The story of storytelling began so long ago that its opening lines have dissolved into the mists of deep time. The best we can do is loosely piece together a first chapter. We know that by 1.5 million years ago early humans were crafting remarkably symmetrical hand axes, hunting cooperatively, and possibly controlling fire. Such skills would have required careful observation and mimicry, step-by-step instruction, and an ability to hold a long series of events in one’s mind—an incipient form of plot. At least one hundred thousand years ago, and possibly much earlier, humans were drawing, painting, making jewelry, and ceremonially burying the dead. And by forty thousand years ago, humans were creating the type of complex, imaginative, and densely populated murals found on the chalky canvases of ancient caves: art that reveals creatures no longer content to simply experience the world but who felt compelled to record and re-imagine it. Over the past few hundred thousand years, the human character gradually changed. We became consummate storytellers.
No one can agree on anything at the moment: what is or is not obscene, what is or is not a coup, what is or is not an emergency. As a person who chooses words professionally, it doesn’t feel great to see the very notion of meaning become a partisan issue.
Goddamnit.
For the first time in years, the Oscars ceremonies had no host. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was pressing to diversify its aging membership in the face of changing times. A divisive Republican president had taken office and civil discourse was strained. A charismatic, blue-eyed actor had made his critically praised directorial debut, but the Academy’s directing branch had denied him a nomination.
The year was 1969, not 2019. Kevin Hart was 10 years from being born; the president was Richard Nixon, not Donald Trump; and the actor-director was Paul Newman, not Bradley Cooper. But 50 years ago, just as today, the annual Oscars telecast captured a shifting moment in movie history, as the old Hollywood gave way—tentatively, haltingly, sometimes grudgingly—to the new. Then, as now, declining attendance at movie theaters was the existential threat, even if streaming-video services had yet to be dreamed of, and the future of old-line studios looked uncertain at best. And then, as now, the systems and methods of financing and making movies were changing. That very year, Warner Bros. was acquired by a parking-garage company, though no one could presumably imagine that it would one day be owned by AT&T.
During To begin somewhere other
than at the beginning, to begin
in that last summer of the ’80s, with the tutor –
his wire-wool beard, his sotto voce slights
and compliments, the meekness he affects
to say them in – and with the student, who is beautiful,