sunshine_queen | After you've gone...

I like film in the way that it captures moments in time. Movies capture whole sequences, and photographs hold on to a flash of an instant, but they're fantastic nonetheless. They exist because you were special enough, deserving enough to be memorialized, you deserve to be seen, to be remembered. Be it Hollywood films or home videos, they are proof that you existed and were special, much more so than a birth certificate.

They're misleading. The people trapped in the moment don't know what will occur to them, and it gives them this poignant tang decipherable only to those who know their ultimate fate. Marilyn Monroe is made all the more beautiful by her tragic death. James Dean could've never lived up to his hype in life but continues to amass a following in death, a sacrificial lamb to the pire of immortality. Jim Morrison was famous in life and eternal in death.

To watch their films or listen to their music, one doesn't know what will happen. James Dean does not know that he will die in a car crash while he is acting in 'Rebel Without a Cause'. Marilyn is breathlessly giddy in her films because she hides her demons that will manifest themselves and lead to her death in her mid-thirties.

Natalie Wood bats her fawn eyes and invokes your sympathy for her plight and she doesn't know that she will die at forty-seven, and that her greatest fear will be her demise: dark, deep water. Judy Garland is killed by the pills handed to her at the age of sixteen by the studios that ruled her life, the very same pills she tried to quit numerous times, the same pills people told her repeatedly would be her death.

They don't know this, and they go about their acts and songs according to the scripted mood, giving us talent to live on for years after they have gone.

And even though you know that Jim wrote his songs while high, that James Dean drove too fast in his flashy car with the arrogance of newly-wealthy youth, that Marilyn was tormented, that Natalie lived in abject horror of imperfection and water, that Judy couldn't always perform because she was so wasted and so dependant on her pills... they still deliver, they still give us the media we want, the media we watch and listen to to this day.