Happy New Year! This week - the 137th installment of the FilmStack1 Inspiration Challenge, an ongoing series where the writers of FilmStack share what’s inspiring them. The challenge was started by the great Ted Hope, and is currently curated by the brilliant Donny Broussard2. Both are real luminaries of the space here, and it’s an honor to follow in the footsteps of folks like them, not to mention everyone else who’s contributed.

It would be hard to trace my interest in film, writing and the arts without talking about my grandmother - we call her Mame3.

One of the first female analysts at Merrill Lynch, she had to sign her name ‘J. Arnold’ so people wouldn’t realize she was a woman. While telling us about the Great Depression, she joked the worst part was that you could only afford to go to the movies once a week. When asked how she felt about equal rights for women, she retorted ‘Well...why would I lower myself?’.

A couple years ago, my parents bought Mame, a big movie buff4, a subscription to the Criterion Channel for Christmas. As we cleaned up breakfast, my 90-something-year-old grandmother opened a laptop, pulled up Charlie Chaplin’s THE KID and proceeded, all by herself…to laugh uproariously.

It’s hard not to sound hyperbolic when I say this, but I really do think about that moment all the time. Here was a woman in her 90s watching a movie that was, at that point, over a hundred years old. And she just couldn’t stop laughing. I’m not sure my grandmother is capable of something as undignified as a snort, but if she was…she would’ve.

It was like the movie hadn’t aged a day. I think all the time about how movies like that - funny, warm, human movies - still somehow work, all these years later.

This isn’t an essay about auteurs or masterpieces. It’s not about how a genius like Chaplin is a gifted light whose work endures solely because of his brilliance, or some similar hogwash.

This is an essay about the value of art in our lives and about the way it continues to touch us - to care for us, to intoxicate us - no matter when it was made. I don’t know that there’s much I find half as inspiring.

So here, another example:

On Sunday morning, I walked to Film Forum to see Chaplin’s THE GOLD RUSH. I was being a true film nerd, visiting a temple of cinema for an important movie - in black and white! On 35mm! From the 1920s!

Of course, I then walked into a room full of toddlers and parents.

What I hadn’t realized when I booked these tickets was that this was a Film Forum Jr. screening - a wonderful program of classic movies for younger audiences, screenings where tired parents can bring their kids and not worry if they ask a question during the movie because every other row is full of kids doing the exact same thing. This audience was mostly composed of five-year-olds.

And you know what?

These kids lost their minds. Uproarious laughter, lots of ‘look at that!’ and ‘ew, they kissed!’ and a whole bunch of sounding out the intertitles. Did they get everything? Of course not5! But it was uproariously fun - like a junior Rocky Horror screening.

I guess what I’m really saying here is that movies live well past their release dates. They live well past their creators. They can always, down the line, perform some act of magic - come alive. Charlie Chaplin died 18 years before I was born, but I will always remember the way he made me feel. I’ll always remember those peals of childish laughter. I’ll always remember the way he made my grandmother feel.

I said earlier this week that I wasn’t going to write about hope, because I thought Chris Riddle had done it better. But I kinda find myself, at the end of this essay, doing exactly that.

It’s always worth it to create art. It’s always worth it to make people laugh because, in 100 years, whatever you make could be food and drink for someone. That is what movies can do. That’s, in a weird way, what they’re best at. The fun of live theatre is that it doesn’t keep. The deep, marrow-scratching joy of film is that it does.

Look, making things is hard. It’s laborious. Making movies is damn expensive. But who knows what joy it might bring someone? Isn’t that what we’re all really trying to do here - make something that brings people the joy and exhilaration we once felt?

The chef Thomas Keller likes to say that cooks do what they do to take care of people. I often feel that’s what we do when we write or film or act or laugh.

It’s hard to stay inspired. It’s one reason this series - and everything Ted Hope and the larger FilmStack movement have built - is so wonderful. It’s easy to get discouraged, or feel dried out. But when I look at my grandmother laughing, or a bunch of kids giggling at a movie from 1921, I find it hard not to be inspired.

Ray Bradbury said that “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you”6. When I see a movie touch someone a century later…well, I feel a nice warm glow.

Hopefully, even just a little bit, you do too.