The Cinema
I just finished my final exam in a graduate level course I’m taking called Brain Science and Learning. As I walked back to my dorm, passing the library, a coyote was twenty yards in front of me on the sidewalk. I had just passed a pile of doggie poo, and at first my brain registered the furry four legged animal ahead as “dog.” But something didn’t add up; it was leaner than most, its ears pointed and stuck up in hyper-alert mode; and it noticed me long before most dogs would have, and immediately startled, and deftly scaled the hill and was away, anxiously checking back to see that I wasn’t threatening it.
I immediately thought of the scene in the Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx movie by Michael Mann called Collateral (2004). In the third act, as they drive to another of Cruise’s “assignments,” they come upon a lone coyote in the middle of LA. (I am attending La Sierra University, in Riverside, just east of LA). It’s a beautiful moment in the film, and relates directly to the emotional situation of Cruise’s character.
The fact that such a spontaneous serendipity with nature would cause me to think first, of all things, a movie, tells you something about me, and my relationship with the cinema.
It’s a deeply integrated part of me. Of all art forms, it comes closest to having the most simultaneously personal and universal impact, and the widest possible range of expression. I’m sure many would disagree, but I was raised on movies more than any other art form (but not to the exclusion of any), and so my view is biased (a lil bit).