“Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973) does something unprecedented. It makes religion groovy and transforms the Son of God into a pop culture icon. Until the film’s release, hymns about the Lord had been associated with bible thumpers in shirts buttoned up to their necks, and the scriptures had been abstruse material for catechism classes. Suddenly, in the first collaborative hit between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, youngsters in bell-bottoms, fringes, and shirtless vests let down their hair, expose their belly buttons, and gyrate their hips to Godly lyrics accompanied by drums and electric guitars. Nothing biblical here. These acolytes are of the me generation. They dance with such abandon and sing to such a feverish pitch that rock-n-roll, in the Age of Aquarius, is elevated to the spiritual.

I was seven years old when “Jesus Christ Superstar” was screened in Manila on Holy Week of 1974. Going to the theater to watch it was a family event. At dinner that night, I could hardly digest my meal. The scene where Pontius Pilate (Barry Dennen) lynches Jesus (Ted Neeley) filled me with visions of blood. We might have gone to mass after the film because instead of food, I could smell the choking odor of church incense like sweat and tears coagulating down my throat. Whip lashes… vestment hem rustling against a red carpet… gashes on Jesus’s back… a chain-dangling bowl of smoke… these could have been scenes out of “The Omen” (1976) rather than from a rock opera and a prayer sermon. Religion is disturbing with its stories of betrayal and Satanism. The number 666 will forever connote evil. “Jesus Christ Superstar” is something else. The music got me through dinner without vomiting. Even though the film has lepers and death, all the bad on earth juxtaposed with the good, none of that outdoes Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman) when she croons, mellifluous as a nightingale, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” or Jesus as he belts out “Gethsemane” while genuflecting before the fire of the setting sun.

For my brother, Raymund, who was then only 14, the film was more than a pleasurable viewing experience. It changed his life. The soundtrack to “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the first long-playing album he purchased. It was a two-record set. The cover opened up as a scrapbook to present pictures of scenes from the movie. Of all the records my brother would collect over the years, he must have held on to this the longest because my memory of the cover consists of musk and a faded crucifix against an azure sky whitened around the edges from wear and tear. Some dreams are hard to let go off, and “Jesus Christ Superstar” is one of them. The rock opera marked the birth of my brother’s aspiration to be a singer.

My brother had what it takes to pass the audition for Kundirana, a music group of La Salle High School boys that is prestigious in the Philippines for engineering the careers of obscure musical talents to national renown, the most famous being Gary Valenciano. My brother made TV appearances and went on a cross country tour. Photo albums show him and other members aboard a bus, laughing and dozing off, girls with them even though this was an all-male minstrel. Groupies, I suppose. Why not? Wherever you’ve got a band of 16 to 17-year-old boys, girls are bound to latch on, especially when the boys have melody flowing out of their mouths.

The rest of the family and I got to see my brother perform live. In white Elvis attire of flared pants and plunging neckline, he did a solo rendition of “Old Man River.” It was just him onstage and his baritone timbre. That was the first time I saw him as somebody other than the guy who would order me to change the TV channel or to fetch a canister of Pringles. There must have been instrumental accompaniments, as well, but I didn’t hear any of that. With the theater as his domain and he the sole person in the spotlight, I understood at last the seduction of performance. It’s in every scene of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Our biblical heroes, as center dots to the massive circle of Jerusalem, possess heaven and earth through the might of music. For that moment, my brother owned the world.

Decisions being what they are, this stamp of indomitability was not meant to continue past high school. It was natural for my brother to want to pursue a singing career… Kundirana only selects a handful out of the dozens of auditionees… but life as a grown up is not a performance, and on this opinion my parents were steadfast. My brother went off to college to study business, a practical choice and one not entirely his. Such is Asian culture – the three primary avenues for a career as laid down by our elders are law, finance, and medicine. Given its nature of economic uncertainty, a profession in the arts is a rarity for a man, talent notwithstanding, which is why when I was earning my B.A. in English at Tufts, I was the only Asian guy in many of my classes. Although my brother did what he was told, the yearning to sing couldn’t be squelched. A great love never dies, only my brother had to contain his great love to parties, karaoke bars, and church.

My brother might have wondered at the path he had been made to take, while I was given free-rein to choose my own. Perhaps my parents didn’t see the life of a scribe as that enormous of a monetary risk. Look around us – papers and magazines everywhere. Words are our primary form of communication, and therefore a means of survival. Words are practical. Music is purely an expression of the soul.

That was a long time ago. We have aged and have since moved on. The scandal we caused our parents over bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and hair grown to such length as to cover our ears is passé. One thing remains: over 40 years later, “Jesus Christ Superstar” continues to sing and dance in the hearts of those who witnessed its phenomenon. My brother now has four sons, one of who is himself a guitar-strumming balladeer, and so it is in the next generation that the spirit of my brother’s dream lives on.

35 years have passed and the scenes continue to haunt me as fragments of a dream: a capsized boat in a stormy sea; a wreck of an adolescent boy wishing to his therapist that he, instead of his brother, had drowned; father and mother in a moment of truth as he asks why she would fixate on his shoes for their son’s funeral. “Ordinary People” (1980) was the first adult-themed movie I ever saw. I was 13 years old. My cousins and I, four guys in all, had not intended to watch it. The title advertised on the theater marquee was to some slasher flick, so we had expected gore and screaming girls. What we got instead was a family in a white-column house, polite dialogue, and Pachelbel’s Canon. My cousins wanted to walk out. I convinced them to stay; we had paid for the tickets. I didn’t know what type of film the rest of the audience thought it was in for because nobody was leaving. So what? As the story on screen unfolded, I became a different person.

The disintegration of the conversations between parents Calvin (Donald Sutherland) and Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) Jarrett from emotionally guarded to angry exacerbated by son Conrad’s suicidal alienation in no way reflects my family, yet I thought of my family even so. Conrad (Timothy Hutton) believes his mother hates him for surviving the boating accident while his brother, Jordan (Scott Doebler), dies. Beth declares to Calvin upon his disclosure of their son’s accusation that no mother hates her son. That could have been the first time I ever wondered what thoughts preoccupied my parents over me and my siblings when we squabbled. Discordances erupted over my brother’s hours on the phone, my sister’s ever shortening skirt hem, and my rebellious silence at the dinner table. What I was rebelling against, I don’t even remember. Once, while my father and I were watching a gymnastics competition on TV, he remarked that gymnasts are short. I said with a tone of agitation, “Not always.” He shook his head. “You always need to disagree with me. You are so antagonistic.” And he walked out the room. True. Dissention was the order of the day for this 13-year-old know-it-all. Adulthood, the only bridge to the generation gap, was a long time away. Until then, my parents had to suffer. And I didn’t care.

Yet whatever arguments and discussions within the walls of my home, no rift has ever occurred among us five. We had fun on summer trips to the U.S. The largeness of American malls and their overstock of products from music records to Crayola-colored socks excited me, and with all those Stateside aunts, uncles, cousins, and two grandmothers, I was never lonely. Back in Manila, our routine of school for us kids, work for father, and home tending for mother provided stability. No staged studio photographs exist of us. We didn’t need them. Candid shots of us smiling on birthdays, Christmases, and lazy Sundays are plenty, which is exactly what makes the heightened drama of “Ordinary People” spellbinding. The Jarretts are not ordinary. Far from it. I was ordinary… pampered, comfortable, and boring ordinary.

In school, my English teacher, Mrs. Olmos, mentioned “Ordinary People” to explain irony, pointing out that beneath the calm of a picturesque house in an idyllic neighborhood simmers turbulence, the opposite state from what a veneer of normalcy suggests. I felt a kinship to Mrs. Olmos, she who enunciated every syllable and whose bangles tinkled as she wrote on the blackboard. She seemed to be giving a performance. I hadn’t spoken to anybody about “Ordinary People,” least of all my cousins; they were only too eager to leave the theater once the lights were turned back on. Now here was a teacher saying that she had seen the film and had gotten something out of it, too – material for a lecture, certainly, but that wasn’t all. By using “Ordinary People” to explain the literary device of irony, Mrs. Olmos was insinuating that it is the extraordinary rather than the ordinary that inspires stories.

That was what I wanted for myself – irony in my life, to be paradoxical and raging with unpredictability, to be interesting. I had craved this for years. I used to fantasize that my parents were divorced. I had transferred from Catholic school to the International School in the fourth grade, and American students who spoke of stepparents and stepsiblings fascinated me. Two families must have been better than one. You could claim to have two homes and not be lying. As I got older and my interest in the arts flourished, I became enamored by the genius of creativity attributed to the likes of Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Vivien Leigh – the schizophrenic. Substantial as their output had been, none of it stands entirely on its own as separate from the artist. “Starry Night,” “The Bell Jar,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/a-streetcar-named-desire-forever-young/)… we inevitably link the greatness of those works with the mental state of their creators. Van Gogh severed his ear as a declaration of love. Plath gassed herself to death. Leigh so identified with the role of Blanche Dubois that in every film she did afterwards, she would continuously slip into the character. To create with such ferocity that your emotions spew out of your pores as plasma permeating the air is indeed the stuff of legends.

Alas, no. The romanticism of lunacy belongs to the realm of the stars. I had to make do with the banality that is me. My compulsion for the movies had grown so strong that I fancied myself an actor. If I wanted to be a tortured soul, then I’d probably have more of a jolly time being one in make believe than in real life. It happened for Timothy Hutton. He got the Oscar. One problem: I couldn’t act. To spin my own stories of bliss and torment with words is a gift I would discover years later. By then I would come to accept that I’m average. This is also the reason I’m a writer. Had I been spectacular, then what would I have to imagine?

Ordinary is good. Ordinary is a blessing. Bandaged wrists are no badge of honor. As it is, I experience my share of life’s ebb and flow, and they provide me enough tears and laughter to contend with for a day.

No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive…

Although Pablo Neruda’s poem, “The Dead Woman,” is in part the inspiration to “Truly, Madly, Deeply” (1990), the heroine of our film, Nina (Juliet Stevenson), isn’t dead. She isn’t even dying. She’s healthy, young, and vivacious. A worldly Brit, she speaks Spanish, has the capacity to make others smile, and is attune with the social issues of the day from racism to class discrimination. What people do not see is that she is not completely alive. Her great love, Jamie (Alan Rickman) – a cellist of acerbic wit and who bears Donald Sutherland’s profile – has died. It isn’t clear to us how long ago he died or how, but we sense it was unexpected and that too much time has passed for Nina to still be grieving. Fortunately, she will be happy again. Jamie returns from the grave. He, too, cannot let go, not until Nina regains a life. To this end, he helps her the best way a ghost can – by giving her a taste of existence six feet under.

Friendships do thrive, so one is never alone for an eternity. Jamie has actually found himself a gang of buffoons, all of who happen to be as talented a musician as he. The problem is that these guy spirits are constantly with him. Nina’s flat transforms into a frat house of sorts. They turn over furniture, lounge in front of the telly, and walk in unannounced. Life with Jamie was never this messy. Regardless, Nina deals with it because love is about tolerance, and love is one emotion Nina has no shortage of, which is why men are attracted to her at every turn. One suitor rises above the others as the saving grace. He is Mark (Michael Maloney), a magician who has roses and doves up his sleeves and who possesses the virtues of patience and compassion.

The beauty of “Truly, Madly, Deeply” is that it makes us believe in the plausibility of a second chance. People in our lives come and go. As difficult as it is to say goodbye, that we are able to do so warrants us closure. With those who depart suddenly and bereft of a parting word, we have a void in our hearts that we fill with desires of what endearing things we could have said and done. Not to have expressed a simple thank you is itself a loss. Nina is lucky that Jamie returns to show her that love should not be wasted on the dead. She is lucky that Mark enters the picture to share in her zing for life. Reality doesn’t provide such a perfectly packaged gift. We are often left alone to find peace within ourselves. A second chance comes from our ability to move past grief and regret, to forgive ourselves for letting slip by the moments available to us to do well. Accept it. We are guilty of stupid things all the time.

I’m not sure I know how to grieve. I’ve lost people – a couple of friends in a car crash, a cousin to cancer, and both my grandmothers – but while I shed tears at their funerals, I carried on in a matter of days with my frivolous diversions of weekend clubbing and shopping at Armani Express. I do have regrets, however. I didn’t care when Nena left my family after nearly ten years of cooking our meals and doing our laundry. I wasn’t sad when our dog, a Dalmatian named Heidi, died. Given the separation between upstairs and downstairs in Philippine culture, I had been guarded with my affection for the domestic help, and with Heidi, a church sermon when I was a child preached that it is a sin to love animals.

On Thanksgiving weekend some years ago, I took care of a friend’s puppy and something happened. I started to miss Heidi. She used to keep my father company as he’d tan in the garden. She’d shut her eyes and raise her face to the sky as if about to take wing to the sun. One day the piano chair fell on her tail. For the wound to heal, the gardener cast her tail in wood so that whenever she would wag it, a bang against walls and hard-surfaced furniture announced her approach. Those were the years when Nena would treat me with my favorite dish of steamed pork or chicken macaroni as my after school lunch. I knew she had cooked something special just for me whenever she would tell me to look in the oven as I walked through the door. She had neither a husband nor kids of her own. It was solely for us whom she pressed our shirts and boiled rice with the duty she would have had her own kin. Her fingers were rough and brown as ginger root from years of loyalty.

All these memories along with a hodgepodge of others from that period in my life surged forth because of my friend’s puppy. I was close to turning 40 and had been in America for nearly 20 years, here where people embrace animals, where the distinction between the haves and have nots is less pronounced. Attribute my regret to westernization or to age, either way, I wish… truly, madly, and deeply wish… that I had hugged Heidi more and had told Nena how kind she had been to ascertain that I was never hungry. I loved them both, and I love them still. They never knew it, and they never will. That’s regret.

What is grief?

Maybe grief is a drowning emptiness mixed with anger. In a wrenching scene with her therapist, Nina cries that she is angry, angry at people in love, at people wasting love. Most of all, she is angry at Jamie for dying on her to love alone. If this is grief, then nobody has to die for it to be experienced. How often have we been angry at ourselves for wasting love? For not grabbing it when it was clearly making itself available to us? For not daring to approach it because of the fear of rejection?

Nina learns to go on without Jamie. For one thing, she’s too smart to lock herself away in a cold flat in the company of the dead. Then again, breathing the air of the four seasons has nothing to do with intellect. It’s largely a matter of common sense. When something feels right, exorcise all ghosts of holding back and jump at the golden moment, or else spend every tomorrow mourning a life that could have been.

It has neither plot nor characterization, neither a sweeping romance nor a family saga. It induces sleep mid-way through its three-hour run, and it has scenes that throw me into a quandary. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s love letter to humankind, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is one of the most spellbinding films I have ever seen. When the curtains draw, the audience is faced with silence and a black screen. Then a miracle. The sun rises to shed light on this new world of ours to the bombast of Richard Strauss’s “Spach Zarathustra.” It is a birth akin to the emergence of a baby from the darkness of the womb into the brilliance of life. Earth is an expanse of dust and mountains rather than an Eden of vegetation, and instead of Adam and Eve, we have apes. They hunt. They commune. They make tools out of bones. One ape throws a bone into the air that it has used as a weapon for murder. As the bone descends, this is where I realize I am in the presence of a soulful storyteller. A spacecraft in orbit replaces the bone, and suddenly we are four million years into the future. No other moment in film history has encapsulated the ingenuity of human evolution than this singular image. It knocks the wind out of me.

Film historians dissect “2001: A Space Odyssey” with the sedulousness that theologians do the bible. I haven’t read any of their analysis. I have no idea what the monolith represents nor do I care to. Its appearance in Prehistoric Times is weird, driving those simians crazy with its emission of a strident trill, and every time it pops up in other scenes, I am lost in space. Kubrick’s prophetic vision of machines outsmarting us humans is what astounds me. The director presents a more convincing picture of our destiny than does Nostradamus. Case in point. I do a lot of data entry at work. Once, I input something that generated an error, which caused a temp (not even my supervisor) to chide, “You did something wrong. A computer never makes mistakes.” And just last week, Turbotax prompted me to manually fill out paperwork and mail my returns because I fumbled up on the website. How could Kubrick have presaged any of this? We may not be confronted with a nemesis on the level of Hal, the devil in the form of wires and buttons that sabotages a mission to Jupiter and that ejects into space astronauts intent on short-circuiting its dastardly deeds. Still, the headache a computer can generate makes me want to smash it.

In the end, man wins. This is why “2001: A Space Odyssey” is beloved. Hal’s wires are disconnected. The hero in the fight between Frankenstein and the monster he has created is astronaut Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea). Bowman lives on, ages, and becomes bedridden. At the point of death, the touch of a monolith that appears at the foot of his bed transforms him into a fetus enclosed in an orb of light adrift in space. Imagine the intellectualism critics have applied to this symbolism.

For me, my reading of it is visceral. Here it is. The mysteries of the galaxy are fathomable compared to the enigma of human inventiveness. What we have achieved with bones and rocks is as bedazzling as the sun, as enormous as the great unknown. Every death leads to a birth. The perpetuation of our species takes us leaps and bounds above the breakthroughs of the previous generation.

We humans are the center of the universe.

I do not deny that this is an intimidating concept, especially given that everyone in the film is a scientist. As such, we are under the impression that only Einsteins are capable of contributing to the world. That’s all it is – an impression. If this were a fact, then what am I doing here? I scored 450 in my SAT mathematics. A grade of B- in Biology 101 my freshman year in college was reason for me to celebrate. With a record such as that, I might as well be a number the world does without as a means of controlling the population surplus. Fortunately, I’ve got other talents as do the rest of us who are right-brained, and even for those who love deciphering puzzles, an invention doesn’t have to be complex, at least not according to the standards of a techie nerd. Take the printing press. When I mentioned to a friend upon the arrival of the second millennium that Johannes Gutenberg’s machine was one of the greatest inventions of all time, he dismissed it as an object constructed of wood and ink, insignificant compared to what Steve Jobs has given us; anybody could have made the printing press. Not true. That clunky thing put an end to the Dark Ages and ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, disseminated education to the masses, and gave rise to the Reformation. The change in Europe was so cataclysmic that it resounded in the far corners of the globe. The Age of Exploration would never have occurred otherwise, so where would you and I be today? We can thank Gutenberg for the voyages across the seven seas our forebears took to bring us to where we are.

Whatever role we play in society, whether big or small, is vital to the flourishing of a civilization, which is why the apes in “2001: A Space Odyssey” go haywire when one of their kind bludgeons to death a fellow primate and why we are as courteous to the janitor at work as much as we are to our boss. We need to be kind to ourselves, as well. I am learning this every day. The routine of a desk job I have established for myself has made life stagnant, and I tend to dwell on what I’d rather be doing. Then I remind myself that I am already engaged in my heart’s desire, albeit one tiny step at a time. I write daily. This blog gets me out of bed. I had the guts to introduce myself to a guy a couple of weeks ago whom I had been admiring from afar. Whether or not he likes me back is irrelevant; I finally made a move. One small dose of a reward will lead to a gold mine. Someday.

So don’t hold back in pursuing your passion, whether it’s opening a coffee shop or penning the next great American novel. Trepidation will not stop time. As Stanley Kubrick shows us, our duration on earth is a flash in the infinite cycle of creation. That’s exactly as it should be because that it is how magic works: life lasts a mere moment, but its legacy is everlasting.

We Filipinos thrive on melodrama. Nearly 400 years of Spanish colonization have given us telenovelas, songs with voices that warble in anguish, and crimes of passion. Brawls erupt upon one man’s glance at another man’s woman. Cuckolded husbands kill wives. Fathers kill daughters and their seducers when caught in a carnal act. We justify manslaughter in the name of love, and we bewail this most maddening of human emotions to God, Jesus, and Mary. Only in 2010 was a bill passed repealing a law that enforced light penalties to such murders. Regardless, this doesn’t change the way we are. We relish in the crucifixion of the heart; love isn’t real unless it stabs.

No yearning is more excruciating than the unrequited. Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, knows this all too well. He could not have made “The Law of Desire” (1987) otherwise, and he certainly was keenly aware that every one of us on this planet has experienced a form of unreciprocated affection, whether it is with the girl next door or Elvis Presley. “The Law of Desire” is about a triangle that involves a celebrated movie director, Pablo (Eusebio Poncela); a partner of convenience, Juan (Miguel Molina); and a fan, Antonio (Antonio Banderas). They cruise, fuck, pour out their ardor in letters, and speak such lines as “it’s not your fault if you don’t love me, and it’s not my fault if I love you… if I forgot you like you said, I’d end up empty inside…” The ultimate Jacques Brel hymn to love, “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” punctuates each moment of a caress:

Don’t leave me. I offer you pearls of rain from countries where it never rains. I will cross the world until after my death to cover your body with gold and bright light.

 

As though this weren’t enough passion, Antonio in the arms of Pablo sings in the climactic scene a ballad that speaks for all the open wounds in the audience:

I doubt that you will ever love me like I love you. I doubt you will find as pure a love as the one you’ll find in me. You will have a thousand adventures without love, but at the end of it all, there’s only pain.

These men are sexy, fervent, and poetic. Love is in the air, in their walk, in every word, and in every look. So why is all their devotion unrequited?

Simple. If these inamoratos were happy, no Almodovar film would exist. Leave it to the Americans to make a stale love story. What we have instead are the primary ingredients to a distinctly Spanish (and Filipino) romance – lunacy and obsession. Antonio is no ordinary film aficionado. He is a stalker, one who orchestrates each meeting with Pablo at a film premiere, an amusement park, and a nightclub, and one so damn good looking that the victim can’t resist inviting the guy to his place for a roll in the sack. A single night leads to others, until Antonio becomes so insanely enamored that he goes to execrable extremes to infiltrate the director’s life.

In a tale of operatic grandeur, a dramatic ending is de rigueur. True to his reputation, Almodovar gives us a tragic finale to end all tragic finales. Law officers gather on the street. Silence oppresses the night. Police lights flash blue. Everyone looks up at the balcony to Pablo’s apartment, waiting. At last, it comes – a gun shot. At the foot of a makeshift altar to the Virgin Mary, we have the corpse of a self-sacrifice.

What a fitting way to end heartbreak. No woman in the history of the world has suffered nearly as much as the sacred Virgin. Our prayers to her for strength and guidance have endowed us with the perverse hunger for this most violent of tribulations. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need her. So we wallow in misery. And although suicide is a sin, done for love, it is the stuff of art. It is beauty.

But what an ugly feeling unrequited love is. I had a couple of instances of it in college. Because the guys I longed for were straight, their unresponsiveness was acceptable. Then I moved to San Francisco, where at a nightclub, I met a smooth talker of a man who possessed a physique made for military action – sinewy and muscular with a crew cut to complete the image. We spent the night together, woke the next morning in each other’s arms, and exchanged numbers. He said he’d call in a couple of days. He never did. I pined after him like a dog whining for its master, imagining chance encounters at Costco, in Union Square, in Palo Alto. Aside from the visual impact, the man had degrees from U. Penn and Stanford, and throughout the night, he would look into my eyes, blink, and whisper, “I want to make love to you.” How could I not fall for him? When he finally did call, I was home to pick up (no cell phones then; this was 1993). After I greeted hello, he stalled and said, “I meant to call somebody else. I pressed the wrong number. Sorry.”

Yup, the guy was Latino. The one time I had the courage to call him, I asked, “Have you ever watched ‘The Law of Desire’?” His answer: “Oh, that’s one of my favorite films.” I have no recollection of whatever else we might have talked about. The conversation was strained. Those who have experienced reciprocated love say both parties have words flowing out of them at the first meeting. I knew it wasn’t meant to be. But since I didn’t know him, I saw him as flawless, and onto him I projected desires of intimacy and fidelity.

God, why this pain? How long will it last?

A friend consoled me that, in time, the pang would wear off and I would forget. Yes and no. I’m over the guy. I haven’t seen him in 20 years. I hardly think about him. If I were to see him again, I don’t know if I’d want him. And yet, I remember everything that transpired that night upon our first handshake and the months of emotional debilitation that ensued. That, I will never forget nor do I want to.

Neither can I forget “The Law of Desire.” The film is an ode to passion. When the mind summons an event from the past, the emotions surrounding that instance wash anew over us. They may not linger as before, but they remain smoldering in the core of our being until the day we die. It’s called being alive. That is why our hearts need to ache every now and then, for only in heartache can we take flight in the rapture of true love when it finally happens.

“The Boys in the Band” (1970) is a groundbreaking film that in the 45 years since its release has fallen out of favor with many gay men. “Self-loathing” is the term frequently associated with it. The “boys” in the title references a group of homosexual male friends gathered at a birthday celebration that devolves into an infernal mess of insecurities and childhood traumas. What starts out as a line dance on a roof top terrace turns into a circle of truth in which each guest is dared to phone the person he loves, even at the risk of humiliation due to the possibility that the person at the other end of the line could be a heterosexual man. Name callings ricochet like bullets. Celebrant Harold (Leonard Frey) refers to himself as an “ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy” then quickly turns around and accuses host Michael (Kenneth Nelson) of abhorring his predilection for men. Michael calls guest Donald (Frederick Combs) a “card carrying cunt.” Donald certainly must have said something in retaliation for such a disgusting insult. But at this point, the hate is so overflowing that every antagonism and defensive outburst jumble together the way garbage does on a barge. These boys are self-loathing, indeed. May I add angry, bitter, bitchy, nasty, and mean. I will also be so brazen as to declare that these vices are precisely what warrant the film its virtue. Although we may not entirely like the manner these guests behave and treat each other, the emotional turmoil they find themselves in speaks the truth of what I myself have experienced as a gay man for the past 25 years.

John Keats said a mighty long time ago that “beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The poet could not have predicted the can of worms the liberation movements of the mid-20^th century would open, in particular the movement that would build the foundation of the community of which I am now a member in San Francisco. Truth is important, I agree, and it can be beautiful. Truth is enlightenment, after all. But it can also be ugly. Wisdom never comes without pain, and I mean the lacerating kind of pain that makes our hearts bleed.

My initial viewing of “The Boys in the Band” was an accident. I was 15 years old and living in the Philippines. While my parents were hosting a party, I was in their room, flipping through the TV remote when I chanced upon a man as he waited on a curbside, casserole in hand, for the pedestrian light to turn green. Chin raised in impudence, eyes wide as a toad’s, he was hoity-toity towards a woman dressed in a moo-moo and who was acting likewise towards him. Emory (Cliff Gorman) was the first gay movie character I ever saw and he was in the Big Apple, a city I considered a Valhalla on earth by virtue of my sister, who was attending college at Columbia University. Imagine yourself as me – a Hollywood-struck Filipino boy with a fashion plate sister in America’s most revered metropolis. On school breaks, she would regale me with accounts of clubs, parties, and shopping, her eyes lit as if she were a princess who had been granted a kingdom. She was, in a way. Her closest friend at the time was Robin Givens (before Mike Tyson entered the picture). They once got to ride a fire truck because a group of firemen, good Samaritans that they are, were concerned over the safety of a pair of beautiful teen girls who appeared dazed and lost in a rough neighborhood. So on went the siren, and armored in work gear of helmets, boots, and shields, these flame killers chauffeured my sister and Robin to the party the two had planned on reaching by traversing Central Park. At night. Who else has a story like that to tell? Only my sister.

That was where my head was at when the festivity on TV started – an adventure in New York free of parental guidance. In this sense, you can say that I didn’t see “The Boys in the Band” for what it really is. What 15-year-old possesses such a deep level of astuteness anyway? All I was aware of was the thrill I felt in witnessing my tribesmen pour their guts out over what an experience it is to grow up a sissy. Sure, they were as frightened as a bunch of cornered cats. Nevertheless, they divulged secrets; they empathized with each other; and they weren’t alone. For that instant, I was no longer alone either.

Life decisions brought me to San Francisco instead of to New York in 1990 at the age of 23. Revelry was in the air. I formed my first group of gay friends. We had parties to get drunk at every weekend and clubs every night to dance in till dawn. We were young and thus we managed at work the next day with the energy an eight-hour sleep provides. But I also quickly realized that for all the hype of solidarity and pride, the gay community was… and continues to be… fractured. Back then, bars existed that were designated venues for specific races: N-Touch for Asians; Esta Noche for Latinos; the Pendulum for blacks. Labels were created to identify those who fixated on a race: Rice Queen, Bean Queen, and Chocolate (sometimes Dinge) Queen. Meanwhile, white gay men stuck together in their own bars from the Castro to the South of Market and all the way up to Pacific Heights.

In the age of online hook-ups, the racial segregation remains apparent. Personal ads state “not into Asians,” “not into blacks,” and “white only.” Discrimination also extends to body types and mannerisms as manifested by the pronouncements of “no fats” and “no fems” and the ever endless search for “only straight acting guys.” We even have gay porn stars who deny any homosexual inclination whatsoever, as if being gay was shameful, and who insist instead that they are straight blokes in it for the money.

None of this exemplifies love and acceptance. It’s heart wrenching. We gay men are, to a large degree, guilty of the self-loathing of which we accuse Harold and his band of buddies. And with the alpha male archetype of muscled physiques dominating the gay media, it’s apparent that all the brawn we’re encouraged to hide our bodies beneath is an armor to protect ourselves against something that’s disturbing and deep-rooted in our psyche.

Michael makes a tear-soaked bid: “If we can just learn not to hate ourselves.” Kenneth Nelson might not have been acting when he said this. He was gay as were many of the other cast members, and they would all fall victim to AIDS. We can only assume that the issues of aging, body image, and bullying that saturate the film hit close to home for the performers. As for me, I thank writer Mart Crowley and director William Friedkin for “The Boys in the Band.” Had Hollywood provided me at 15 a glimpse of my future the gay romantic comedies of today that feature pretty white boys falling in love and living happily ever after, then… God, help me… I really would have been screwed.

Hong Kong constitutes my earliest memory. When I was one, my father’s career with the Bank of America took him from Manila to the former British colony, where we lived in a building perched on a mountain that overlooked the ocean. Repulse Bay Beach was our playground. I can still see the tide rushing towards me, the crest carved in the form of foaming clouds fallen to the earth. I am lying stomach down on the shore, and a feeling I have not known before that is part excitement, part fear overwhelms me. Nothing can harm me, I think, because Daddy and Mommy are near. Yet the wall of water surging forth compounds my smallness in relation to nature.

Water was ever present in the formation of my mind. Over 40 years later, it floods me with memories that place and time rather than sequence link. I now sit on a bench onboard a yacht, my feet barely touching the floor, as my family joins the Normans in prayer for a storm that has stranded us out at sea to subside. Now my father, with a tone of factuality to his voice as if he were teaching me to count, points to cars in the basement garage that a hurricane turned over the night before. A tidal wave on TV mounts to the syncopated trumpets of “Hawaii Five-O.” My mother yanks me by the arm from a toilet. She laughs, not at my slipping into a commode, but at the two of us drenched in rain as we run downhill to a noodle stand.

Since memory starts at three, these remembrances encompass only one year. The memories that I have amassed ever since have added to the mélange to create me into the person I am today. Months intertwine – years, events, and people, too. They are the solar plexus of my consciousness. It would be impossible to subsist on a single memory, blithe as it is, yet that is the challenge “After Life” (1998) presents.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda has a peculiar vision of what awaits us when we die. He doesn’t believe in hell, only in heaven. To get there, we must pass through purgatory – a snow laden landscape where stands a sole edifice that houses the departed. Gray and block-like, it has the stodginess of a bureaucratic office. No harps and angel choirs here. Counselors conduct the business of assisting its residents journey forward to eternity with one happy memory. One. The episodes of an individual’s life are stored on reels of film for him or her to view, and within a week the person must decide. An aged woman (Hisako Hara) chooses a plane ride with an infinite view of cherry blossoms. The gaiety of Disneyland’s Matterhorn obsesses a 12-year-old girl (Sayaka Yoshino). And for one man (Kotaro Shiga), happiness never existed. The counselors are faced with the task of inspiring all to search deep in their hearts for a memory redolent with a bliss deeper than the superficiality of one gained in an amusement park as well as to understand that life, no matter how deprived, possesses spurts of richness.

For all their expertise, the counselors are themselves the dead who cannot decide on their own singular memory. Takashi (Arata Iura) is a man in his twenties. Shiori (Erica Oda) is an 18-year-old girl. Like those to whom they offer guidance, Takashi and Shiori remain the ages that they were when they died. A new arrival is of special interest to Takashi. She is an elderly woman by the name of Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa), who chooses as her cherished moment a farewell to her fiancé before he goes off to fight in the Pacific War. She is young and she smiles with hope beside him on a park bench. The sky is clear. Trees are alive with the singing of birds.

With every decision comes a sacrifice. Somebody is bound to get hurt. In this case, it’s Shiori. We know by the way she looks at Takashi that her feelings for him are more than platonic. Hers is a look not merely of wistfulness, but of anguish for the knowledge that, once Takashi singles out his memory so that he could enter the portal in the sky, it will be for him as though she had never been born.

It seems that oblivion is the fate of myriad splendors that enrich each passing day from birth to death. Certainly, we have memories we would like to expurgate because the events that produced them were unpleasant. “After Life” provides us with this possibility. Then again, we need to wonder if this is a wise move. We might as well will to change our history. I could wish that I had been looking where I was running that day in the school playground when I slammed into another boy and had my front teeth knocked out or that my brother hadn’t bullied me or that, to avoid what could have been a ship wreck, my family had not moved to Hong Kong. Grant me this wish, then I would never have experienced the gentleness with which a dentist held my hand or the sincerity of my brother’s apology (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/love-story-love-means/), and I would not have the image I will hold dear to the end of my mother, in Capri pants and slippers, running in the rain with the joy of the provincial girl she once was.

How to select one memory to live forever? Takashi’s advice to Shiori is that in our search for happiness, we forget that knowing we were a part of somebody else’s happiness is also a blessing. That doesn’t make it any easier. What a tragedy it would be that in heaven I would not recognize many of my loved ones because I had chosen not to remember them.

Death is complicated. I’d rather choose life.

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Doc Brown’s time traveling, flux capacitor-powered DeLorean!

30 years later, that genius of a car still stupefies me. It’s the most awesome invention that ever was. Or should I proclaim instead that never was? Hard to say. The thing is a movie invention, and we all realize how significantly more ingenious imaginary machines are than anything real that comes out of a Chrysler assembly line. Now I am not an auto junkie, never have been. I am especially not prone to hyperboles, that “awe…” word in particular. In this case, however, the object of reference deserves the praise of awesome. I would not be exaggerating. Einstein would agree. (No exaggeration here either.)

When “Back to the Future” (1985) unveiled Doc’s brainchild, it sped off the screen and into pop culture Neverland. The poster image of Michael J. Fox in character as Marty McFly raring for the adventure of his life, car track marks on fire as he counts, panic-stricken, his watch tick away the seconds, is synonymous with the 1980s. Every generation can claim a decade. For me and my peers, the decade of padded shoulders and Pac Man fever is the one and only. I was 18 in 1985, the age of Fox’s character and of his parents when he travels through time to meet their adolescent incarnations. The Thompson Twins topped my list of pop groups. I deified Kelly Lebrock. Benetton populated my closet. I also sang in the privacy of my room to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, swooned over Audrey Hepburn, and bathed my head in hair products to achieve (unsuccessfully) James Dean’s pompadour. In this, I thought I was an anomaly, until Doc’s car materialized in a void and landed on the streets of 1950s suburbia.

Of all the periods in the history of the world, we wonder why Doc (Christopher Lloyd) would program his invention to journey to a monotonous place in a sedate time. The 1940s had the adventure of war. The 1960s was a string of social upheavals. Go further back to previous centuries, and the selection is immense. Sure, the ten years sandwiched between the introduction of the Volkswagen Beetle and the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy boasted glorious movie stars – Grace Kelly, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor – if that’s what you’re into. Otherwise, it suffered from a surplus of Tupperware. And yet, a moment in America when families were migrating away from urban centers makes sense. Like the pioneers of the west, they were etching on new territory a golden future. Not everybody had it good, though, and two of the unlucky ones are Lorraine Baines (Lea Thompson) and George McFly (Crispin Glover), Marty’s mom and dad.

Our introduction to Lorraine and George is an ugly picture; they’re losers. Lorraine provides no incentive to start a day. Her face Elizabeth Taylor jowly during the actress’s John Warner phase, she’s a drunk who greets her family with a grimace at the breakfast table. George is the quintessential nerd. His despondent eyes through aviator glasses light up only when he guffaws, and he walks with a slouch as if in apology for treading the earth. Marty also has a mama’s boy of a brother, David (Marc McClure), and a sister, Linda (Mary Jo Sperber), who offers no relief. Picture Miss Piggy, but with glasses and a whininess in place of the glam wardrobe and the attitude. You wonder how a dude like Marty could have been born into this family. So does he.

Doc Brown is the one person in his life whom Marty is proud of. White hair in disarray lends Doc the appearance of a walking streak of lightning. He regurgitates ideas with the rapidity of a machine gun so that we can’t help falling mute the way a child does with a fairy tale. Everything about this scientist is unreal to Marty, but then not quite. As outlandish as his visions are, Doc aspires to fulfill them. From dawn to dusk, he is confronted with a black board of hieroglyphic computations until… lo and behold… he surpasses the imaginings of H.G. Wells. This time machine is real and it works.

Though the journey Marty embarks on isn’t one he would have chosen, it turns out to be an enlightenment. He witnesses for himself where it all began for his parents and why it went wrong. Lorraine in her youth is beautiful. George is talented. Marty never regarded his parents this way, and seldom ever do we with our own parents. It’s an exhilarating discovery for him that his father should possess the gift of creative writing. The guy pens tales of aliens visiting our planet. Marty asks to read them. George is embarrassed. “Oh, no, no, no,” he says. “I never… uh… never let anybody read my stories.” Marty asks why not. “Well, what if they didn’t like them? What if they told me I was no good? I guess that would be pretty hard for somebody to understand.” Here lies the crux of the problem: dad is insecure.

Like arson in liquid, George’s insecurity so contaminates his blood that the local bully, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), remains his nemesis into the future. As high school kids, Biff torments George into doing the former’s homework. As married men with kids, Biff torments George into paying for car damages Biff incurs. George acquiesces with a snort and a goofy smile. It is Marty’s mission to change his father into a strong man. More than having a parent to be proud of is at stake. This is a matter of life and death. You see, Marty’s appearance in the past thwarts the event of his parents’ meeting. Instead of George whom Lorraine nurses to health after her father drives into him on the street, it is Marty. No meeting between Lorraine and George equals no marriage. No marriage equals no birth of the McFly progenies.

Of course, Marty is too lovable of a character to be eliminated, and “Back to the Future” is too fun of a movie not to have a sequel (or two). We are also rooting for George. He speaks for all of us. We want him to have the break that he deserves as much as we want one for ourselves whenever life deals us a bad blow. No better moment for this fighter in embryo to shine… with Marty’s encouragement… than at the prom, the singular event that caps every teen’s existence. In the school parking lot, he catches Biff forcing himself on Lorraine. One punch on that asshole’s nose, and Lorraine sees in George a winner.

Back in the future, George is a best-selling sci-fi author; Lorraine is sober; David and Linda have their rest and recreation at a country club instead of at Burger King; and Biff kowtows to George. This is too drastic of a turn around, we might say. So what? At this point, the film is no longer about parents, but about us… about you.

Every decision you make today will have a repercussion on tomorrow. You can either be George McFly, the winner or George McFly, the loser. Certain decisions will be more difficult to make than others. Don’t fret. You’ll always have somebody to help you. The unlikely ally can even be your own son. And under any circumstance, never forget the life lessons of “Back to the Future”:

1. Punch the forces of oppression that prevent you from pursuing your potential.
2. Fight for love.
3. Trust in the supremacy of your talent.
4. Forgive your parents. They’re human like the rest of us.

Everybody knows the tale of “Romeo and Juliet” (1968). Even if you have never read a word of William Shakespeare, and even if you have but find his prose too archaic to comprehend (that would be most of us), you know it. The shared grief of a boy and a girl, who sacrifice their lives on the altar of love, set the standard for every romantic tragedy to follow. What is curious about the movie adaptation of literature created four centuries earlier is that it would be made and be a box office success in the decade of the 20^th century that experienced the apex of rebellion against the past. History attests that no ten years revolutionized our advancement as citizens of the world more than those of 1960-1969. A minister’s dream of human equality upended a long-standing tradition of racial segregation. Women were no longer divided between the titles of Miss and Mrs., but united as Ms. Gays and lesbians broke through closet doors and into the light of freedom. Indeed, times were a changin’ with such velocity that men grew their hair, joined hands with those they once held subordinate, and sang in harmony against the destruction in Vietnam. Make love, not war was the motto of this era. Every man was a Romeo. Every woman was a Juliet.

“Romeo and Juliet” is loyal to cinema’s mission in that it is a mirror of the cultural and social milieu in which it was made. As unforgettable as the ultimate pact of union is that forever links Romeo (Leonard Whiting) to Juliet (Olivia Hussey), life more than death suffuses the movie. It’s gorgeous to watch. Costumes the colors of Jupiter against a Renaissance backdrop evoke the murals of Michelangelo. Juliet and her Romeo are as dewy as the moon under which they seal their devotion. Energy thrives in every scene. Dueling swords aside, we can’t believe these young Capulet and Montague rogues truly want to off each other. Both sides are at it more like rugby players fighting over a foul than like warriors. And the balcony courtship – all sighs and kisses and hugs – burns with the fire of two people hungry to be one.

But the most mesmerizing moment is the dance where Romeo and Juliet first lock eyes. This isn’t a meeting. This is a collision. We could almost visualize two chariots racing towards one another, the horses maneuvering them at full throttle. Destiny has no brakes. Neither does disaster. Who cares? It feels good to be flying against the wind, unstoppable and free.

In this scene, Romeo sneaks into a Capulet gala. He masks his face to conceal his identity, though he fails to conceal his handsomeness. His figure is lithe. His eyes are visible. They gleam with such admiration that Juliet is beguiled. For the pair, the world stops. The only person in motion is the other. They circle the room in a merry-go-round of seduction, catching glances over people’s shoulders, through the space in a crowd. She is coy and courageous. He is determined and daring. When at last Romeo, from behind a post, grabs Juliet’s hand, we know that in this single touch, they have discovered the purpose of their existence. Time melts into Juliet. She can only stand frozen, throw her head back, and shut her eyes in awe as the past and the future converge in this one sensation. Romeo reveals his face, smiling and smitten. She studies his beauty as though she had just unearthed a holy relic.

Director Franco Zeffirelli hit the jackpot with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. Whiting is just 17 in the film. Hussey is 16. They speak Shakespeare with the fluidity that we text messages. Perhaps this kind of language is inherent in the Brits. Regardless of how old the tale of “Romeo and Juliet,” Whiting and Hussey bring it to life with a youthful freshness.

We are inclined, as a result, to believe that “Romeo and Juliet” is about the young and for the young. Not so. Let me tell you the true story of a Kentucky boy on the dawning of the Depression who dreamed of movies and movie stars. In 1928, Hal Riddle was 11 years old when he fell in love for the first time. The object of his emotional awakening was the lead actress in a film called “Adoration” (1928) – Billie Dove, a diamond-studded Howard Hughes paramour on whom, during the peak of her fame, the public stormed with 50,000 fan letters a week. The boy’s mother was not pleased as he announced his love for Dove when he came home that day. This meant he had played hokey again. He wrote Dove a fan letter, and in return, received an autographed photo. It would have ended right there, but Riddle himself wanted to be a movie star, so when he grew into a young man, he went to Hollywood. “Cinema Paradiso” (1988) could have been based on Hal Riddle. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/cinema-paradiso-the-sacrifice-behind-a-dream/)

You might recognize Riddle in the Michael Keaton film “Johnny Dangerously” (1984). He plays a prison warden. He had been working as a character actor for 40 years, but had never achieved the stardom he had yearned for back in Kentucky. “Johnny Dangerously” was his last shot. Alas, it was not meant to be. Calling it quits, Riddle later took up residence at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Wasserman Campus in Woodland Hills, a retirement home for the elderly who play a role in Hollywood’s history, whether big or small. He must have expected the rest of his life to consist of nothing more than bridge, golf, and swapping with fellow residents anecdotes about dreams that were never fulfilled. But that would not entirely be the case because it so turned out that Billie Dove was in a facility a mere five-minute walk away from his cottage.

Although Riddle might not have become a star, one dream did come true. The famous actress for whom he held a torch for nearly all his life would love him back. It didn’t matter that Dove was frail and wheelchair bound. As he confided to Entertainment Weekly: “… when I looked at her, I still saw the actress in the photo she’d sent me when I was a kid. I just saw Billie Dove. And I could see the essence of her beauty still.” And radiant she had been: black hair against white skin, curled lashes, and lips the red and succulence of a heart.

Through age, ailment, and dashed ambition, the Romeo in Riddle had not dwindled. A bystander at the community movie theater who had overheard Riddle gush to a friend about his boyhood crush brought him and Dove together. He was 79. She was 93. He told her everything of his life, including her autographed photo that hung on his wall in every place he called home up to that moment and to the end. When Dove died on New Year’s Eve 1997, a year after she and Riddle had met, Riddle delivered her eulogy. He lived on for several years more, fueled by a passion to tell the world about his two greatest loves: movies and Billie Dove.

This is why we need stories. Stories are our history. We remember Romeo and Juliet not because of their death, but because Shakespeare immortalized them with words and Zeffirelli with images. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey are thus frozen in adolescence, in the bodies of our most famous couple – both permanent reminders of what is possible in us, whether young or old. We can say the same for Hal Riddle and Billie Dove. That the two were not teens nor are familiar to all is irrelevant. Riddle’s public appearances in the wake of Dove’s passing paid off.

Their love is everlasting on the internet.