Saving Private Ryan

 

        I have a limited capacity for violence that is too realistic. Which is why I've Seen Schindler's List exactly once, and Saving Privat Ryan Twice.  It is not lost on me that both of these are Spielberg movies. Generationally, not surprising, but you also give him his propers when it comes to telling stories that stab your heart.

        Watching the second time, sitting in a hotel room in Titusville, Florida, as the rain falls and I fight my anxiety i am aware this is exactly the wrong movie for me to watch right now, but I clearly need to be AS ANXIOUS AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE in this moment, so...watching.

       All I have to say is this: when I watched this years ago, Giovanni Ribisi's role is the one that made me check out. Not the opening slaughter, or the insanity at the French village but the death of the medic. That whole scene was written and executed with such depth and humanity and loss that I never forgot it, and it remained the reason I said "I will never watch that movie again."  

        I turned on the TV in the room while I showered, and it rained, and Jim is with his cousin sorting out the estate stuff, and I opened the computer intending to write with the movie as background.

       Instead, I sat riveted, horrified, shredded by anxiety and hopping up occasionally to do a yoga stretch so I at least felt like I wasn't just...fermenting. I have no idea why that is the word chosen for this moment. As I watched Giovanni get shot again, and ask for morphine and know he's a goner, I was taken aback because the scene was in the wrong location. I had remembered that he died on an expanse of green, near a church. I have no idea where that came from, but when he was hit on a hellish landscape, not an expanse of green. Maybe that scene is somewhere else in the movie, I did join it late this time around. My mind inverted another scene with his death. Maybe to make it more peaceful. Less like a murder. I am obsessed with why or how my mind did this. I realized as the movie advanced, that I remembered which character lived and died, but not how. As if watching the movie had created a reaction to trauma in me. What is that about? I actually changed the location of a fictional character's death? 

       Nah, I just misremembered. I am not traumatized by a silly movie.

       I am also not watching it because I know it will make me cry and I really need a break, a safe break, right about now.

      As it's raining outside in Titusville, and Saving Private Ryan is on AMC, the anxiety spikes and a person sobs at a Spielberg blockbuster.

     Scene.