Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood

Beginning a step by step journey through this list...

My first steps towards cinephilia started with a love for action movies (especially those starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) and what my brothers and I called "epics" - i.e., movies that came on two VHS tapes (The Towering Inferno, The Right Stuff, The Great Escape), which we liked to rent because they gave us more bang for our (parents') buck.

After that I got into actors. My favorites were Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, and for my 14th birthday, my parents got me - appropriately enough - coffee table "The Films of..." books for each of them. If I were making a list of books that were important to "my life as a movie watcher", those two would have a place on it, but this list is about my life as an amateur critic.

I checked Robin Wood's Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan out of the Westmount library in order to research a Grade 10 English paper that I was writing on The Graduate. Though I didn't find much in it that directly related to my thesis ("Coming of Age in The Graduate"), I ended up reading through the whole book. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it.

I had, at this point, learned about the basics of literary analysis in English class, but this was the first book length work of criticism that I had ever read, the first work of criticism that assumed the reader was familiar with the basics of Freudianism and Marxism, and my first exposure to close readings of movies. I can still remember reading Wood's Feudian take on Blow Out and being shocked by all of the phallic symbols he was able to find.

I'm not sure that I found him entirely convincing. Today, I still don't quite agree with his arguments and I value his Howard Hawks book (even though there's lots I'd argue with there, too) more than this one. But what was important to me was less Wood's specific approach, than the idea that I could approach a movie with a critical frameworks in place. And that, by doing so, I might be able to unlock deeper meanings, hidden under the surfaces of the films I loved.