When you drive to Goliad, Texas, you drive through a lot of nothing. Well, not nothing, I guess. There are cows and roadside meat stands and always some guy fishing off the highway, rain or shine — but a lot of empty. Empty pastures behind barbed wire fences, empty expanses of creeping laguna, and empty, forgotten houses, weather beaten from nearly a century of hurricane seasons. You feel small and exposed with all that world spread out before you, able to see ten miles out in every direction. The flat land and sky equivalent of being lost in open water — overwhelming, deep blue, but empty.
There’s a whole lot of empty in Anarene, too — The Last Picture Show’s small Texas town is eerily familiar that way. Empty oil fields, empty pastures of scrubby grass, empty shops. Businesses that had been there forever slowly but surely falling into disrepair, waiting for the inevitable ply-board windows and chained doors. The golden era long past, the citizens are a mixed bunch of elders living off memory, and the youth who are caught in the wake of their parents’ nostalgia. It’s sunny, but empty, and as the film goes on, it only gets emptier. Yet, time feels so frozen you barely notice it passing until it’s too late. Maybe that’s why The Last Picture Show feels familiar.
For the majority of her life, my grandmother, Dorothy, lived in Goliad. Goliad is a lot like Anarene — small, hot, and very Texan, caught almost equal distance between two of the bigger cities in South Texas the same way Anarene hovers on the outskirts of Wichita Falls and Dallas. Time feels crystallised in towns like these, with major events passing with little visible change. Like Anarene, Goliad seemed trapped in its own nostalgia. You could feel it when you walked through the Spanish missions or the old battle grounds, but I felt it most on Dorothy’s porch, listening to her and my aunts gossip about the scandals and stories that predated my existence. Some of my earliest memories are on that porch, watching and listening to them talk.
I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that my area of research is nostalgia; specifically nostalgia and American identity. That’s what led me to finding this movie, actually: the oh-so-romantic world of doctoral dissertation research. Peter Bogdonovich’s The Last Picture Show is often cited as an example of quintessential American nostalgia films, alongside George Lucas’ American Graffiti. I picked Last Picture Show first because the description sounded like it could have been one of my grandparents’ stories: In the fall of 1951, three teenagers, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), Duane (Jeff Bridges), and Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) begin their last year of high school. Over the course of that year, Sonny becomes entangled in an affair with the football coach’s wife, Ruth (Cloris Leachman), Jacy attends a series of sex parties hosted by her rich peers, and Duane is driven by grief and alcohol to join the army and take out one of his friend’s eyes in a drunken fight. It was some real small-town-Texas messy shit that made me feel I was back on that porch in Goliad instead of an ocean away in Scotland.
The first time I watched, I was struck by how warm it made me. Edinburgh, for all its marvels, lacks the flat plains and too-open skies that signify home, and the slow, smoky drawl of Texas accents. At the beginning of the pandemic the film was a link back. I loved how the camera lingered on the cracked store fronts, the dirt roads, and all the negative space you can never escape. I loved how the characters talked, how they joked with each other, how they knew everyone’s business. I especially loved how they captured nights in these small Texas towns. The constant, low chirp of crickets and how dark the sky was; the kind of inky black that so completely envelops the world’s isolated, lonely places, threatening to swallow you whole if you stray too far from the light.
The story was also incredible, like a direct mockery of the idealized 1950s that had begun to creep into American pop culture in the late sixties. The characters are all so frustratingly flawed, crude, and just abysmally horny that if they weren’t so well written and so on-point culturally, it would feel like an ill-advised gritty reboot of The Andy Griffith Show. The more it tried to destroy the notion of nostalgia, the more I longed to be back around those ugly fields, breathing in the dust. It quickly became a comfort film as lockdown continued, and I watched from afar as the death toll back home started to swell and the state government failed to do anything to slow it. When I watched, it felt like I was back, listening to my family’s small town stories. It felt like home.
I disagree that life can’t be like the movies. Sometimes, a film captures a place and its people so well it’s almost indistinguishable. Sometimes, it reminds you that bad things always seem to happen all at once. In 1952 Anarene, your affair with the coach’s wife sours, your dream girl dumps you after your wedding, a few of your loved ones die and your best friend nearly cuts your eye out. In 2020 Edinburgh, your relationship crumbles, your mental health takes a dive and your chief coping mechanisms become an unholy trinity of oversleeping, overdrinking, and oversharing. You’re stuck in a crowded apartment, and your grandmother gets sick — really sick this time. But, because this is real life and not a movie, because it’s a global pandemic, you can’t make a dumb, drastic gesture like fly home on a new credit card. You can’t show up at the last moment and hold her hand, asking her silly things like if she remembers Dairy Queen strawberry sundaes or the cement angel in her garden or when you used to smear her red lipstick all over your little girl lips and she would call you a ‘tart’ (she doesn’t remember any of that — she doesn’t even remember your name). All you can do is hope the slipping scissor-hold you have on your sanity isn’t too obvious (it is) and you’re not annoying your roommates (you are). All you can do is text and call and FaceTime and lay awake in bed, wondering if tomorrow morning you’ll wake up to the news. All you can do is watch your silly little films.
One of the more impactful scenes of the film comes around the midpoint when Sonny and Sam go fishing with Sam’s adopted son, Billy (Sam Bottoms). In a long take that slowly closes in, as if it itself is caught up in the memory being recalled, Sam tells Sonny about the woman he used to bring out to the same fishing spot, “swimmin’ with no bathin’ suits.” When Sonny asks about her, Sam snaps out of his trance, and the camera pulls back to include the two boys in the shot. “Oh she growed up,” he tells him. He tries to distance himself from the pain, telling Sonny they should go to a real fishing spot next year before falling back into his memory. “She was just a girl then, really….if she was here I’d probably be just as crazy as I was then in about five minutes. Isn’t that ridiculous? No, it ain’t really. Being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being a decrepit old bag of bones is what’s ridiculous. Gettin’ old.” He takes a drag from his cigarette and the scene fades.
This is only one such instance that illustrates the film’s incredible grasp on the melancholy of nostalgia, and I wanted to reach through the screen and shake Sonny. Take him by the shoulders and say, “Hey, asshole, you’d better enjoy this! This isn’t always going to be here! You’re getting old, too!” But that’s the nature of nostalgia; it tends to cling to those times you were too blissfully unaware you might one day miss. That’s what aches the most in hindsight, and The Last Picture Show understands that pain, conveying that sadness through its visual language and narrative.
The sliver of good times we see — afternoon rendezvous with lovers, frenzied trips across the state with best friends — are fleeting, if not taking place off screen altogether. Instead, the film spends most of its runtime lingering in the character’s pain or longing for their past. The scenes where the characters are uncomfortable or upset take up much more of the film, are longer and sparsely edited. This contrasted to the much lighter touch of the (few) happier scenes’ multiple edits and short takes. The product is a bleak portrayal of one of the most cliche of nostalgic American dreams — teenage years in small town, 1950s America — and it is devastating. Life, it says, has always been messy, complicated and mostly ugly. You don’t know the good times until you’re missing them, and even then they’ll only ever be memories you recall with a sad smile on your face. You’re right to feel this way, depressed viewer, because this is the way things are. The good times are short, the painful times are drawn out, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, and that’s just fucking life.
In Last Picture Show, Sonny learns about Sam’s sudden death from a nonchalant sheriff. In real life, I learned about Dorothy’s death from an international call from my cousin at 1 AM. I remember sitting up in bed and staring across my room, arms on my knees. It had finally happened, this monumental thing, and the whole house was quiet. Everything felt still, cast in the orange light of the street lamp out the window. Four thousand miles away, doctors in masks and double gloves were wheeling my grandmother’s body into the hospice morgue, and I was in a quiet room that felt like it was holding its breath.
Time crystallised.
I didn’t watch the film again for a few months. Lockdown got worse after my grandmother’s death. More people back home died, some friendships ended abruptly, and I had to orchestrate a move during a surge in Covid cases. By October, I was cored out. I was struggling to write my dissertation, fighting with my mother, and smoking an inadvisable amount of cigarettes for someone living through a respiratory disease’s pandemic. There was too much loss to deal with. Whether by circumstance or sickness or just the bullshit that so often accompanies real life, people kept slipping through my fingers, and I didn’t know what to do with all that pain, I just knew I didn’t like the needy, impulsive person it had made me. It wasn’t until my friend Maria suggested I find an independent project to work on that I thought back to Anarene and all that blissful empty. If I couldn’t go back and be enveloped by it, I could at least write about it.
It seems annoyingly cinematic that this viewing was the first time I cried. I can’t remember what it was that set me off. Maybe Lois (Ellen Burstyn) telling Sonny about her and Sam’s affair, how it had been the one thing that saved her from a life without real love. Maybe it was Ruth’s final monologue, where she finally stands up for herself only to revert back to trying to please the same person who threw her away like trash. Probably, though, it was that last shot of the film, the one that mirrors the first: the camera pans across an empty Main Street lit up by the harsh noon sun before lingering on the now closed picture house. Now boarded up and empty, the only sounds come from the whistle of the wind and the bits of trash caught in its stream. You stare at this lonely building for a few seconds before the image fades to black.
More than anything, Last Picture Show is about loss. About losing people, places, relationships, and the comforting fantasy that everything will make sense once you’re an adult. The truth is, things end, even the things you thought would be there forever, like stone missions and cement back porches. It seems so obvious but you don’t really learn it until it happens — and even then, it never gets any easier. You don’t become magically enlightened with age. You’re never going to outgrow making mistakes or escape the need to fall apart. The pain of loss, be it in death, ended relationships, or just the passing of time, is always going to sting. I love Last Picture Show because it proves there’s beauty in that realisation. The places and people you love are going to wither and die just like everything else on this stupid planet, like they have for millions of years, but that doesn’t mean you lose the way they made you feel, or what they saved you from. To cherish something or someone isn’t ridiculous – it’s getting old that’s ridiculous, but it’s a necessary part of life. To live in the moment, to take the good for granted only to long for it later is a fundamental human experience. It’s okay that it makes you sad, just as it’s okay that you can find something to smile about when you’re lost in all that empty.
It’s almost been a year since my grandmother passed away, and I haven’t been back home to Texas. I hear Goliad’s got a new store in the square and my mother tells me people are still finding a way to congregate on my grandmother’s porch. I don’t know when I’ll get to go back and join them. I don’t know how I’ll feel when I drive up to her house for the first time knowing she’s not going to be waiting inside. That’s all right though. There’s something comforting in the mess of the emotions that await me when I finally do, something both brutal and beautiful, like watching dry leaves catch the wind in front of a closed down picture house.
