Vamos A Matar Companeros- Ennio Morricone
If it is a mark of a disturbed mind to find something obscure and make that their favorite, than I am that disturbed mind. It just seemed like I was best rewarded in life when I went after something nobody else wanted because then I got it all to myself. This was the case when I would try out for the supporting roles in the school play and when I said I liked purple jellybeans more than red; who doesn’t like red better? This tastes of the obscure transferred quite easily to movies when I finally discovered their magic and allure. I never did like popular cinema too much unless it was really good or meant very much to me. Of course there was Star Wars (curse you George Lucas for ruining my childhood), Mad Max II: Beyond the Thunderdome and Gremlins but besides those mainstays in our culture I enjoyed Circuitry Man and the original Phantom of the Opera and White Hunter, Black Heart. I was the only one at school who heard of these movies and wrote essays about them in class and would bring them up in the least successful conversations you could ever happen in 5th grade. Kids wouldn’t really talk to me, but it was because they were jealous of the knowledge I collected so readily and kept so carefully. I knew I was different and that was enough of a childhood companion for me. When high school happened I found that what held true in a school of one hundred did not hold true in a school of two thousand. And although most people still had no idea what I was talking about there were a few who also taped Mystery Science Theater 3000 and liked the non-Back to the Future roles of Crispin Glover. We formed clubs where we would watch movies and argue about whether the Japanese or the Italians made better horror movies. I then learned that not only was it good to be different, but also good to be different with other people. We flaunted our superiority of knowledge about the things that really mattered, not grades, but knowing who Tom Savini was and enjoying his work. As it thankfully does high school past and I bade my friends goodbye as we went off to different colleges. And college sure was certainly different. Not only were there people who had these movie clubs well entrenched, but there were a ton of them! And that’s not counting the Anime groups and foreign language groups that watched movies almost exclusively. It took three tiers of the educational system to finally learn the truth. There are no different people, there are enough people in the world that there are a lot of every kind of person so you cannot be different by what you like or know. This is common knowledge; you just have to look around for it. Ten Thousand people were able to show me what fifteen hundred had not: that I was no different and all my trying to find something no one liked so I can like it was childish. I still like Chinese Opera though.