More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But this book is not just a book about a movie about a journey, it’s also a book about my/our journey with that movie about a journey, a journey soundtracked by the sweet soft-rock sounds of Journey.* Or, to be precise, this book concerns multiple Journeys. The Journey of The Book, the Journey of The Film, the Journey of Us, i.e. Me, the Journey of the band Journey and (perhaps least importantly) the Journey of You.
Please also make sure your seat is back and that the folding trays are in their full upright position. Because it’s not the crash that’ll kill you, it’s the trays.
The doors to this book have now been secured, and we will shortly taxi§ to our runway, if we take ‘runway’ to mean ‘further introductory passages’, ‘taxi’ to mean inelegantly trundle like a chest freezer on a roller skate, and ‘doors’ to have no real relevance within this piece of high-wire idiomatic world building.
three years. Can I ever get that lost oxygen back? Is that why I’m always tired? Why I find it hard to focus? I find myself on YouTube, watching a compilation of Extreme Slap Bass. I close the curtains a smidge.
This isn’t going to be some ‘worthy’ virtue-signalling film about social issues/justice. This is the opening frame of a Super 8 montage. This is going to be a normal, nostalgic film about attractive white people who get everything they want.
In fact, throughout what follows, the film’s sustained, masterful use of first-person narration obviates the need for potentially protracted scenes in which important character motivation might be revealed visually.
I never learned to conspire, no one showed me how to rebel. I simply did not know how to transgress. I did everything I was told. My first words were, ‘Will that be all for today?’
When my parents weren’t watching the news, they were either waiting to watch the news or recovering from watching the news. The news confirmed their feeling that things were terrible everywhere, and there was nothing anyone could do about it apart from keep abreast of developments. I’ve avoided the news ever since.
By feting my naissance at an Eater, I would move up the dominance hierarchy from Boy Held Down and Farted On to International Sophisticate Laughing at Prior Subjugation with New-Found Friends. ‘Was this the boy whose head we used to flush down the toilet?’ my oppressors would ask. ‘This bon viveur so suavely swirling his Thousand Island dressing with a carrot baton?’
In a word: empathy. I too know what it’s like to have a disappointing birthday party. I too know the terror of unexpected gusts, be they environmental or alimentary. I too know what it’s like to want to leave somewhere. My main problem is knowing where to go once I’ve left.
Sisyphus is going places, it’s just that the route is quite up and down.
Cinema helps us to remember that although we all have the right to shine, some of us must shine in the background, out of focus, and not too brightly.
It is in the unvaried repetition of familiar motifs that Barreto’s originality lies.
At first glance, Paltrow looks like she wouldn’t set foot in Big Lots even if it were the only viable place to shelter from acid rain. She hates conventional retail so much she’s set up her own company to filter out anything non-bespoke and named it after what Stephen Baldwin’s smile seems to be wallowing in.*
For Donna Jensen to even dream of such a woman would be beyond her capacity. GP’s life is Olympian, a true View from the Top. A view that only one super-special old soul with youthful glow-y skin can command.
Two things are apparent. Firstly, Donna Jensen has no fear of cliché. Secondly, at the end of the day, Donna Jensen is a pack animal. She believes in the value of the collective over the individual. She prizes loyalty, joint responsibility and – in a way that’s truly refreshing – literalism.
are we to believe that people are only hired at Big Lots for their alliterative potential?
The phrase ‘business is business’ will haunt us later. It’s a phrase that’s hard to refute, much like the phrase ‘genocide is genocide’, but the trauma of this rejection will lead Donna to harden up and focus on her own ‘business’.
The exchange ended with me calling DeGagne a ‘farm boy’ – a reference made solely in relation to the genealogy of his name. Gagner is an old French word meaning ‘to till’ or ‘cultivate’, and therefore it’s very likely his ancestors were agricultural workers. I presumed DeGagne would know that, but I now accept that the nomenclature could be ‘regarded as derogative’, and after a period of intense pressure from some aggressively vocal farming lobbies, I reluctantly deleted the tweet.
I think the film is about coming to realise that the dream that helps you be your best self is already in the centre of your own heart, if only you dare to believe
It is unclear why Co-Pilot Steve thinks that his undoubted ability to successfully co-pilot a plane would be a subset of a more general omniscience.
Donna is literally in a plane that is flying ‘ahead’ at ‘full speed’, but the expression ‘flying at full speed’ might not be merely a description of the aircraft’s velocity; it could be interpreted as referring to Donna herself. Like the plane, Donna has ‘momentum’.
When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I’ll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven’t read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.
They like those epaulettes.
Why don’t they just call it Caligulair? ‘Our seats are wipe-clean for a reason
That oil is for us! We should enjoy it! If God didn’t want us to burn fossil fuel, He wouldn’t have allowed a layer of mud to form over dead animals and plants at the bottom of the ocean and subjected them to heat and pressure over many millennia.
But the passage is clear in encouraging us to buy friendships.
will Ted Stewart be able to serve Donna’s needs, or will he be the Ryanair of love interests?
What looks like modesty is actually a quasi-fascist argument either for genetic supremacy or the absolute necessity of being correctly encoded within a family unit.
In short, why can’t life be idiomatically similar to air travel?
Apart from, it often seems, View from the Top. View from the Top feels unending.
Dear Lord, why would anyone, let alone Sally Weston, begrudge anyone taking seven or eight bars of novelty aeroplane soap?
But Church, wisely, suggested that these women would be no ordinary useless women, they would be trained nurses: superwomen hardened at the sharp end of a scalpel.
Within a few years, the need for nursing qualifications was dropped – youth, tailored uniforms and attractiveness being deemed more than sufficient replacements for the ability to save lives.
if a woman were forced to share the same contained space as you, an emotionally closed-off businessman, how would she stop herself falling in love? Has she any idea how many moves you have? Has she any idea how many women would fall prey to your charms if only they were employed to pretend to like you?
Becoming a stewardess allowed women to take on a role that was uniquely feminine: A Blank Canvas Onto Which Men Could Project Their Desire. But these women weren’t just sexually objectified, they were also forced to conform to a male idea of female elegance.
Stewardesses had to dress the same, have their hair cut the same way and walk as if they were miming being a teapot.
A time when, owing to the rules about being single, non-pregnant and in your twenties, there was no prospect of increased pay or advancement, the job being a prelude to the domesticity for which it was a de facto training ground. An elegant time. A better time.
Like Sally, Donna’s main chance of wealth is to meet and marry a wealthy person. Thus, the stewardess is a debutante, a debutante who has to do her own catering and clean up after the guests depart.
Winston Churchill said, ‘Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.’ But he never said anything about letting go of your fury.
HAIR HEIGHT There’s an unspoken rule w/r/t this in post-Reagan America: high hair = low class.*
Like a reverse Samson, her power grows as her follicles flatten. She moves from being ‘other’ to ‘us’, if we looked like Gwyneth Paltrow.
The height of your hair illustrates the emotional bandwidth in which you may operate, which is why Chris Walken can emphasise the syllable which he deems appropriate rather than the one that might convey meaning.
‘Unless my hair provides complete coverage,’ such a man says, ‘I will destroy it.’
In fact, many romantic comedies seem to be based on the theory that women are best suited to men whom, initially, they barely notice.
Sliding Doors is a film that asks us to have sympathy for someone who works in PR, and shows that whether you catch the tube or not, you will never get away from John Hannah.
