The Dyeing Gall

Once upon a time, the only way you could watch a film was to go to a theater and watch it from beginning to end. Once the VCR came out and then the DVD player, people could alter the way they watched a film. They could watch it they way the read a book. In bits and pieces. Whenever they have the time.

Do directors want people to watch the film in its entirety? After all, as a filmgoer, you are trying to follow what's going on, which means keeping track of characters, their relationship to one another, and possibly the emotion that's the director is attempting to induce. Films are a bit purer than television, which forces interruptions in the form of commercials. Television, aware of such interruptions, often ends each commercial break in a mini-cliffhanger.

I remember watching Love and Death on Long Island which stars John Hurt and Jason Priestley about a British man who has eschewed technology (televisions, answering machines, even watching movies) until he decided he should watch an E. M. Forster adaptation, and instead, accidentally attends the screening of Hotpants College 2 starring Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestly), where he becomes smitten, and is eventually reduced to a schoolgirl, collecting pictures, reading teen magazines, finding out all about this guy, and eventually deciding to stalk him in Long Island.

At one point, he is lecturing about film and how people can now go back and dissect each moment. While he's giving the appearance of an academic, of course, the real point is that he's done this with his current obsession.

While it speaks to one extreme of how one can watch films (another example is Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts where Arsinee Khanjian
plays a hotel cleaning woman who is obsessed with her coworker, an aspiring actor whose never had any speaking parts. She repeatedly rents films and only watches the segments that he's in), a less extreme version is simply stopping the film and getting back to it, much like you would get back to a book and read it.

I'm starting to watch a film, The Dying Gaul which stars Peter Sarsgaard and Campbell Scott. Strangely enough, I've heard almost nothing about the film, even though it stars Peter Sarsgaard. I've seen three films with Sarsgaard so far: Garden State, Shattered Glass, and Kinsey. Of the three, his performance in Shattered Glass is perhaps the best.

I would have thought that I would hear about most of his films. On the other hand, actors can make two films a year, and with so many films coming out, there's bound to be a few that aren't so well publicized. I'm bound to miss some. A few years ago, when Sarsgaard was still just starting out, people would confuse him for Stellan Skarsgård, mostly because the name sounded similar. Skarsgård hasn't made many English films that people have heard of. Perhaps his two most famous films are Breaking the Waves and Good Will Hunting.

The Dying Gaul is a film within a film. It's about a screenwriter, Robert Sandrich (Sarsgaard), who has written a film called The Dying Gaul about two gay lovers. A producer, Jeffrey Tishop (played by Campbell Scott), says he loves the film, but no one will watch a film about gay characters that's a weepie (what about Brokeback Mountain, but Dying Gaul came out already), and wants to alter the story to make it about a heterosexual couple. It tries to raise the issue of purity of art with the crassness of commercialism.

As a person who watches films, now more than ever, it's interesting to see which films are picked. Gus Van Sant's name is mentioned. Tootsie, Philadelphia, Spike Lee, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg are all name-dropped. It seems odd to hear films referred to explicitly. It's something you don't notice in films (just as people watching television is rarely depicted in television programs).

It starts off well and that's where I stopped. Since then, I couldn't help but check if Roger Ebert had reviewed it. Ebert's a prolific reviewer, so chances are he did see it, especially since this isn't a low-budget film starring unknowns. Alas, Ebert liked its start, but said it went downhill when it veered to a plot point he thought wasn't worth exploring. I'll probably still watch the rest of it, since I've already started it, just to see if I come to the same conclusion as Ebert.