Palo Alto

22 Dec 2014

I watched the movie Palo Alto last night, and it made me feel things. I haven’t fully parsed out what all of those things are, but I’d like to discuss the mechanisms by which it accomplished this. This isn’t going to be a critique of the movie, but more of an exploration of how it seemed beautiful.

Also, this will probably make more sense if you’ve seen it.

While watching it, I found myself constantly referring to moments in my own life that reverberated with the emotional tone of the scenes.

The movie loosely follows a couple high school students around. We see them party and puke, kiss coaches and boys, smile shyly at the hint of first love and cry alone in a bathroom amongst uncaring gossip. There isn’t really a strong story arc, or climax, or crisis; we simply gain access to moments of life, decisions that at once seem fateful or inconsequential or oddly difficult. These moments are all rendered beautifully, and are presented with a refreshingly light touch of dialog. The emotions are hinted at, and we are presented with the skeleton of a story.

It’s this skeletal aspect of the movie that I find so beautiful. Here I am watching all these oddly significant moments that have gained all of their emotional power from my own life. The movie provides a context for my own experiences, and the slow pace of the film allows me to truly inject my experiences into the scenes. I remember that uncertainty of love, the slow flush and then rush of illicit touch, the awkwardness of communication, fundamentally disagreeing with the behavior of people that I thought I knew, all these little moments.

I didn’t only relive high school moments. The movie provided a skeleton for my experiences up until this day as all base emotions are timeless.

In many ways it reminded me of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”. Hemingway was able to flatly state elements of the world around his characters in a way that only become significant when you could really relate to their emotional state. I once had a discussion, in high school, with a friend who really didn’t like the book. My friend had never been in love at that point, and as a result, was bored by Hemingway’s dry descriptions of the world surrounding his lovers. I had recently broken up with someone and I was able to take Hemingway’s skeleton and hang my experiences from its bones. To this day that’s one of my favorite books.

Palo Alto does the same thing. It’s beautiful, slow, and sparse.