In the past two years, I’ve become a dad. And for the past three months, I’ve been a dad of two. And for anybody who’s a parent of one, or two, or more than two kids (god bless you), then you probably understand how excruciatingly hard it is to get anything done outside of parent duties. For someone like me who has always had terrible stress when it comes to their job and getting enough work done: it’s been rough. Hell, sometimes. At Film Colossus, we’ve always prided ourselves on writing lengthy, detailed, all-inclusive analyses that aim to become the definitive explanations of the world’s most interesting and confusing movies. And that kind of article requires time. Time I no longer have. And instead of finding a solution to this problem, I’ve continuously forced myself to get these articles done, even when I didn’t have the time, at the expense of relaxing or exercising, of reading a book or eating ice cream or something. And if I didn’t get more done, I stressed about not getting more done. It was a recipe for disaster that, quite frankly, made being a dad not as fun and rewarding as it should be.
So I’ve decided to make a change. A major change. I don’t have to stop writing movie explanations. I just need to make them simpler. Shorter. But still just as probing and insightful as our definitive explanations are meant to be. But I also can’t cut corners. My writing must reflect how I watch a movie and how I engage with it, how I derive meaning from it, how I reflect it back onto myself and the world around me as I learn and grow from truly great art. I know there’s a way to write this kind of article. But how?
On Tuesday of this week, the answer came to me. My son laid down for a nap, and I knew based on his sleep history that it meant I had about 35 minutes to write something, anything. I had been thinking non-stop about the Alfred Hitchcock movie Torn Curtain, and I had something very specific to say about it that described how I watched and understood the movie. So I started writing. I just let my thoughts pour out in unadulterated form, every single idea that had been brewing in my brain for several days. I didn’t worry about structure or sections or providing context. Instead, I allowed the text to visualize what it’s like to be inside my brain, to exemplify how I watch and critique movies for a living, how I ultimately find those deeper meanings that can seem so pervasive yet suddenly become so clear when you just confront yourself and your worldview and talk through everything.
Until the day I’m not happily giving away all my free time to my children, which won’t be the case for several years, this will be my new format for movie explanations. I hope this series is inspiring to those who understand the pain of feeling like you’ve lost part of your life, of not being able to dedicate yourself to exterior projects, because I’m now finding that a pivot is all I needed—I can have the best of both worlds.
And to those who feel intimidated by giant articles that explain movies, I have to say: I’m with you. Honestly, these much shorter “dad with two kids and no time” reviews are more akin to how I interact with and consume movies, how I find deeper connections to them. There truly is no “definitive” explanation of a movie, and all analysis, no matter how convincing it tries to sound, is purely subjective, is based on our tastes and perspectives. I hope this series shows that anybody can form those sorts of deeper connections with movies. You just have give yourself over to the art.
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