In the summer of 1978, the cast and crew of the film “Last Embrace” came to Princeton for a week of shooting on the university campus. I had already graduated, but was still living in town, so I was lucky enough to get cast as an extra (along with my girlfriend Marcia) in one nighttime scene. Marcia and I were directed to walk behind the stars of the movie, Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin, as they strolled along a walkway having a conversation. I don’t remember much about the shoot itself, but I do remember that there was lots of waiting around, that we got surprisingly good food, and that one attractive female student got invited to the afterparty at a nearby hotel while the rest of us didn’t.
Mostly, though, I remember getting my first closeup look at Roy Scheider. It’s not as if I was a particular fan of his; the only reason I was familiar with him was that (like everybody else) I had seen him in “Jaws.” Yet here he was, standing just feet away from me, brushing his hair with a pocket hair brush just like the one I had. He looked exactly like Roy Scheider, except that now he was three-dimensional and breathing the same air I was breathing. The thrill of that moment is firmly etched in my memory.
Why should that be? Why do we always get a thrill when someone we’ve seen on the screen appears before us in person? For me, at least, it doesn’t even have to be someone who’s famous. I’ve been to film screenings where the subject of a documentary takes the stage for a Q & A session afterward, and even that person exudes a special aura.
It’s even stranger when places and things we’ve seen onscreen take on that air of specialness. I’ve never watched “Game of Thrones,” but when our tour bus in Northern Ireland stopped at a key location from the series, passengers went nuts taking photos. I’ve been known to stare reverentially at the Brocklebank Apartments in San Francisco, because that’s where Kim Novak’s character lived in “Vertigo.” Sometimes it gets just plain silly: I was once on a tour of Paramount Studios in Hollywood during the time the series “Monk” was in production, and our tour guide sneaked us onto the set. “Ohmigod,” I remember saying to myself as I walked breathlessly through Adrian Monk’s apartment. “There’s his refrigerator!”
Back when I was a boy in Hebrew school, I remember the teacher having to explain what “graven images” were, since the second commandment admonished us not to “bow down to them nor serve them.” She explained that people used to pray to stone figures as if they were gods. I found it impossible to believe that any sane human being would attribute divinity to a human-made artifact. Yet later on, we learned the story of how the Israelites worshipped a golden calf while Moses was away on Mount Sinai. Was idolatry such an irresistible impulse, I wondered, that even the people who had been freed from Egypt by a series of divine miracles felt driven to do it?
I can’t help thinking that the thrill we get in the presence of people and places we’ve seen on the screen is a modern-day outgrowth of the ancient need to worship something concrete — to treat ordinary entities as having some connection to a realm higher than our own. Rationally, we know that celebrities are just people, and that movie locations are just places, but there’s a strong, irrational part of us that wants to experience them as special.
In my 20s, when I developed close ties with a Quaker community, I was surprised to find out that the Quakers didn’t put much stock in holidays such as Christmas and Easter. Since God made every day, they reasoned, why should we treat any particular day as being more special than another? On Christmas Day, the sun rises and the wind blows just the same as on any other day. Any special attention we pay to a holiday is just us projecting our human egos onto nature, and Quakers don’t think too highly of the human ego.
I’ll grant that it’s possible to observe holidays without thinking of the days themselves as being innately special. They’re a time on the calendar when we can all agree to engage in rituals that we enjoy — rituals that retain their specialness because they only happen once a year. (Even the Quakers hold a special meeting for worship on Christmas Eve, even if it’s no different from their normal Sunday meetings.) Similarly, it makes sense to experience an encounter with a celebrity as having a heightened atmosphere — simply because it’s so rare for something that only existed as a mental image to suddenly become concrete — without necessarily conferring a hallowed status onto celebrities themselves.
Still, there’s something a little crazy about the relationship we have with the movie or TV screen. Whether or not it’s odd that we get a thrill from encountering a person or place that we’d never seen in real life, think about the opposite: when something that’s totally familiar to us suddenly appears on film.
“Oh, wow!” I thought to myself when I finally watched “Last Embrace” in a theater. “That’s the Princeton campus! There’s the East Pyne archway! There’s Holder Courtyard!” Despite the fact that I’d spent nearly every day for four years on that very campus, there was this inexplicable excitement about seeing it on the movie screen. “That’s Ron Grayson!” I said when a familiar classmate was shown running out of a dorm, carrying a trombone. Somehow seeing him on film felt so much more emotionally charged than seeing him in person. So how do you explain that? Why did I run to the theater in 1993 to see a mediocre movie called “Made in America,” simply because parts of it were shot in my neighborhood in Oakland? Why do I feel a tingle whenever my high school friend Rob Bartlett shows up on the TV screen, even though I know perfectly well that he’s played recurring characters on several popular series? Why do I, many years after my graduation, still get excited when I see a film (“A Beautiful Mind,” “I.Q.,” “Across the Universe”) that was partially shot on the Princeton campus? This is behavior that we all take for granted, yet it’s entirely weird when you take a hard look at it.
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