hoisting a tragedy mask toward the heavens. 

Huh, there is the Prado. It was closed, in case you were wondering. 

I walked the the length of the the park, and as I got near the exit I saw some Spanish kids all wearing matching soccer uniforms save one friend sporting a NY Knicks shirt featuring Carmelo Anthony. The only thing worse than rooting for the Lakers (Go Lakeshow!) is rooting for the Knicks, and not even a throwback Ewing jersey or...ugh, there really is no good option. But this young Spaniard, in that gaudy orange and blue, I loved him. He defied what was expected of him. I wanted to give him an Ultimate Jordan DVD and my copy of Buffalo Gals Back to Skool and whisper, "keep it secret. Keep it safe."

I sat on a bench. Humanity whirled past me. Rollerblading is huge in Madrid right now. And it finally hit me, I'm in Spain. I'm here. This is my life. This is really happening.

When I arrived back at my metro station later, I tromped heel-toe over the tile chess pieces laid into the floor, and where I'm not hack enough to grant myself a, "Check and Mate," moment, I felt pretty damned good. I helped some Chinese girls carry their luggage up the stairs. I went back to the hotel, packed my bags, and watched Blood: The Last Vampire in Spanish. Really, impressively so, not good. Not at all. As I settled into bed I thought for the first time, "I think I'm going to make it. I can do this."

Once In A Lifetime

Which line of cliches do you want?

The, "I worked a job I hated for 10 years and had to get out." The, "It was the end of yet another relationship and I needed answers." Or, better yet, "I turned 30 and was at a crossroads." Maybe if I let Saul Bellow tell it, it'll give me the literary quality I so desperately crave:

"What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated."

Well, let's start from the beginning in case some future generation unearths this tome and mine is the only travelogue on record. Sorry, Odysseus, but have you heard the one about the guy who turns 30 and decides he has to see the world? For your sake, I hope you haven't either...

I'm not a man who looks for answers. I'm not a man who looks for symbols in his life, but I have spent the last six months living on the corner of Hobbiton and Middle Earth. As much as I wish I lived on the Shire enjoying first and second breakfasts and smoking my weight in pipe weed, this is the name of some street in some bedroom community. It was all too familiar objective happiness: employed, comfortable, detonating relationships  like I was hired demolition, and miserable. What a terrible thing the life of endless comfort. I had money, I have wonderful friends, but I couldn't alleviate the persistent despair. I couldn't find the reason to give something to anyone besides myself. I was incinerating the goodwill I'd spent the last decade forging on the iron of passable production at work. I was sick inside.

I reached out to my sister, one of the few who I can talk to about my human feelings--I have two modes publicly, aloof and Cowboys game--and she said, make a list of what you think you should be doing and what you want to be doing. Both lists came back with travel and writing as one and two, just swapped. She made me commit to a date, say it out loud, and 18 months later, here we are, six months off to see Europe and Southeast Asia. 

And what of the Shire? Well, I went to see Peter Jackson's much maligned first installment of The Hobbit this Christmas and Gandalf--who was probably played by Ian McKellan in JRR Tolkien's imagination--said something to Bilbo that still churns in my guts to this very moment: You've sat around long enough. The world is not in your books and your maps, the world is out there.

For the last six months when I came home from work and walked my dog I would turn off Hobbiton and on to Middle Earth and remember, no matter how much worry I felt, no matter how many times I privately hoped people would forget I said anything, no matter how many times I wished I could undo it all and go back to putting on weight and DVRing the rest of my life away, I heard the reverberating mantra--you've sat around long enough.

I'm no Bilbo, my mission isn't that important, but if all conflict resolution is internal, The Hobbit is technically over very early on. The hardest part is leaving the house.

What answers are you looking for? None. I don't think there are finite answers. What do you think you'll find? Scenic vistas, good food, and some much needed misadventure in an existence arm-barred into predictable submission. Are you scared? Of course I am, sometimes, and then I'm brimming. Just bursting. It's been an interesting 18 months. Won't you be lonely? No. If I could instill these words with one drop of the outpouring I've received the last few months, you'd ask yourself how that man could ever be lonely. I'm going to let life as it happens fill in the rest. But, if I come back skinnier, that's affirmation enough.

"Once  in a lifetime," that's the phrase I keep using. I've used it to keep bosses at bay. I've used it to assuage my regular customer's curiosities. I've used it to calm the minds of my parents who cannot understand why I would do this. I keep telling people I'm cashing in my "once in a lifetime," chip, but I can't simply say a thing. Every time I utter the phrase, it's not meant to invoke the image of an 80 year old widower giving the thumbs up as he sky dives for the first time, or the dude about to eat 50 nuclear wings to make the 'Wall Of Flame' because, "you only go around once, brah!!" Every time I say it, I hear Tina's arrhythmic bass line. I hear shimmering keyboards and a soaring delay pedal fuzz loop. I hear David chanting in his spasmodic anti-singing "...and you may ask yourself, 'well, how did I get here?'"

Under the water, carry the water, there is water at the bottom of the ocean. What began as a bucket is now a sea of letting the days go by sitting on my chest. I chose to leave home at 18 and fended for myself everyday since. I was young and furious and out to show the world, fuck you, that's what. The first bucket was a menial job so I could feed my baby monsters: food, rent, alcohol, drugs, cable TV. Then it became some other job, because I didn't have to work Sundays. Then it became not going to college because it was too expensive, and 'if I wanted my mind paved over I'd just join the military,' *passes bong*. Then it became a refusal to jar my self loose from an arrested development manifested in ensuring the ones who loved me the most suffered equivalently. Then it became promotions and building the perfect credit score and diving further and further into whatever substance there was to abuse on any given night, and then the gnawing sense overwhelmed me, "My God, What Have I DONE!"

One of the best moments of "Once In A Lifetime," comes when David Byrne is assessing the life around this fictional 80's suburbanite male and he suddenly snaps to, "This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!" The implication always felt like the reveal in a late night SciFi B-movie. Suddenly, everything in his life has been exposed as a fraud. Wether they were replacements, or his eyes were finally opened, this isn't what I feel. I'm complicit in my life. Instead, I feel like a kid who found a $100 bill on the ground. I was happy to hold it, call it my own, but after a while, I know it belongs to someone else. It's a mismatch. It's this thing I've kept crumpled in my pocket for far too long, and I'm finally exhausted enough to say, "This is not mine. It belongs to someone else."

So, what, I'm going to live everyday like it's my last? What a line of horse shit. This is the ideology of doing nothing. The sinister, deeply buried premise is the perceived life to live. You can put it off, because that last day will eventually come. You can do it then. I know a person who was told today--this day--is your last day. By then, it's already too late. You don't book a trip to Machu Pichu, you just cry.

I'm going to live my life knowing I'm going to die, but not today. Not unless the Great Equalizer decides to come for me, and I've no say in that. After this trip, a work-a-day life will have to be rebuilt. Maybe I can break the cycle, maybe I can't. Maybe I'll engineer the life I've always wanted and circle this as the line of demarcation. Maybe this is the first step to being some destitute, dandruff covered, toe glove wearing weirdo lecturing you in the Brussels airport about how, "India just gets in your blood after a while." I don't know. I can't worry about that now. But if we're doing the cliche roll call, I don't think I'll be on my death bed wishing I had been a better banker.

My name is Monte Francisco Monreal, and I'm 30 years old. I'm taking a trip. I'm taking a trip for myself. I'm taking a trip to see a world until now shuttered in the corners of my imagination. I'm taking a trip to stand far off enough from my life to learn something about it I may not know.  I'm taking a trip for my family who has given me their endless support. I'm taking a trip for my friends who have done more to keep the dream alive than they will ever know. I'm taking a trip for my mother who was going to travel when she got older, but she didn't get the chance to get older. I'm taking a trip for the vision of myself dying in his office chair to let him know, it's just life, all the other stuff is water flowing underground. 

Water dissolving. Water removed. Once in a lifetime.