Like the music savant that John Cusack plays in High Fidelity, I too obsessively order my media collection in accordance to an idiosyncratic logic, yet for me its not so much autobiographical as psychological. Each film is a drug stimulant used to heighten a certain aesthetic effect, arranged according to the subtlest of mood variations. If depressed I choose a film that deepens the wound, if pensive I choose a film that engages my mind. On the surface this might seem a common practice, at the very least amongst cinephiles, but the depth of my resolve to find the right film for the right mood is probably unique if not borderline neurotic. I know well enough the buttons to push to make me feel one way or the other, and my dvds are arranged according to this spectrum. Some, though, are held back, even unwrapped, for special agitations.

Today’s agitation is inconsolable weariness. My body aches, the inescapable toil of life weighs on me, and this same grayness appears reflected back to me in the state of world. While I am not directly hurt by the Recession, it does serve as a symbol of what I feel inwardly and, for the sake of narrative, serves as an excuse to indulge my myopic preoccupations of late with the hypothetical that maybe the world at large could in fact use my prescription of escapist cinema right about now. This is a recession after all, a time people are said to flock to the cinema to escape reality (the grosses of Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Fast and Furious would appear to corroborate this). Now would appear to be the proper time to dispense with weighty verisimilitude and wade deep into the Technicolor ponds of artifice.

The following are some of my favorite cinematic getaways, unabashedly idiosyncratic, and posed self-aware of what is missing. Unlike most people, the very niche enterprises of straight up fantasy films, whether it be your Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potters, rarely if ever satisfy my needs of escape, this despite their very clear ambitions of world-making which I respect as an essential component of what I think escapist cinema should embody. But must it be so bombastic and self-important? Fantasy films are preemptive daydreams, engineered for seduction like some kind of malleable call girl for the unimaginative. I want worlds that meet me halfway with their flirtation into a natural state of blissful revelry. They need to be about something else while always hinting at the greater horizon. The only real fantasy stories I enjoy as escapist fare are those that are drawn out over seasons of television like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, there are enough crooks and crannies to inhabit with that much duration.

My idea of escapist cinema also excludes what I would like to call ‘the mindless distraction fare’, films that are usually under the banner of ‘escapist cinema’ but which are by design made only to occlude the audience for a couple of hours with a clutter of special effects and/or comedy sketches. That is not escape as I understand it because there is no real and desirable sense of place to escape to; rather than become stirred awake into some kind of fantasy, here one is numbed into submission. Also there tends to be no lasting resonance of the experience to focus on. Escapist cinema should supply worlds agreeable and reductive, stripping away all of the complexities, all of the agendas, all of the static of the everyday, while inviting you to the pure cinema of place. Here you no more watch the film, you breathe it, and by design, the world appears to extend beyond the frame. Its not the story or the punchline that you remember vividly, but rather the world that contained them.

Such escapist cinema is the poor man’s holidays and so I offer a couple of my preferred destinations in exchange for yours.

The West: RIO BRAVO

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks): This classic Howard Hawks’ western has all the outward signatures of the genre, including the Duke, John Wayne himself, as the sheriff, but unlike others of the time period, Rio Bravo achieves a levity and meandering quality to its vision of the Old West that sets it apart from all rivals. Inspired more from the fifties TV westerns than films past, Hawks created an Old West of affable characters shooting the breeze and breaking into the occasional tune, all while an inevitable confrontation between factions bubbles up nearly inconsequentially outside of it all. Filmed in the famous Tucson Studios, Hawks gives the audience a true sense of place, as John Wayne and his sidekick played by Dean Martin cover every inch of the town in their patrols. Rio Bravo is a purely Hollywood concoction, from the saloon to the hotel to the prison, everything has a hyper-reality sheen to it. Whether seeking warmth in the Saloon from a rainy and foreboding evening, or hanging back in the Sheriff’s office as an impromptu sing-a-long drowns out the mariachi band down the street, Rio Bravo is made for weary souls like me to collapse into. And with all good fantasy worlds, this too comes with its own stunning embodiment of the female persuasion (feminist writers be damned!) with the casting of a nubile Angie Dickinson.

Alternative Western choice if Rio Bravo is unavailable: Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country

The Musical: MEET ME IN ST LOUIS

Meet Me in St. Louis: Admittedly, my knowledge of Hollywood musicals is rather limited, and when I know something works my ambition to look elsewhere (particularly within a genre such as this) becomes stagnated by my fixation. I unabashedly love Meet Me in St. Louis, it melts my heart, my jaded academic heart. My love is not so much a reflection of my interest in Judy Garland, who I could take or leave, truth be told, but rather the splendid artifice of this Missouri family and their nostalgia tinged depiction of familial squabbles and celebratory events. With the exception of Clang Clang goes the Trolly I cannot for the life of me dredge up a single other musical number in the film, and for me clearly, the music is not the point. Its as if I go somewhat mute when I watch this film, and just fixate on the glorious rendering of the ideal family life, the naïveté that encompasses it like a halo. The family home where most of the film takes place is clearly a set but what a set! When Christmas is in full bloom, the house is a spectacle to behold, and as Judy Garland sings that Christmas song (which I cannot recall) and the snow is falling outside, I feel ridiculously at peace. This is the magic of the movies, this is the place I long to escape to.

Alternative Musical choice if Meet Me in St. Louis is unavailable: Singin’ in the Rain (well duh).

The Period Piece: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright): Joe Wright’s film fleshes out a world of Jane Austen that is at times quite breathtaking in its historical sumptuousness. Rather than confine the form of the film to suit the narrative constraints of the novel it seems that Wright understood the tacit value in merely observing the historical details of the mundane that makes the Jane Austen world tangible, so that frequently there are free-floating shots which weave throughout a dimensional space, offering the viewer an at times 360 degree sense of the setting in which the story is nestled. The pastoral imagery of the settings and the raw earthiness of the costumes and performances further engaged the historical voyeurism at the heart of the work. I suspect part of the appeal of Jane Austen is the historical milieu she depicts, a time of simple values and pleasures which we in our modern world wish at times to escape to: Pride and Prejudice is just such an escape..

Alternative Period Piece choice is Pride and Prejudice is unavailable: Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows

The Crime: HARD EIGHT

Hard Eight, a.k.a. Sydney (Paul Thomas Anderson): Of the films so far listed, this is the most clearly at risk of bursting the fantasy bubble and giving into harsh realities as part of the aesthetics. That and I imagine my affection for this, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, is something of an anomaly particular to my psychosis. Even stranger, Hard Eight is my favorite P.T.A. film, for just the same reason that it is here singled out as my favorite crime fantasy choice. None of the other worlds Anderson creates call to me in the way that Hard Eight does, and while I can stand back and say they have other strengths from a craft perspective, they do not have the lasting effect that Hard Eight does. This story of a mysterious gambler and his curious tutelage of a down-on-his-luck rookie as they forge a profit among the casinos of Reno, hits me on several levels: first, I am a sucker for the sheer base aesthetics of neon awash casinos and the sort of nighthawk allure they give off; second, the fantasy of a mysterious benefactor relieving me of my burden of day-to-day employment calls to my laziest instincts; and lastly, the drama and attraction to the Gwenyth Paltrow character in the film works on me in this alternate reality kind of way. While she is severely flawed, somehow within the context of a fantasy world of late night casinos and criminal behavior, this wounded beauty has a natural logic to it. Also who wouldn’t want a friend like Sydney (played expertly by Philip Baker Hall)?

Alternate Crime film if Hard Eight is unavailable: Jules Dassin’s Rififi

The Classic: SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS

Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges): Yes this is a film whose world is set squarely in the Great Depression, and on the surface would seem to contradict the ‘escapist’ description I laid out before, but let’s dig deeper shall we? Upon this canvas is set a story about an affluent Hollywood filmmaker who longs to make a great dramatic work on the plight of the impoverished and as research strives to live out the life of a hobo. The story is played for laughs mostly as a fish out of water schtick with Sullivan coming to terms with just how out of touch he is with the impoverished, however by the final scene the film quite self-reflexively comes to acknowledge just how important levity is to those confronting the brunt force of an economic downturn. Pensive and dramatic realism is all well and good for someone whose basic needs have already been quenched, but when wearied by the world there is nothing better than delightful artifice to alleviate the soul. While the message of this film serves to underscore the whole motivation for this post, I would not include it solely on this merit, for in addition to the amicable sensibilities of the story, we have perhaps one of my all time favorite destinations in film: the Dust Bowl. This got me thinking about the Dust Bowl, this looming spectre of the past that I never lived through but which I have grown to appreciate through my vicarious admiration of the works of Ford and Steinbeck. The faux-nostalgia of borrowed cinematic memories has conjured a vision of the Great Depression that feels more real to me now then my domesticated life. As part of one of the first generations in Western civilization unburdened with the hardships of war and financial instability, yet privy to the knowledge of past events, I feel the absence of burden all the more acutely as an affront to my more primal instincts. And speaking of primal, it would be impossible for me to overlook the consummate ideal that is Veronica Lake who even dirtied up comes off as the ultimate male fantasy.

Alternate Classic Dust Bowl film if Sullivan’s Travels is unavailable: John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath