Australian media is, for lack of a better and less oblique word, foreign to me. Sunday Night Football comes on at noon on a Monday, a reality show has tenuously-labeled celebrities escaping from Aussie wilderness, and no one here seems to know who Scoot McNairy is. This all might sound trivial (especially the Scoot McNairy bit), but I'm a big media guy. I spend the majority of my time either watching movies, reading about movies, writing about movies, or talking to my friends about movies.
I like movies, is the point.
I don't want to get too "ivory tower" or anything here, but with people more invested in film, I feel as if we have a sort of inherent and referential language to our discussions (Paganini Horror, anyone?). Sure, this applies to pretty much anything -- basketball, make-up, lemurs, etc --, and it's a given that a group of people invested in a subject can better converse with others of the same ilk. That's how investment works. My point is, I'm on a trip where I'm already having to learn another form of my primary language (what the heck is a furphy?), and I can't exactly fall back on my secondary to help me out.
But wait... In the distance... Is that...? A beacon? My god.
Earlier in the week, I was sitting in class, listening to my professor talk about the early days of the Aussie frontier and the lawlessness and uncertainty that came with it. He then mentioned a name that made me stop my note-taking cold:
Taylor Sheridan.
Taylor Sheridan: Academy award nominated writer and acclaimed director.
Taylor Sheridan: The guy who wrote such modern classics as Sicario and Hell or High Water.
Taylor Sheridan: The guy who was in Sons of Anarchy, I think. I'm not sure, I never caught that one.
That's when everything clicked into place for me. As soon as the professor mentioned the chaotic landscape of Juarez, Mexico, bleeding from the pages of Sicario, the new Wild West lamented in Hell or High Water, and the tribal disenfranchisement of Wind River, I got it. His points made sense. Full stop. Next subject.
I'm not here to clap myself on the back for getting a lesson (okay, maybe just a little bit), but I can't express the sense of joy I felt hearing an Australian native talk about a filmmaker I erroneously believed to only have a sphere of influence in the States. I couldn't help but smile, because suddenly I realized: This guy's got me. Taylor Sheridan's got me. I got me.
I'm going somewhere with this.
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