Red Rover, Red Rover, Red Riding Came Over : The Lost Blog Post

[Author's Note: The following is an unfinished blog post. I just couldn't figure out how to wrap words around these films. I took notes; I have plenty more to say. If you watch them/it, let me know.]

They are no longer running separately at the IFC Center in NYC, and I don't know if all three films ("1974," "1980," and "1983") making up the Channel Four trilogy Red Riding are still available "On Demand" from Time Warner Cable. Eventually you should be able to rent them through Netflix.com and other venues. And, of course, one is always welcome to purchase such things on DVD (or in their original 4-book form).

However you are able to do it, I highly recommend you experience Red Riding, but be warned -- it's hard stuff.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2010, I braved the first weekend of The IFC Road Show tour and watched all three parts in one 5 1/2 hour sitting. Since then, I have felt a bit paralyzed by the experience -- unable to say much or write on the subject, studiously avoiding all the reviews piling up around me. I just couldn't process the totality of what I'd seen.

How can I describe what happened, to me or onscreen, in an intelligible way for those who haven't experienced it? I still feel in danger of failure. My marathon viewing is partly the culprit. Wannabe cinemaniac that I am, I'd never before sat for so long in one theater (two 15-minute breaks notwithstanding). The closest I'd come was watching the overlong Inland Empire in that same theater (during which, frankly, I wished to take a nap so that it would be over a little sooner). But it's the films themselves that really cripple me. I would both watch all three again immediately in a quest for a deeper understanding, at the same time that I never want to go back to their world.

Watching Red Riding the night I did was my chosen alternative to several Super Bowl parties, and it felt freeing to choose a wide parcel of film over that nearly compulsory (in this country, anyway) day of sport. That Sunday evening, at the movies, I felt like myself -- asserting my own identity, thrilled to be sinking deeper into the soft chair of the theater as I became immersed in the brutal, velvet world of the R.R. trilogy. I felt like myself, as I just wrote, yet accosted, and perilously close to despair. So it progressed.

I've seen many films (and television shows) with story lines revolving around serial killers. But Red Riding is different. It's a horse of a bloodier color, with a relentless gait. At moments I could stand apart as a viewer "watching a film." And then, if I may be so bold, there were moments I would feel a sensation that something desperately important was happening.

Occasionally I was central and centered, a bit like Roger Ebert is described in Esquire's now infamous article. Though, dear me, I'm not really comparing myself to Ebert, I did find myself feeling crucial and powerful, scribbling notes into a ringed pad in the dark, surrounded by the films, but held apart. And then I felt, at other times, like a lost child or faceless stranger in their world. My persona slipped away and I lost myself in the spectacle. It was "just a movie" (three movies), but it felt like more.

So, it was/they were (each and together) a singular experience and singular experiences. I was surrounded and enveloped at once by beauty, intelligence, talent, and horror. I was no one and the world was impossibly angry and raw. How could there be any good left in it?

As I mentioned above, the presentation I attended included two fifteen-minute breaks. These breaks came between films one and two. During each intermission, I found myself in the IFC's lovely, lonesome women's bathroom, dug deep along one edge of the theater's mouse-maze of a basement (yes, perhaps this description is a bit dramatic, but that's how it felt).

Anyway, watching films often makes me feel vulnerable, but this was a special night. Each time I took my stretch-my-legs-buy-a-snack-breathe-again break, I found myself in that bathroom, looking introspectively into the mirror, my eyes slightly red from strain -- and, each time, I felt compelled to apply a coat of the lipstick that just happened to be rolling around the bottom of my bag. I twice found I needed to put lipstick on before I could return to my seat and begin the next film in the trilogy. Why? It didn't feel like vanity. It felt like necessity. I think it was armor. I applied the color so I might feel more human, more tied to something outside the off-kilter, too familiar, wrong and punishing world of Red Riding.