Technicolor dreams
(I moved over here from tinyletter.)
One of the first projects I took at this job, hosting our Oscars podcast, is coming around now to its second incarnation. Last year I played a lot of catch-up, relying more on my many expert colleagues to walk us through the top films and performances. I also got to interview some very talented filmmakers. And I spent more time watching movies — mostly screeners on my couch — than I had in years.
In preparation to go back to the Toronto International Film Festival in September, I’m now marathoning my way through early 2020 awards contenders. I’m getting an earlier, more luxurious start, and am about a quarter of the way through seeing a dozen or more films in total over about ten days. To do so I’m criss-crossing Los Angeles from one studio to another and back again for two or three hours of very serious prestige film at a time. It’s a ridiculous privilege but also a practical challenge of logistics and sensory input, a beast of an undertaking, both physically and emotionally.
For years, really the better part of a decade, I could barely go to a movie theater in any state resembling sobriety without risking at every twist of the plot or photography an unexpected panic attack. It would all just suddenly be too much. Too big. Too terrifying. I have literally run out of more than one Los Angeles theater, crying and shaking, hand over my mouth in hopes I might make it to the bathroom before maybe throwing up. Or standing around nonchalantly on the sidewalk, waiting for whoever I’d abandoned inside, inhaling nothing but second-hand cigarette smoke and exhaust as I tried to bring my breathing back under control.
There are just so many movies, you see, that love to blow up whole cities, that linger on the faces in a crowd as they run for their lives, that pull out to reveal a stark wasteland of what little is left of the world. There are too many dramas that dwell in the depths of despair, of loss, of fear. I didn’t need to go to the movies to get more of what already filled my nightmares. All I ever had to do was close my eyes, forget to take an Ativan because I was already so tired so wouldn’t it be fine just this once to just fall asleep like a normal fucking person, and instead wake up screaming again.
What I love most about movies, about cinema, is how, in a theater with good picture and sound, with a crowd either too thin to be disruptive or every bit enraptured as you, there is no outside world. I love serialized storytelling and characters who come back hour after hour changed and flawed and compelling, but a great film is a world unto itself. The first year I lived in New York after college, when I still had few friends and would spend long weekends almost entirely alone, I saw so many movies, new and old and abstract and archival, jeering crowds and trains rumbling underneath the seats. I can’t remember ever feeling like something had been a true waste of my time, even when it wasn’t good, even when we joked after that the director must have had no good friends to tell them they’d made such a mediocre film, even when we swore we’d never let each other make such self-indulgent work.
I am seeing so many films in such a short time right now that I’ve basically stopped learning much about them before I go. There’s a small group of us charged with selecting who we’ll honor in our coverage and at a TIFF party, and mostly it’s a scheduling nightmare. I show up at one of LA’s many massive, classic, iconic studios, hand my ID to a security guard, park where they tell me, wander through a maze of sound stages and office buildings to find a small screening room, sit in the dark with many of the same faces who I’ll see at other screenings this month, and just let whatever it is happen to me.
This is still new, the idea that I can trust myself to wander onto the edges of the known map and expect to return in something resembling a safe and complete form. It’s still an imperfect, perhaps incomplete experiment, one I haven’t talked or written much about.
Two summers ago, through a series of coincidences that weren’t really at all, under the watchful eye of people who know me as well as any other humans can, I took two doses of pharmaceutical-grade MDMA. Combined with sound therapy, it was intended to possibly offer some relief for treatment-resistant PTSD. I was skeptical, a little weary, a lot resigned to nothing working much better than the rest of what I’d tried.
I grew up in a house where the main message about most drugs, including hallucinogens, was that they could be revelatory but also dangerous, and to “please try them at home,” which as a contrarian, ambitious teenager meant I most certainly did not try almost any of them at all, anywhere. I wasn’t straight-edge — I drank far too heavily, far too early into my middle and high school years, and was generally lucky to emerge unscathed — but I was always a control freak. Post-end of the world as I knew it, I’d been both more reckless with the substances I knew and more terrified of those I didn’t. Well into my adult life I was committed on some level to being more grown-up and boring than my mother, and I had quite enough going on inside my mind to keep me busy, thank you very much.
But why not try this punchline of a party drug? Literally everything else I’d sampled in almost twenty years had been to limited effect. I had slowly, and mostly I think due to having a steady bed-partner, begun to sleep better, longer, occasionally even able to nap without being so exhausted I crashed into it. I’d tried every sleep aid or sedative or alternative medicine and settled on a low but longterm dose of Ativan on a nightly basis, just enough to turn down the volume so I could fall asleep. I’d done enough therapy and talked enough with other anxiety-ridden friends to know and be better at avoiding my triggers or the slow creep of tension when I stop taking care of myself and leave my mind’s door more open to meltdown. I’d made whatever peace is possible with the fact that my brain would never snap back to how it processed fear before I was 24 and quite sure I’d stepped out into the end of the world.
The nightmares, though, had never really gone away. They were still technicolor full-throttled fear shot through my veins whenever I least expected it. And every one of them was a hard reset, a dozen steps back, leaving me shaken for days. The movies in my mind, the worst kind of movies, were always worse than I’d remembered, and it’s not like what I remembered of them was good.
I knew, because when you’re a person with PTSD who likes to dabble in a little light scientific reading about traumatic brain injury and such from time to time, that there were some active clinical trials, and some older but well-documented community-based work from before LSD and MDMA were criminalized, that both might have positive impacts on people who had suffered trauma or were facing the known end of their lives. I can’t imagine I would have ever actually sought it out, but when the wide circle of traumatized friends I’ve cultivated yielded a strong personal endorsement and a willing facilitator, I surprised myself with how easy it was to say yes, okay, sure, let’s try ecstasy. I didn’t expect it would be some magic bullet any more than everything else I’d tried, but by all accounts absent hours of simultaneous drinking and dancing and being dehydrated it seemed unlikely to make me feel worse.
A perfect Shana-sized controlled scientific experiment: the least fun-seeking way to try the most fun-sounding drug. I laid on my back with heavy-duty black-out blindfolds on, arms crossed on my chest as if in a coffin — my choice, it felt comfortable — and waited for the first dose to kick in, letting the sound of various bells and chimes and gongs fill my ears. My only conscious intention was whether I might be able to find a space inside myself that felt safe. Lucid dreaming, touched on briefly by several therapists I’d seen, had always seemed to me a fantasy — how in the world are you supposed to stop your own mind from seizing with fear? But what I’d read of MDMA treatments suggested something similar might be possible to unlock with the drug, some out-of-body-like separation that allows you to see yourself and help forge a new way out of danger.
What I remember most is The Black Stallion.
I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d seen the film, though it held a huge, fond place in my heart, and I didn’t go into the session thinking about it. I rewatched it yesterday for the first time since.
In The Black Stallion, a lyrical, unconventional film from 1979 produced by Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Carroll Ballard and shot by Caleb Deschanel, a boy and his father are on a ship that violently sinks off the coast of North Africa. The father drowns; the boy, Alec, survives by clinging to a wild Arabian horse who was being transported on the boat, and they are stranded together on a deserted island. There’s a whole second and third act about horse-racing, with Mickey Rooney as an ex-jockey and trainer who eventually coaches the boy and his horse to victory.
But before that is what the film is most famous for — a 28-minute long sequence in which the heartbroken and terrified Alec and the unbroken stallion find each other on the island and cautiously learn to co-exist, to take care of each other. The horse stomps on a rattlesnake that threatens Alec; Alec lures him close with a giant shell filled with dried kelp to eat.
For half an hour, there is no dialogue. None. And yet there is so much story. There is an exquisite scene in which Alec and the horse chase each other back and forth along the beach, back and forth, back and forth, splashing in the water, until the stallion is subdued and allows Alec to pet him, to hug him and cry into his mane. One day they are swimming side by side just off-shore and Alec is able to take hold and climb on the horse’s back; the horse speeds out of the water and onto the beach, Alec astride — until he falls off. But they’re friends now: the stallion lets him try again, and again. Alec holds the base of the horse’s mane in lieu of reins until he is so adept he can lift his arms up in triumph, galloping across their own private island.
That they are eventually stumbled upon by Italian fishermen and consequently returned to home and the horse-racing father-figure plot seems secondary. “He saved my life,” Alec insists. “I can’t leave the island without him.” The fishermen try to wrangle Alec away from the wild horse, who plunges into the water to follow. Alec goes home, where he’s lauded for his bravery, though he is also shell-shocked with grief and bewilderment to be back in the world of humans and mothers and indoor plumbing and dinner and school. But he still has the black stallion, equally unprepared for reentry into civilization. Alec does better out at the horse farm with Mickey Rooney, with wide open fields. Together they manage to get a bridle on the stallion, then a saddle, then Alec in the saddle. The rest feels like a bit of a Disney movie, though it’s not.
Lying there in my self-imposed blackout, mind wandering through itself, I felt fear — I saw the same death and destruction that fills my worst nightmares. And then I felt, equally strong, the sensation of riding a wave, not on my own but with my fingers knotted in the mane of a wild and powerful horse. It was dangerously fast-paced but I wasn’t in danger. I could see the fear, smell it, but also exist alongside it. It was not unlike how I felt the more recent time I’d actually nearly died, caught up in a giant wave inside Queen’s Bath in Kauai. As water crashed over my head in that tidal pool, I knew there was danger, I felt afraid, but I also never quite felt lost. I knew which way was up. I expected to be injured but not killed. It was not unlike that recent experience in real life, but it was different and deeper. It felt like swimming and flying and riding all at once. I felt safe and protected. Buried somewhere even beneath that trauma was this beautiful, restorative piece of cinema, waiting for the right moment to be found again.
The ecstasy hangover, apparently especially for first-timers, is profound, a lingering sense of love and security that makes me feel like a dumb kid on her first drug trip when I try to talk about it. But it didn’t just last through a few days, it settled in my bones.
In many of the FDA trials of MDMA, people with treatment-resistant PTSD often go through just one or two treatment sessions, accompanied by talk therapy. Many report exactly the same experience I had: a vivid sense of detached safety, a lasting and long-awaited lifting of a veil of fear, the absence of nightmares that had hovered for decades. It’s been nearly two years and though I’ve had occasional, much lower-grade anxiety dreams, and though I still have panic attacks and take Ativan to relax enough to fall asleep, it feels fundamentally new. The results among phase III trial subjects has been clear enough that it’s thought likely MDMA will soon be approved for therapeutic use — pending a willing FDA.
Researchers don’t fully understand how it happens, but as clearly as some wiring broke in my brain almost 18 years ago, some bypass has now been forged. When I dream I can still feel that detached sense of safety, still feel that riding-flying-swimming sense of a horse I can lean into and hold onto. When I’m awake I can summon it, cling tight.
And now when I see movies I can breathe, as big and scary as they may unexpectedly turn out to be. I have not rediscovered any taste for unnecessary pain and suffering, for destruction and death and violence for the sake of it. I still look away from the screen. I find nothing fun or interesting about unfounded fear.
I saw one film this week full of all of those awful things, one that will no doubt be in contention for some of the industry’s biggest awards because it deliberately does all the things a film can to be in those conversations. I left the theater deeply unsettled, uncomfortable. I didn’t sleep well.
But it didn’t overpower me. It didn’t make me flee.