Our Secret Life in the Movies

by Michael McGriff, J.M. Tyree

Fiction. Film Studies. A whip-smart fiction debut, OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES riffs on classic and cult cinema. Inspired by films from silent-era documentaries to music videos, the authors unfold a dual narrative about two boys growing up in the 1980s. Coming of age during the last days of the Cold War, these boys dream of space exploration and nuclear winter, Reaganomics and Dungeons & Dragons, Blade Runner and Red Dawn. Haunting, cinematic, and full of life, OUR SECRET LIFE makes it clear that we are in the movies and the movies are in us.
"Wildly intelligent and deeply felt, OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES gives us a fascinating look at American life, shot through an insightful and compassionate lens. After reading it, the world seems bigger. A tremendous book."—Molly Antopol

"Reading OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES is like finding a lost frequency on the AM dial. The voices you hear in this book are strange, hypnotic, and intensely American."—Jim Gavin

"A book of poignant and affecting beauty. Readers are presented with characters who are losing their innocence in lockstep with the changing nation they inhabit, and the end result is a book that provides great insight into both who we are and how we got this way. A remarkable achievement."—Skip Horack

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Film, Literary Fiction, Literature

145 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2014

About the author

A native of Oregon, poet Michael McGriff is the author of collections Choke and Dismantling The Hills (which won the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), and his work has appeared in the publications Slate, Field, The Believer, and Poetry. He has also translated a number of works by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, including The Sorrow Gondola. Receiving his MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, he is currently a lecturer at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was primed to really enjoy this book, which tells a story of growing up under Reagan and Cold War era foreign films, which feels a lot like my experience. And there were lots of familiar touchstones-- empty mall parking lots, playing _Red Dawn_ in the woods behind run-down suburban developments.

But for me, it didn't quite work-- these are composed of lots of small pieces, one for each movie, and between them, there's a loose continuity (at least for the first two third or so of the book). But that continuity doesn't really resolve into much, and it feels like a crutch that means many of the smaller stories don't quite resolve either-- and I mean linguistically, as a fragment, as much as I do narrative resolution.

There are lots of flashes here, and some good writing. But these pieces really felt like starters, prompts for other, better, more complete pieces. These are more like sketches and outtakes.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors each write a very short story after seeing a classic film. Each chapter is one pair of stories inspired by the same film, and while I haven't seen most of the movies in question, the theme or mood or setting that the stories share is enough to make each chapter feel coherent. That being said, the stories don't hit more than a few emotional notes. They hit them powerfully and beautifully, but it's one long bittersweet nostalgic ode to this cruel life we all lead.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this short book today. It was very unusual. There is reference to the Criterion Collection's sweeping catalog of world cinema classics as the basis for the story line. I can only recall two of the movies - Blade Runner and On The Waterfront - cited in the book. In each case, I found it challenging to follow the relationship between the film and the story line.

Don't take any of this that I didn't appreciate the read. The premise for the story line was intriguing. I found the reading of the story interesting. The complete depth of the work befuddled me. Perhaps the comment of one critic says it best - "This beautiful, devastating little book is quite unlike anything else I've ever encountered." I endorse that comment.

[Travis Rowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the Blog (https://www.rtfbpod.com/?s=b&h=19)

My fellow nerds might remember this better than I, but I recall a Monty Python sketch. Said sketch was a type of a literary gameshow, wherein the competing teams had to produce an analysis of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, but their answers had to be given within a certain time limit and HAD to be presented in the form of an opera. The memory of this sketch was triggered when I scanned the blurb about this book (that I found while perusing at Deep Vellum.)

The conceit of the book that was promised reads a bit like a new year's resolution, so now feels like a fine time to talk about it. That conceit being: the dual authors, McGriff and Tyree tasking themselves with watching ALL of the films in the Criterion Collection in a single year (that year, I gather, being sometime before 2014). After each viewing, the two of them went off on their own and wrote a short story in response to the film they'd just seen. The liner notes also suggested that the two authors' responses would weave together to create "linked stories follow[ing] two boys coming of age in the 1980s."

I mean, I can't think of a concept more directly targeted at me.

Exhibit A: this whole web site/podcast focused around movies and books.
Exhibit B: distinct memories of browsing through the new Criterion collection DVDs (the humble DVD being a medium that wasn't that old, itself) each week when they hit the shelves at Barnes & Noble (the classy bookstore in town).

Very early on in reading the book, I realized: I have seen a staggeringly small percentage of the Criterion Collection's catalogue. Of the 39 movies included in this book's exercise, for instance, I have seen:
1.) Blade Runner
2.) Carnival of Souls
3.) Donnie Darko

That's it.

AND I saw Blade Runner for the first time last year when we did it on the podcast.
AND I only saw Carnival of Souls because RiffTrax did it as a live show once.

I began to think I was not cultured enough for this book. But, I read on, and I found that these were more like micro stories. Some of the entries bordering on Haiku; a prose paragraph with the preciousness of a poem.

I tried to keep the thread of the two different storylines in mind as I progressed, a task made more difficult since neither response story had a by line, but either I am also too dumb for this book (a real possibility) or there isn't supposed to be any connective tissue between the stories, aside from the movie they are both responding to.

Come to think of it, maybe responding is the wrong verb here. For the VERY few cases where I knew the movies that the stories related to, it seemed more like the films had provided the terroir, set the mood for the written works that came after. It wasn't like either response to Donnie Darko had time travel furries telling people when the world was going to end, but both stories had a kind of feeling of inhabiting a life you weren't intended to, of side-stepping fate that seemed aligned with the spirit of the movie, if that makes sense.

In those cases where the film was familiar to me, I did enjoy trying to reverse-engineer what they had written; what idea their minds had clamped onto when they moved from the TV to their typewriters... but most of the time I could only really guess at what the movies had been about, triangulating using whatever similarities the two pieces shared.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy the book. In fact, I found that the micro stories were expertly done for the most part; minimalist, but as fleshed out as they needed to be. And if they didn't weave together to tell a single (or double) connected narrative, they still had that feeling of being part of a bigger story; of growing up in dying mid-west suburbs, of pubescent trysts, family trauma and secrets, and waking-life magical realism.

I wouldn't suggest just sitting down and reading it cover to cover. Much better, I would think, to treat this like a book of poems to be consumed in small chunks and mulled over for a little while -- especially if you know the movies they are responding to. I was constantly coming across plot points and prose that were surprisingly good and memorable (if not exactly an opera).

It might even be fun to pick a handful of the movies in here that you've never seen before, make a checklist, and turn reading the book into a new year's project of your own?

[Mark Oppenlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

The gimmick here is relatively simple: Two writers watch a film together, and then each composes a short piece of fiction in response to the movie. The two short stories are published here, along with the name of the film that inspired them.

The stories are brief, ranging from a couple of paragraphs to maybe four pages at the longest. Most are one or two pages in length. As such, they are really flash fiction, sketches and setups, not full length narratives. Given that one of the two writers is a poet by trade, perhaps that is not surprising. The tales offer mood and style over character and plot.

There are thematic threads throughout. Many of the tales involve dysfunctional families, or take place in small, working class suburbs or rural towns. The protagonists are frequently Gen X kids, trying to make sense of the 1980's, Reaganomics, the Cold War, video games, relationships, and more. I found it interesting that sometimes the two stories inspired by the same film were quite similar, whereas other times the stories couldn't have been more different.

I expected to like this book more, in part because I am a movie buff, and in part because I too am a Gen X'er, who grew up in a middle-class Oregon suburb in the 1980's. I thought that I would have a lot in common with the authors and their little experiment (McGriff is from Oregon too). Nonetheless, I found that the collection really didn't leave a lasting impression on me. Fleeting fragments of beautiful writing, and the evocation of bittersweet moments, vaguely related to a film I may or may not know all added to a sense of this as being an incomplete experience. I felt as though I had consumed a series of appetizers but never saw the entree.

It's possible that if I knew more of the movies (or had watched them in preparation for the book), I might have had a different experience. I have seen maybe 25% of the films referenced here, and am broadly familiar with another 30 or 40% of them. The remaining third were complete unknowns. But maybe deeper knowledge of the movies isn't the point. This collection feels like a personal project for the authors - a private correspondence between the two men, or an in-joke that the rest of us don't quite get. Whatever it is, I found myself standing on the outside, looking in.

This isn't a bad book. It's just very unusual, and hard to fully endorse or recommend.

[Joe Sacksteder]

A book that explores a total lack of narrative fixedness. You expect to track the parallel coming-of-age stories of two kids in the eighties; you expect to try to detect whether or not one of them appears in the other's section. Maybe they do? But quickly you realize that the narrative is riven, distorted, and uniquely deranged through the lens of each film. Everything exists in the realm of fantasy intruding on reality. "If art reflects life, it does so with strange mirrors"—Brecht

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a nice quick read in between long novels. I really enjoyed the essay/short story format! I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had seen the movies they had watched. I read some movie descriptions online but it was a little too much research for me. However, it was definitely interesting to read snippets of life growing up poor in the Midwest in the 80's. And I love the thought that everyone has a secret life in the movies. 🎞️

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of vignettes by two authors, each based on a film they just saw. To be honest, I had seen very few of the films, but it didn't hinder my enjoyment of the great writing. Though there was no story arc per se, themes of "coming of age" in the 80s permeated the book along with basic tales of human sorrow and a few glimmers of hope.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The result of the author's experiment, to watch the entire Criterion Collection and write stories inspired by the films, this cohesive collection of micro-stories, laced with jagged humor and stark grittiness, is a haunting glimpse into the crumbling suburban landscape of America in the 1980s and the strange experience of growing up under the blanket of Cold War paranoia.

[Neil McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book to dip into every now and again for a bit of escapism.

[Wren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I would have loved it more if I watched the movies before reading the short stories. Or if I was a movie buff.

My two favorite stories were:
No Outlet
Godzilla

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the concept (writing short stories after watching the Criterion catalog) but fell flat for me.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong flash collection based on movies I mostly haven’t seen, largely themed around childhood and teenage life in downtrodden, Reagan-era America.

[Kim Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

In concept, the book sounds profoundly pretentious. The co-authors, McGriff and Tyree, were roommates and teachers in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. McGriff convinced Tyree to watch every film in the Criterion Collection together and to write a piece inspired each film. The book is a collection of these short stories, presented without bylines, and listed by the source of their inspiration.

The collection of connected microfiction is a series of intimate tales of middle-American squalor, broken homes in 1980s America, and loneliness. The authors don’t romanticize; instead, it’s presented with the understandable mix of pride that they escaped into academic and professional success, survivor’s guilt in the fact of their peers who committed suicide, overdosed, or burned out and stuck in squalor, and anger about what they grew up without. It’s Richard Linklater’s Boyhood gone dark.

Standing alone, the collection is powerful. I’m sure that familiarity with the films that served as inspiration would amplify the collection’s effect. I felt a perverse connection to the films; I read the book as I was flying from New York to San Francisco, and I could imagine these same stories happening below, details rearranged to fit the 2015 context.

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Am honestly unsure what to make of this collection, which sees two authors engaging in stories that are tangentially connected, with each pair housed under a different cult movie. The stories movie between realistic depictions of an 80s childhood and more surreal adult environments that featur, for example, a man whose significant other breaks up with him because she finds a suitcas full of human ears under the bed. What she doesn't realize is that he sells the human ears, it's his job, and he only took that job because the IRS had come to repossess his wife! Strange and occasionally powerful, but the connective tissue of it all lay somewhere beyond my grasp.

[Philip Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this twice over this holiday break. Once to myself, the second time, aloud to my wife. We are both more unfamiliar with many of the films than we'd like to be, but that isn't the point of the work. My wife told me, as I read aloud to her, how she "drifted through someone else's life, familiar, maybe yours." And that is exacting to the experience I was having. Someone else's life, but familiar, like maybe it was my own.

p.shaw

[Anne B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not at all what I expected. Beauty doesn't usually come packaged like this.

I would need a whole lot of hyperbole to do the stories in this little book justice. I won't bother. Read it if you love poetry, the West Coast, memory, movies, or the place where the weird intersects with the honest. Read it if you hated the 1980s, and love the others who survived them.

I love this book. I love my generation. Mike, J.M.: you guys are rad.

[Maria Hummel · Rating 5 out of 5]

So excited to see this book make NPR's best of 2014 list! Tyree and McGriff's literary experiment brought out beautiful and funny prose by both of these writers, and the book is layered with so many different kinds of consciousness--of movies, of autobiography, of coming of age in the Cold War era, etc. Recommended for cinephiles and book-nerds alike.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting concept: two writers watch the criterion collection and then write flash fiction responses to each film. It sounds like a fun project.

I fee like I missed out on something for the stories in response to films I hadn't seen. Some pieces didn't really have enough time to breathe, but I thought the concept alone made it worth reading.

[Tamlynem · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't get it.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has given me a long list of movies to check out. Good writing too!