What they didn’t tell me about getting old is how I’d have trouble remembering who I am. There was once a kid who watched TV, and then a grown man settling in to my first job. But what connects them all to me now?
I’ve moved on, from school to school, city to city, always leaving the past behind. The cord that binds all these people together comes from my family, a mountain of guilt (as I’m Irish) and “TCM Remembers,” the tribute Turner Classic Movies pays to movie people who died the year before.
I first saw “TCM Remembers” in 2015, late one night in a hotel room, when I was in Toronto for my mother’s funeral. The previous year had seen the deaths of Robin Williams, Mickey Rooney, Richard Attenborough, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Lauren Bacall. A big year. The series showed clips of each of them, and one showed Bogie kissing Bacall and saying, “I’ll be waiting for you.”
Each year TCM saves the big star for the last. For 2014 it was James Garner, one of my favorite actors. When I was a kid, he was riverboat gambler Bret Maverick. A little older, and he was the Scrounger in “The Great Escape” and a Le Mans driver in “Grand Prix,” and then Jim Rockford in “The Rockford Files.” He was always the same person in whatever he appeared: intelligent, witty and quietly noble, the kind of American we’d all like to be. In “The Great Escape” he befriended and aided the helplessly half-blind Donald Pleasence, and in “The Rockford Files” he looked after his father and remained loyal to his sleazy friend Angel.
Old men forget. I don’t have the clearest of memories of myself as a kid in front of the TV, but I do remember “Bret Maverick.” “The Great Escape” I saw in a fancy old movie theater, and “Grand Prix” in Cinerama. If I have a sense of personal identity, James Garner gets some of the credit.
I’ve now gone back and watched the “TCM Remembers” I had missed. In 2010 it was Tony Curtis. In 2008 Paul Newman. In 2006 Darren
McGavin, whom I loved as Mike Hammer. In 2005 Richard Pryor. In 2004 Marlon Brando. In 2003 David Hemmings and Gregory Peck. The list never stops. In 2021 it was Ed Asner and Christopher Plummer, the immortals who sadly were mortal after all.
Watching those old clips, I realized what the movies had given me: a picture of time that cheats death by gathering itself into what W.B. Yeats called the artifice of eternity. Those old films are his holy city of Byzantium, and the pictures are the toys that Grecian goldsmiths made to keep a drowsy emperor awake. Paul Newman is dead, but Butch Cassidy lives, as do Ari Ben Canaan and Fast Eddie Felson. Like Horace with his odes, Newman does not wholly die, and his films are monuments more lasting than bronze.
At the same time, those old stars are truly gone, and the TCM clips both connect me with my past and invite me to wonder what awaits me down the road. Without the reminder of their deaths, it’s easy to put thoughts of my mortality out of mind. Our emails, apps and web addictions absorb us, and even our language shies away from the fact of death. Americans often say that people have “passed,” as though they have wandered into another room. The French say that someone has “disappeared,” as though it’s a game of hide-and-seek.
Watching TCM, I’ve thus been brought to seek a unity to my life, from start to finish, and even thereafter. There was one person, the same person, from the kid in front of the TV until today, who persisted when friends were forsaken and venues abandoned: the bearer of promises broken and duties neglected, for which he’ll be held accountable.
But when I replay those old films, I realize that they were about action figures who gambled on riverboats and drove race cars. I don’t play poker and my Jeep tops out at 70 mph, but I still dream about emulating James Garner.
By proc. BY MOVIES
