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Highlights
Lines that rip the sheet off reality, leaving only the naked ghost.
the structure of the institution creates a hammer-nail relation between doctor and patient
I think I write to think—not to find out what I think; surely I know what I already think—but to do better thinking
And when I’m thinking well, I can sometimes write that rare, rare sentence or paragraph that feels exactly right, only in the sense that I found the exact right sequence of words and punctuation to express my own thought—the grammar in the thought. That rightness feels so good, like sinking an unlikely shot in pool. The ball is away and apart from you, but you feel it in your body, the knowledge of causation. Never mind luck or skill or free will, you caused that effect—you’re alive!
But more so—it feels like people who urge you to reread books so you can form a new opinion, to update or overwrite the old one, want you to betray your younger self, as if the new opinion is better—as if my new self is better. Maybe I’m not any better? I think some books are better encountered when you’ve read less, lived less, and know less. You can’t wait to read everything until you’re wiser, nor can you already have read everything once. At some point, you just have to read things. I want to defend my fifteen-year-old self from that friend who said, “Read it again.” That self only knew what she knew. That self wasn’t wrong.
And it’s not lost innocence. Youth isn’t innocence, it’s possibility.
I don’t really have a favorite book, but I sometimes think Point Break is my favorite movie. It depends what one means by “favorite.” Is it the same as your desert island movie? Do I think it’s the best movie? It depends what you mean when you say something’s good. There’s a sense in which it’s not a good movie at all—I mean, of course, the 1991 Point Break, starring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, which is in some ways a ridiculous, even stupid movie—yet I am basically always up for watching it, and right when it’s over, I always sort of want to watch it again. I sometimes think there’s a theoretical maximum to the appreciable quality of art—a physical limit, like the speed of light, to how much greatness I can experience. There are many technically better movies than Point Break, many movies with more historical significance. But I can only enjoy them as much as Point Break, because Point Break is the limit for greatness. As the first review on Amazon puts it, “If you don’t like this movie, you don’t like movies.” In this sense, it is the best movie. You can’t go faster than the speed of light. I saw it for the first time in the early nineties, but not in the theater. In my memory it was daytime, either a summer or a weekend afternoon, and my older brother and I watched it on cable, not knowing anything about it, increasingly riveted, giddy. We used to sit on the floor in the den right in front of the TV, and we kept inching closer to the screen, as the tension kept ratcheting up. It ratchets up when FBI agent Angelo Pappas, played by Gary Busey, tells his new partner Johnny Utah, played by Keanu, his theory on the case he’s been working on for years: a group of bank robbers known as the Ex-Presidents are surfers. (The guy who came up with the idea for the movie—“Surfers who rob banks. And an FBI agent that’s a good athlete that goes undercover among those surfers”—said it “wasn’t that original an idea, there’s only like ten ideas”!) It ratchets up when Johnny, a former star quarterback, buys a surfboard and nearly drowns trying to use it. He is dragged to shore by Tyler, played by Lori Petty. Johnny decides to use her to get in with the locals, digging up dirt on her past, finding out where she works. It ratchets up when he tells her his parents died in a car wreck, knowing hers both died in a plane crash, so she’ll teach him how to surf. It’s so interesting when actors have to lie or act in a role—it’s like a frame narrative, acting in quotation marks. The movies suggest that FBI agents must have an interest in acting; they have to be willing to go undercover. It ratchets up again the night of their first lesson, when Johnny meets Bodhi, played by Patrick Swayze, on the beach. Bodhi is short for “bodhisattva”: “a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings.” Surfing movies are always about initiation. There’s a fool who knows nothing—about surfing, the ocean, this connection between waves and nirvana. The sea as beyond. In Point Break, Johnny is a double initiate, doubly ignorant and dangerous. In one of the first scenes, his boss, Ben Harp, played by John C. McGinley, tells him, “You know nothing. In fact, you know less than nothing. If you even knew that you knew nothing, then that would be something, but you don’t.” Why is that? Why is there always a fool? In movies, surfing is knowledge, but also a manifestation of ego. The fool is a foil against the guru, the bodhisattva. Without the fool, the guru wouldn’t know all; he’d know nothing also. They all play a game of football in the dark, lit by campfire and jeep headlights. This is when it starts getting really good, when the split occurs, the fissure—Bodhi recognizes Johnny (“The Ohio State Buckeyes, all-conference!”), so they know something real about him. Not everything, of course. They don’t know the pretty fool is a cop. Johnny sticks around to insinuate their world, but really falls in love with Tyler, and with surfing. Johnny thinks he’s found his guys when some territorial “Nazi assholes” try to beat him up on the beach—surfers are notoriously territorial, at least in the movies—but Bodhi shows up and the two of them beat up the assholes instead. Johnny sets up a raid on the guys’ house, then goes night-surfing with Tyler (“At least nobody’s going to see how bad you are,” she says) and sleeps on the beach. He’s late to his own raid, and things ratchet up again. A surfer played by Anthony Kiedis, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, gets his foot shot to shreds. One of the assholes tries to push Johnny’s face into a lawnmower; he’s less than an inch from the blur of blades, his resistance giving out, when Pappas shoots out the motor and saves him. (This part was always hard to watch, but even more so now that I know the pain of going to work underslept.) It’s all a mistake. They’re into drugs but not bank robbery, and in the course of events Pappas and Johnny have to kill two or three of the assholes. “I hate that,” Pappas says, “it looks bad on my report.” This is the system the director Kathryn Bigelow refers to in a documentary about the making of Point Break. It’s why she was attracted to the movie: “It’s a system versus the anti-system.” It’s cops versus robbers—Robin Hood shit. It’s Holden versus school, Rabbit versus church and society. Johnny finally realizes Bodhi and his friends are the bank robbers. He trails them for a day or so and figures out their plan. Johnny and Pappas stake out the scene of the next heist, but they almost miss the whole thing—the Ex-Presidents are known for getting in and out in ninety seconds, never shooting anybody, never going for the vault—while ordering sandwiches. (In that same documentary, Swayze remarks on Busey’s “fabulously interesting choices,” then quotes Busey’s famous line: “Utah! Get me two!”) Then follows a car chase, and then an awesome foot chase, Johnny chasing Bodhi through a residential neighborhood in LA, down alleys and through houses and backyards. It’s Keanu but it wasn’t actually Swayze; he was indisposed that day, and his character is in disguise anyway, wearing a suit and a rubber Ronald Reagan mask, the kind that pulls over your whole head. (A movie with this many masks and body doubles asks a lot of trust from its audience. The first time we watch Bodhi surf, it’s clearly not Patrick Swayze. It makes me think of a poster for the animated movie Polar Express, dubbed into German, that a friend once saw in Berlin—in what sense was it “starring Tom Hanks”?) Johnny isn’t masked, so the act is now threatened, the fracture, but not entirely dissolved—Bodhi knows Johnny’s a cop, but he doesn’t know if Johnny knows he, the Ex-President, is Bodhi. They sort of make eye contact, from maybe fifty yards away—it’s a little hard to tell, in movie space. Johnny’s knee is blown out, but he has Bodhi in his sights and he’s a crack shot (Pappas: “When you shoot, you don’t miss”). Bodhi holds still, almost daring him to shoot. Ratchet up, ratchet up. I always feel I have to move during this scene, to lean forward, move my legs, get closer to the screen. Johnny can’t do it; he kind of loves Bodhi. His friend, his enemy—as Guy asks of Bruno, when Bruno falls overboard, in Strangers on a Train, “Where was his friend, his brother?” Johnny unloads his magazine into the air and screams. At this point Bodhi starts to lose the thread. He starts talking about “stakes” and “the game.” Young Grommet, the one who wears the LBJ mask, played by a surfer named BoJesse Christopher, says, “Fuck the stakes, Bodhi! I mean the only person this is a game to is you! This is real! I mean this is serious shit and I, for one, am scared.” Then they all show up at Johnny’s, to take him someplace, but friendly: “You are going to love this.” Johnny’s knee and his face are all fucked up. Temporarily, that undissolved, unresolved split becomes strange. It’s hard to track who knows what. Why are they pretending? Which quotes are we in? The first skydiving scene is somewhat a release from the tension, the high torque. (Point Break always seems to contain another scene, another act, to hold more than you remember, like Hamlet. I can’t believe it’s only two hours long.) The music in this scene is soaring, uplifting—“the orchestral tones are at times euphoric,” as one review of the score put it. Their movements are balletic. “Sex with the gods!” one of them cries. All the dialogue in these scenes took “poetic license,” in Swayze’s language—you can’t actually talk, or hear, I guess, when you’re free-falling in high winds. Swayze really did dive out of planes, so many times in fact that the crew finally asked him to stop for insurance reasons, but for the close-ups, the stunt coordinator rigged up a circle of cranes to hover the actors, who were filmed with a floating camera. Bigelow must not have been quite as obsessed with authenticity as her then-husband James Cameron, who insisted on filming all the diving scenes in The Abyss “wet for wet”—meaning, if the characters were supposed to be underwater, the actors had to be underwater as well—almost killing Ed Harris in the process. Now that Bodhi has lost it, he’s breaking his own rules. When they rob the last bank they go for the vault. A big guy on the floor softly whispers to a nearby security guard: I’m a cop. He gestures toward his concealed weapon. By this time, it’s an anti-cop movie. The security guard cringes and we cringe with him, he cringes for us. No, we think, no—don’t do it! The cop doesn’t help anything. A bunch of people get shot, he gets shot himself. I wonder how much poetic license was involved in the second skydiving scene, when Johnny jumps out of the plane without a chute, holding nothing but a handgun. Obviously, this is insane, but what I mean is, is it physically possible that he could catch up with Bodhi, who had jumped out fifteen seconds earlier, and was that much closer to the earth? It’s a pointless question, like asking if Keanu is a good actor. I remember how shocked we were the first time we watched it, when he jumps. My brother has a particular, high-pitched laugh that only comes out when he’s really surprised, and he laughed like that then, and I can hear it now. It’s like the wrench has been twisted so tight something breaks. Euphoria. Insanity. When I stopped rereading books, I didn’t stop rewatching movies. It doesn’t take as much time, for one thing. And movies I’ve watched many times are a very great comfort to me. It’s what I do when I’m too sick, exhausted, or anxious to read. I sometimes replay movies in my head to relax when I can’t fall asleep. Outside of my squidness, there remains a question: Would I get bored of Point Break or Moby-Dick on a desert island? A Twitter acquaintance told me he once spent a summer in a beach house on the Jersey shore with “no TV hookup and one single tape for the VCR: Point Break.” He watched it over and over, “like it was the only thing ever filmed … it was glorious.” Is good art exhaustible? To quote Johnny Utah, when Ben Harp wonders if the FBI has “an asshole shortage”: “Not so far.” Rewatching Point Break, in order to take notes and write about it, wasn’t quite the sublime experience of watching it to watch it.