Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lawrence Raab’s "My Life at the Movies" is a wistful meditation on memory, romantic missteps, and the way film shapes and distorts personal experience. The poem reads like a series of recollections strung together by the unifying theme of cinema, where each failed romantic encounter is tethered to a specific movie, turning the speaker’s life into a filmography of disappointment, nostalgia, and self-awareness. At its core, the poem explores how film offers not only an escape from reality but also a framework through which the speaker interprets and revises his own past.

The poem opens with an ironic confession: "Village of the Damned was the movie I?d chosen for my first date with Emily, my first date ever, as well as my last with Emily." The horror movie choice immediately signals the speaker’s youthful naivety—he fails to grasp the necessity of setting the right mood for romance. His retrospective self-awareness, along with the dry humor of "my first date ever, as well as my last with Emily," establishes a tone that is both rueful and self-deprecating. The film itself, in which "children with supernatural powers turn against their parents and take over the village," mirrors the awkward power dynamics of adolescence, where control is uncertain, and intentions are often misread.

The next lines reveal the speaker’s lingering embarrassment: "But I kept remembering how embarrassed I?d felt telling Emily on the phone that we?d be going to a horror movie. Science fiction, I thought immediately. God, that sounds so much better." His concern with labeling—his belief that science fiction carries more legitimacy than horror—suggests a desire to appear more sophisticated, to construct a better version of himself even in hindsight. This minor revision, even in thought, signals the broader theme of the poem: the tension between reality and the cinematic lens through which the speaker views his past.

This pattern continues with other failed dates: "Then there was The Wreck of the Mary Deare with Barbara, who showed up late, so we missed the credits and the opening scene, and never went out again." The conciseness of the anecdote reinforces its triviality; Barbara?s lateness and their failure to see the beginning of the film somehow doom the relationship before it starts. The parallel between missing the film’s exposition and the abrupt ending of their brief connection suggests that, for the speaker, romance and narrative structure are inextricably linked.

As the poem progresses, the speaker reflects on Hour of the Wolf, another unfortunate date choice: "with Wendy and Max von Sydow as a demented artist / who must stay awake all night to fend off his demons." Again, the film’s thematic content ironically parallels the failed relationship—an artist battling inner turmoil is hardly a mood-setter for a budding romance. "These were not, I can see now, the very best choices," he admits, with wry understatement, recognizing too late that his cinematic selections may have shaped or reflected his romantic failures.

The poem takes a turn with Blow-Up, where at least "Nancy and I had the mystery of the end to talk about." The mention of "illusion and reality" ties back to the film’s themes, reinforcing the idea that movies provide a means of interpretation, a vocabulary through which relationships can be processed. This period—the 1960s—becomes significant because it was "a good time to discuss illusion and reality, an easy time to favor illusion." The implication is that both he and Nancy, like many in their generation, preferred abstraction over concrete reality, a preference that likely extended into their relationship.

With A Night at the Opera, the speaker and Nancy take this further, equating Groucho Marx with James Joyce: "Groucho, we agreed, was a genius, like James Joyce, in fact very much like James Joyce." The absurdity of the comparison, along with the admission that their "teachers were resistant" to this theory, highlights the youthful arrogance and playfulness of the time. Their attempts to justify this intellectual leap—"We cited Baudelaire, mentioned the limitations of rational thought, and were given extensions."—add to the humor, showing how cinema became an academic and philosophical exercise as well as an emotional one.

Yet, for all this theoretical posturing, it is movies—not philosophy—that provide the deeper emotional framework: "Movies, of course, were much better than rational thought. Plus they had music." This casual assertion underscores the heart of the poem: movies, with their scores, their edits, their controlled narratives, provide a means of making sense of things that real life often does not. The speaker longs for his life to follow cinematic conventions, especially in moments of loss: "How could I break up with Nancy without seeing it played out on the screen: a crane shot, lifting me up / and back and away in one long sweet and floating glide." Here, he envisions his breakup as a stylized Hollywood moment, where sorrow is aestheticized, where distance is not painful but beautifully composed. The cinematic dissolve—the smooth transition from one scene to another—becomes the idealized alternative to real heartbreak.

But, of course, "it didn?t happen that way, and now I don?t remember the truth." This admission reveals the poem’s central dilemma: memory is unreliable, and reality, unlike film, does not come with structured edits, soundtracks, or dissolves. Instead, the speaker substitutes reality with film, allowing cinematic moments to replace personal truth.

The poem closes with a reflection on La Dolce Vita, specifically its final scene: "Mastroianni on the beach, so handsome and anguished. A young girl at the water?s edge calls to him, but he can?t hear what she?s saying." This scene encapsulates the essence of lost connection, of being too far removed from what once was. The speaker projects himself onto Mastroianni, identifying with the sense of something beautiful yet irretrievable. The iconic shrug—"as only he could shrug"—becomes emblematic of acceptance, an acknowledgment that some things cannot be reclaimed. The final lines—"We can?t take the world too seriously, no matter how lovely you are in your white dress this morning."—are a bittersweet farewell to youthful illusions, an acceptance that life does not unfold like a film, no matter how much we wish it would.

"My Life at the Movies" is ultimately about the way film shapes our expectations of experience, romance, and memory. The speaker, looking back, recognizes that his life has never followed the elegant arcs of the films he loved, that his romances were not scripted, and that reality is much messier than the cinema suggests. Yet, in the absence of clear memories, film remains his reference point, the medium through which he can at least attempt to make sense of his past. It is a poem of nostalgia, humor, and quiet resignation, acknowledging that while life does not imitate film, film can still help us understand life.

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