Films Of Mine That You Now Own

I have lent out nearly half of the movies I own. There is little to no hope of ever seeing them again. The people who borrowed them long gone, departing after high school in their own separate ways, following their own specific ambitions. Sure, there is a downside. I wanted to watch Match Point last week with a friend after explaining, using no hyperbole mind you, how it was absolutely the greatest movie ever. But I haven’t had Match Point in my collection since Junior Year when I left it at Claire’s after that one night with the Champagne Cocktails. She lives in Seattle now and I hear from her only on the holidays. Then there was the more recent divvying up of my Harry Potter series. The last one, which I owned on Blu-Ray is, quite inexplicably, somewhere over the Atlantic while the rest are with a girl who packed up and moved to Colorado.

The list goes on and on: Fight Club is in Pennsylvania with Tommy who once let me punch him after third hour when we were both feeling it. The Darjeeling Limited in New York. Brooklyn, I believe, in one of those brownstone looking buildings that I imagined Truman Capote living in. All three Whit Stillman films are keeping my friend Trudy company as she tries to find herself in the Mid-West.

This doesn’t bother me, not as much as you’d think. In fact, it is strangely comforting. There is something calming about knowing that if I ever find myself in Oakland, California I can call up a friend, someone I haven’t seen in a few years and go out for drinks, for conversations about the old days, before retreating back to her place to watch not just one, but all three of the Back to the Future movies.