The Brave Little Space Heater
Recently, after my heater went out, I sat bundled in a blanket on my new sofa, threading through the internet, on the hunt for my favorite film: The Blood of a Poet. It has been about ten years since I last saw it. An avant-garde film released in 1932, it is hard to track down complete copies, but I finally found my ivy-covered door in the Criterion Collection. I whooped, pumped my fist, and turned to the small space heater that the property manager lent me, saying, “You are bearing witness to the return of the best movie ever made.”
It churned red and orange, unappreciative.
Of course, the heater is now fixed and is happily burbling away. Meanwhile, I have held off on getting a subscription to the Criterion Collection until next payday. And yet, my silent companion, the space heater (I have not yet gotten it back to the property manager), has encouraged a whole host of recollections for me with nothing more than its solemn presence. I think a lot about the books that meant the world to me as a child, but less about the films that shaped who I have become.
Kailee and I watched a great many cartoons growing up, from The Brave Little Toaster to Anastasia and just about every Disney film. When Kailee was a toddler, she watched Beauty and the Beast every day and sobbed at the wolf scenes. For my own part, I forced my mother to watch Atlantis in theaters eight times. I favor, and always have, The Hunchback of Notre Dame because I thought that the music was beautiful and the message deep like the trenches in the seas.
Our mother took us to see all sorts of films when we were growing up, even films that probably weren’t age appropriate (The Sixth Sense comes to mind). It was sort of like how she encouraged us to read broadly without worrying about how old we were. She read to us from adult books, from To Kill a Mockingbird to My First Shakespeare. It is perhaps my earliest memory, watching Toy Story in theaters.
And so I read Crime and Punishment and Ayn Rand — not knowing anything about the political nut she was — and my mother would always listen to my meandering thoughts and desperate grasps to learn about the philosophy of the world. Kailee and I both achieved a college reading level quite young because we had such a sagacious and well-read mother.
The films that meant so much to me growing up are the reason I wanted to be a screenwriter as a teenager. I still work away on my ghost story set in the world of ballet. Perhaps it was inevitable: I am named after a film, so they have walked alongside me from birth. Now, as an adult, I am fond of Ikiru, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Suspiria, Nosferatu, Alice, Hamoun, and anything with stop-motion animation. The Brothers Quay are always a hit with me.
And yet The Blood of a Poet stands out. It is the most singularly beautiful ending I have ever had the pleasure of being in awe of. What a kick to the gut! I left the film class that evening, wandering around the spring-time campus of UNM. The pinks of the trees were fishing for the wind, barely budding and already sending their scents adrift. I liked my walks back to my dorm after all of my film classes — I took a few in theory — because I was probably too stupid to realize that I should be afraid to be by myself so late. I had some cognitive digestion.
Spring is around the corner again; it will arrive without announcing itself except in the brutal winds that it knocks about. I cannot believe how much time has passed when I still make the trek around UNM, this time as a graduate student. Someday, I will work on my own avant-garde film about poetry and labyrinths. The world is best understood through the lens of the fantastic because we, all of us, are fantastic. That was why I wasn’t scared traipsing around in the dark, because I believe the best in people when I see a good film. Humans came together to create that. What is there to fear?
