a memoir with movies
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Inside. Inside these pages. Inside an asthmatic kid’s locked room. Inside a writer’s head. We all know there’s only one way out, but in the meantime an engagement with art might offer some solace, and the engagements Steve Mitchell offers in A Mistrust of Arrival are nothing short of reasons to carry on, to get outside. The call-them-essays in this book think about art (generally but not exclusively film art) and they use movies to manipulate the psychic space in a writer’s memory of a younger self. Films interrogate Mitchell’s life just as Mitchell questions and responds to the moving images he encounters throughout his life. This is a give-and-take of the highest order and the filmmakers whose work is here used might well feel the rare joy of being “read” seriously and thrill at the depth of intellectual and emotional response to their work this book brings. This is art criticism as revelation of self. It believes that art might matter and that it might matter enough to change your life. And you might find the keys to all the locked doors in the schlocky horror of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die or in the 4 hours and 47 minutes of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. Either way, the subtle intensity of Mitchell’s writing will offer you an interior passage to the beautiful world.
“I’m eight or nine and haven’t yet decided movies are a possible religion,” Mitchell writes as he describes what will become a lifelong passion, a way of connecting with and experiencing the world through a sickly childhood, spiritual quests, marriage and divorce, a son’s mysterious illness. In these clear-eyed, tender essays, Mitchell dances from memoir to film critique to a magical place between the two where art meets lived experience. These are not just explorations of movies and the people who make them—though they are that too—they are new modes of seeing, the way watching a snippet of Bonnie and Clyde as a kid showed Mitchell that “these few images—it’s less than a minute of wordless film—might be the first time I . . . understand I’m not alone.” And neither are we alone, with this book in our hands.”
-Lex Orgera, author of Head Case
“The second paragraph of ‘Ultimate Trip’ begins with the narrator’s declaration of love for ‘anything having to do with space, science fiction, and astronauts…’ Its real subject is the interior life, and the development of consciousness that brings us both meaning and unrivaled pleasure. ‘I’m outside myself,’ the narrator remembers after seeing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘I’ve lost hold of myself for the first time, realizing there is a self to lose hold of.’ Space, consciousness, memory, time, mystery, wonder, joy, art, faith, the body, the self—all these subjects are not only touched upon but connected in 12 pages of careful, wondrous sentences. That the essay also manages to honor, with grace, all that it cannot communicate is what convinced me of the possibilities of looking inward and upward at once.”
-Michael Parker, author of I Am the Light of This World
230 pgs. Trade Paperback. $20
ISBN: 978-1-959104-06-3
Scuppernong Editions
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