“You just don’t have a soul.”
It hurt when she said it, but I understood why my best friend was so upset. Braving arctic January winds, we had hiked a mile from Chicago’s downtown Loop to the only theater in the entire metropolitan area that was still showing Pride & Prejudice. She had spent two months threatening, begging and bribing me to see it, and I had caved. Now we were about to board a Green Line train at 10:30 p.m.—essentially asking to be robbed—all because she had been sure that this movie would finally make me a chick-flick lover.
“It was okay,” I said as we left the theater. A few moviegoers around us were discreetly wiping tears from their eyes. My friend sighed and informed me of my soullessness, having failed once again to convert me to chick-flicks.
Pride & Prejudice never really stood a chance against what my friends have affectionately termed my “man-taste” in movies. The problem may lay in my upbringing. While most of my peers grew up watching Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty, I spent my childhood watching ‘classics’ and action movies at the insistence of my movie-buff father.
By 10 I had seen Alien, Patton and The Third Man, but I didn’t know who Mary Poppins was. At 12 I could place Tippe Hedren and Eva Marie Saint in their respective Hitchcock blockbusters. My movie-hating mother never intervened, except when Dad felt that I could handle Miller’s Crossing, a bloody Coen Brothers’ mob movie, at age eight.
What finally solidified my prejudice against chick flicks was seeing my favorite movie, The Godfather, for the first time. It was nirvana. It had me at “bada-bing.”
Since then, chick-flicks have felt empty to me. I watched Titanic later that year, which I had loved before, but everything felt compartmentalized: the bad fiancé; the good hero and heroine; the bad iceberg. Upon second viewing, nothing captivated me.
The Godfather, by contrast, was even more riveting the second time I saw it. Were the Corleones straight-up good guys? No. So why couldn’t I stop pulling for them to come out on top?
But even after I had seen The Godfather, I tried to remain normal. I tried to hate Dr. Strangelove, but I couldn’t. I watched movies my friends enjoyed behind my father’s back, but I found lines like, “This isn’t a democracy, it’s a cheerocracy!” woefully unmemorable when compared to, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
My girlfriends spent our junior and senior years in high school hoping to win me over to chick flicks. They thought they had struck gold when I admitted to admiring Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s Rear Window until they realized I only liked her for her outfits, not because she made the movie a romance.
Worst of all, when my friends argued over which movie to see in theaters, my vote usually broke the tie in favor of the boys. Last winter, I tipped the vote in favor of seeing Casino Royale instead of The Holiday. I have yet to be forgiven.
Still, “soulless” misses the point. Who has more soul than Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke? To Kill a Mockingbird is a more impassioned—and more important—movie than any chick flick I’ve ever seen. Movies ought to explore more than love. I’d watch a movie that explores justice, truth, betrayal or family—not to mention cannolis—any day.
