The film appreciation thread just made me think about how I sometimes judge people (unfairly) based on film or music preferences. As I said in that thread, if someone likes Before Sunrise, I tend to view that person much more favorably than if they don’t. Also, liking weird, offbeat movies like Being John Malkovich or You, Me, and Everyone We Know makes me more interested in someone, as well. When I think about it, I guess it’s because I like people with some tinge of weird on them, and these are good indicators.
As for music, I don’t have any hard and fast rules; I tend to be influenced by the overall tastes. If, for example, if someone only likes rap and virtually nothing else, the friendship is probably doomed from the start. But if they like a lot of things (with rap being #1), then that’s fine. Elliott Smith tends to be a very good positive indicator, possibly because his fans tend to be more introspective (yea, I’m graspin here).
Anyway, this is all shockingly superficial, but, in my defense, it’s also quite automatic, a subconscious attraction or repulsion that happens all the time. Do y’all have any acid tests?
I think people who have interesting taste in music and movies are more, well, interesting, but I don’t judge them unfairly if they don’t. Everyone has to start somewhere, and I figure that maybe they just haven’t started yet. Everyone who’s into interesting stuff has that moment when they were exposed to something that made a light bulb go off in their head and think something along the lines of “WOW! I never realized this was out there!” be it their first foreign film, their fist indie movie, their first non-mainstream music or whatever.
I do have to watch myself about condeming people who hate what I consider to be good music and movies. I just think “what’s wrong with them?”
From a personal experience, my husband and I met because we were both Kate Bush fans, which started us off on a very solid footing, since I can’t even imagine being with someone who wasn’t. Then come to find out he was a Peter Gabriel fan too, which pretty much sealed the deal.
Then, a few weeks after we’d met, we were watching cable at his place. The Elephant Man came on and we decided to watch it. Both of us had seen it before. In hindsight, I think we each wanted to see the other person’s reaction to the movie. We ended up sharing a box of Kleenex and knew by the end of the movie that the other had the proper empathy quotient. After that, it was just a matter of finding out that we both liked to sit up front at the movie theater, and that we both liked to read while eating, and we had confirmation of our rock-solid soul mate status. 26 years later, and there’s never been the slightest bit of erosion on that rock.
It’s not a book in the sense of having a deep plot or anything, but I and most of my friends lust after their own, personal copy of the OED.
Yes, I’m even geekier than that makes me sound.
