I am vulnerable to routine, or the illusion of structure that we create for ourselves. For instance, the first movie I see each year is either a classic that I’ve seen many times or a well-regarded blind spot that I’ve always meant to see. New Year’s Day probably wouldn’t be much different if I spent it watching several hours of old sitcoms, but the movie tradition is nourishing for me somehow and allows me to feel as if I’m clearing my mind for the year ahead. Again, this idea is an illusion. How is this forthcoming Monday really all that different from any other? But illusions and symbols that give the passage of time a sense of controllability are the manna of our lives.
Think of the hokum that we attach to New Year’s. My attitude towards resolutions is about the same as it is towards whichever month is reserved for people to try to write novels: If you actually want to do something, you do it when you’re ready, whether that’s in January or August, without prompting from cultural gimmickry. The same goes with Dry January. Either drink according to your idea of moderation or don’t drink. As a recovering alcoholic, every month is currently dry for me, as I have recognized that I am a person of extremes who wants all or nothing, with nothing being the more governable option. This all might sound relatively rational, but I’ve been putting off a diet for years, and may despite my tone be trying it on again for January. I can’t bear to call it a resolution though.
Given that my job at Style Weekly is to write about movies, it may seem as if I’m going south of the subject here, and I am — holidays are about indulgence after all. New Year’s movies for me are part of this hokum, a superstition to get the year started with confidence. One of the worst years of my life, connected intimately to alcoholism, began with my watching the entire “Godfather” trilogy on New Year’s Day. I was brutally hungover, my lover was existentially unhappy with me, and I’d had a breakfast of four boilermakers to make the day livable before Dry January, with one day of February included to make up for the delay. This is the nonsense that addicts submit to, and all 10 hours or so of “The Godfather” was a desperate escape. A reckoning at the end of the year, near the following Christmas, soon came, and it eventually corrected me (thus far).
I will never watch “The Godfather” on New Year’s Day again. Not ever. It opened the floodgates to a year of hell. Hell survived, yes, but hell nevertheless. Is it Francis Ford Coppola’s fault that I have a drinking problem? It’s not. This is not rational, but hokum is what makes the world go ‘round. This year was not without considerable turbulence, but it’s ending well, and it began with me watching D.A. Pennebaker’s “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back.” “The Godfather” is a much closer movie to my heart, but “Don’t Look Back” will forever have the edge on New Year’s Day programming. It’s the symbolism, baby.
A good New Year’s Day movie for me is robust, potentially canonical, lucid, poetic, and feels like the cinematic equivalent of a big meal. This New Year’s Day, I may rewatch Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai.” Or I may dig once again into that collection of Yasujiro Ozu films that’s currently being spotlighted on the Criterion Channel. Kurosawa and Ozu are among my favorite filmmakers, and they have to their name many devastating films that leave you feeling somehow optimistic, as if a subterranean essentiality of humanity has been drawn out into the open. Kurosawa was a swaggerer who often worked on huge scales, while Ozu became legendary for a series of relentlessly detailed domestic dramas that hinge on the pull between the social expectations of a fraught postwar Japan and the actual desires of his characters. “Tokyo Story,” Ozu’s most famous work, is among the best of all films. It would be a bracing, sobering New Year’s Day movie. So would his equally unforgettable “Late Spring,” which I rewatched recently and could easily rewatch again this morning.
New Year’s Eve films are a different animal. If New Year’s Day is about sobriety and clarity, a celebration of the quotidian details of the stability of our lives, New Year’s Eve is about hedonistic possibilities — the potentiality for naughtiness. Possibility in pure heroin form is the most spellbinding property in life, which is why Christmas Eve is more thrilling than Christmas Day. With the eves, we are talking about the figurative difference between cutting-wild Saturday and taking-stock Sunday. Of course, watching a party movie is not partying, but for those of us who’re not the revelers that we used to be, it’s enough. When I think of New Year’s Eve, I think of Martin Scorsese at his most unhinged: the glorious party scenes of “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the latter of which I watched again last New Year’s Eve. These movies are about hunger in its purest and most animal form, hunger that eclipses any other considerations, especially empathy and morality. Scorsese’s willingness to meet this hunger on its own terms is profoundly moral, however, an irony of his work that eludes many people.
On New Year’s Eve, I also think of the exhilarating, unbridled excess of the cinema of Orson Welles. “Citizen Kane” is a great movie, but it’s become touristy. If you want to truly immerse yourself in Welles’ sensual music, try his extraordinary “Chimes at Midnight,” a Shakespeare mashup that emphasizes the rejection of Falstaff. The less money that Welles had, the more often that he had to cobble together resources, the mightier his cinematic poetry became, as he developed an editing syntax that reflected his need to consume and inhale cinema, which paralleled in turn the needs of his protagonists. His rapid cutting and shifts in perspective became a kind of visual free-association. For a more modern Welles bonanza, try “The Other Side of the Wind,” another exhilarating rumination on power that was restored and released on Netflix a few years ago. It’s a movie that finds the aging Welles trying to compete with New Hollywood counterculture and succeeding, and along the way fashioning one of the most erotic sex scenes in cinema. It’s a sex scene of transcendence: of an aging artist trying to recapture his former aesthetic vigor and succeeding.
If you want the yin of New Year’s Eve and the yang of New Year’s Day in one movie, there’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” a battle-of-the-wills domestic chamber play that explores the danger and the sensuality of control, of repression, of channeling your hungers into your art and practicing a restraint that was almost certainly alien to aesthetes like Welles. Like Anderson’s “The Master,” “Phantom Thread” is obsessed with the struggle of neurotic characters to find balance between polarities of obsession, between austerity and hedonism, either of which can destroy you out of proportion. The film climaxes, fittingly, at a New Year’s Eve party, with its lovers perched on a figurative wire separating desolation from hope. (Anderson, in his younger days, also made a perfect New Year’s Eve movie as I’ve chosen to define it: the moving, addictive, immensely impressive end-of-porn bacchanal “Boogie Nights.”)
In the spirit of taming and compromise that drives “Phantom Thread,” I must admit that these patterns and pontifications can go up in a puff of smoke the moment my partner suggests that we veg out in front of several episodes of “Frasier” or “The King of Queens.” Hokum, rituals (symbolism, baby) can’t hold out against the endless variables of even a regular day living. These anal-retentive traditions — absurd to probably most anyone under 40 who’s looking forward to experiencing New Year’s Eve and Day as a regular person —also can’t hold a candle to love.
