NORA TREATBABY: Okay, you love movies. How did you decide to make them the subject of a book of poetry?
COURTNEY BUSH: I was trying to write a poem that was like a movie. And I mentioned this in the book. My friend Shy was like, “I think you could write a poem that’s like a movie.” And I had often heard things like, “There's something cinematic about your work,” but I didn't know what that was or how to work with it. So I wrote this long poem called “A Movie” that was sort of about memory, about memories from my adolescence. I was thinking about the moving image, and I was trying to cycle through images really quickly as a way to try to make them move, so to speak. But I didn't like it. It was really bad. Of course, it was nothing like a movie. It was like a long poem in couplets. But I had the title for the poem that was “A Movie,” which I loved. I was doing morning pages one day and I kept writing about how I wanted to fix the poem “A Movie.” I was writing “a movie” over and over in the notebook and then I got latched onto it as a phrase, “a movie,” because I realized how it could stand for something very specific or be a very general thing, because so often we say things like, “Do you want to watch a movie?” Like, “come over, we can watch a movie,” and it's very casual, but actually each individual movie is so specific and detailed and is only itself. I was like, oh, that's an exciting way for language to work. We use the phrase for a lot of different things, even though movies are very particular things. And sometimes when we want to watch a movie, it’s just, like, we don't even care what it is, it’s just a movie. It is just a filler or a social anchor. Or sometimes you watch a particular movie and it changes your life. So then what I decided to do was to use the phrase “a movie”’ as the generator. I decided that anything I thought of could go into the book, as long as it somehow incorporated the phrase “a movie,” like my friend having an experience of choking on rotisserie chicken at a fancy restaurant on a first date and getting carried out in an ambulance, where he was like, okay, what movie am I in? Meaning this can’t be real life. Or when the kids I babysit are obsessed with watching a movie, like fighting over whether to watch Frozen or Luca. I am a filmmaker, too, so “a movie” is also something I imagine, plan, and make, and I realized that’s an experience a lot of people do not have. A very weird and interesting experience.
NT: How did it become the book that it is? It’s prose, it’s sentences, it’s direct, and it’s extremely readable. And it revolves, ultimately, around a narrative of you and your friends making a movie. I’m curious what the process was like crafting this into a book. It feels like that process of crafting is invisible. It’s clearly done well but the hand that does it is not present, in the sense that it just feels like a stream of ideas, and it feels like speaking.
CB: It was composed very intuitively. I wrote it all in order, except the narrative of making the vampire movie which was actually grafted in last, in pieces, just because I realized, oh wow, I just made this vampire movie, wouldn’t it be cool to have this long thread going on in the middle of all the random pieces, and have it feel seamless. The ease of construction came from the form that I’m writing in, which almost seems like it’s not a form. It’s so simple. It’s just sentences, mostly one-line sentences, with an indented space between each sentence. I find working in that form, you can do a lot of really strange things. It is, like you said, extremely readable, and because it is so intelligible, it almost always seems measured. You can introduce a random new thing into the middle of the stream you’ve already created, and it still feels calm and it still feels under control. You can have all these things that are just like ideas about a movie or different anecdotes or facts or jokes going on together. But then you can also just start a narrative at any point. And because the eye and mind are traveling at such a steady rate, and everything feels calm and safe, just as you can start a narrative, you can also drop back out of it, back into facts, jokes, whatever, at any time, and then you can come back later, when you feel like it. It’s kind of magical to me, writing in this form. It allows you to just say, like, Okay, I want to start talking about this now, or, I’m bored, let’s talk about something else for a second. It’s kind of like talking. In a conversation, you can just change subjects because of the mutual trust between you and whoever you’re talking with, and I think there’s something like trust that a reader starts to feel when reading in this form, so you have a lot of allowance.
NT: It’s totally conversational in the sense that I actually just felt very spoken to. I didn’t feel like I was reading film criticism. It’s a direct transmission of experience, not in the sense that it’s pure description, but in the way the emotional experience of watching a movie or making a movie was conveyed without the self-consciousness of analysis. Because, crucially, while it’s like a film about movies, it is a film, excuse me, it’s a movie, it’s a movie. [Laughs]. It’s a book about how movies appear in our lives. There’s a line in the book I want to talk about:
But this book is the opposite. You seem interested in the exact opposite, which is the vast unframed expanse of a life and how movies appear in it.
CB: I love that. The vast unframed expanse of life. The movie is a space of control. And, you know, any art project or the formal poem is a place of control, to a degree. It’s not that there’s no control in this book. But it feels like it’s talking to you. And I think when we think of a poem as being talky, we think of a certain sound quality, rhythm, or an inclusion of certain small words which are kind of casual. But I also think there’s a higher-order kind of talkiness that is at the level of structure and shape and logic. When you’re talking to somebody, you’re not going to have a weighted place where there’s so much detailed description. There’s not going to be one place where you’re able to deliver a totally complete narrative all at once, uninterrupted. It would be kind of unbearable to have a conversation like that. What happens instead is like, you walk around with your friend, and you each tell each other one long story over the course of, like, a day, talking about a zillion other things in the middle of it. And I think that is a beautiful function of language, it’s a way of using language that is part of the relationship between two people, it’s intuitive and you make your own kind of shared harmony when you talk to someone, and narrative and other random stuff often come together in a way that is actually very hard, I think, to mimic. And I think it’s very hard to pin down, because it’s a way we use language in the moment, it’s language that is very literally active. Something I do love about the book is that it does come across as talking. Sometimes when you say something is intuitive, there’s a risk of sounding like you weren’t thinking about it, or you didn’t apply the kind of rigorous thought we can all get too obsessed with. But actually, that is also an intelligence, knowing when I need to stop telling the story right now and talk about something else, because it’s too much of the story. There’s too much continuity, actually, and something else might feel better for me and for my reader at this moment, which is how you intuitively speak to a friend.
NT: Yeah, there’s a pulse to the book I like. You and your friends are making a movie about a vampire, and then interspersed are these anecdotes that are often about you watching movies with people you love or care about, but other times are about how other children or the directors experience movies. It does have a narrative arc, but there is a realism to the way you intersperse tenderness and alienation and wonder and all of the beats that a life has that appear nearly randomly throughout the book and our lives.
CB: That’s really cool, and does make a lot of sense. It makes me really happy that you feel that way, reading it. I could only dream of recreating how life feels, with that randomness, which is better than trying to describe how a movie feels. I want the book to, as you’ve picked up on, feel like everything outside the movie. I’ve always had this idea that I want to make poems that feel like real life. And part of what that means to me is making them feel conversational, in that higher-order structural way. For a while I was just obsessed with the way we interrupt each other when talking, we even interrupt ourselves, and how that actually is like the structure of the world. It’s not like that’s a problem. That is the web.
NT: Beautiful. So then that makes me just think about how this is such a unique piece of art, because almost all the ways that we use poems to interact with art still treats the art in it as an artwork, with a self-consciousness around criticism and insight, whereas you are doing something else and saying “A Movie” is a part of our lives. And that’s your like, source of investigation. It’s not ekphrastic.
CB: It’s not ekphrastic at all.
NT: Yeah, like individual movies and actors appear in the work, but you seem far more interested in what you were doing that day, who you were dating at the time, what your relationship with your father is like, or like who you were there with when you were watching the movie. And those things determined how the movie impacted you as much as the film itself. You know what I mean? I guess it’s not really a question. I just find it remarkable that you chose an art form and then said I’m not going to write about this art form. I’m going to write about everything else.
CB: Yes! And I think movies are particularly good for that, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Everybody watches them. They’re everywhere. There’s all different kinds of movies. It would be too much if I decided I wanted to write a book about life in its entirety, so it’s a trick, because if I have everyone in the book looking at and thinking about movies, then I can sort of get what is spiraling out from “a movie,” which is… literally everything. It just wouldn’t work if I did it with sculpture or something. But I feel like almost everybody interacts with movies in some way. What you’re saying also reminds me about how a movie is a controlled entity. It’s a certain amount of time, it’s a fixed calibration of light, sound, and time. That’s it. But everybody’s experience of each movie is so personal and informed by what happened to them. Like, I always think about this time when I saw Synecdoche, New York. I saw it at the MoMA movie theater, which is already, like, a vibe. It’s underground and there’s no concessions and the crowd is hardcore in this very particular way. I was sitting behind a really stinky guy and the movie has this sort of stinky air about it. And it’s like, my memory of this movie is always going to have that be a part of it. And then somebody else can see that movie and what they remember or experience of the movie will be totally different.
NT: That’s funny you brought that movie up because seeing Synecdoche, New York was one of the craziest movie watching experiences of my life. I saw it when I was 16 years old. My friends brought me there. I’d never seen a trailer of it. I’d never heard of it at all. I just was asked to go see a movie. And I’d never seen an art film before, and it completely blew me away. It was probably the first artwork I was deeply obsessed with not because I loved it but because I was so confused and challenged by it. Anyways, it’s just funny you bring that up because it’s not one of my favorite movies necessarily, but it’s probably one of the most important movies I’ve ever seen for me. And that has to do with time and place in my own particular life, growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah.
CB: Yeah, totally. I think about Synecdoche, New York a lot too, even though it’s not a movie I care about particularly. But that’s exactly what the book is about. It’s like, I’m actually much more interested in you watching that movie in Salt Lake City and having that experience. I’m a filmmaker. I love movies. But a lot of times, I would rather hear my friend tell me every single thing that happens in a movie. One of my favorite memories is trying to tell my friend Phil the entire movie, in as much detail as possible, of Devil’s Advocate starring Al Pacino as the devil and Keanu Reeves as the devil’s lawyer, on a bench near the tennis courts in Fort Greene. Or I had a co-worker at a vegan cheese shop who would tell me Stephen King movies at work to pass the long shifts. And it was like paradise to me. Every single person that tells you about a movie is going to tell it to you differently. They’ll be sharing themselves in some way. And that is, to me, so interesting, that we have that capability. And sometimes people who aren’t comfortable talking about other things, who are closed off in certain ways, can talk to you about movies. Movies are really useful to people because, like, sometimes it’s just a way to connect to other people, it’s something to talk about. I’m even thinking about, like, fandom, like, you see people that are like, obsessed with whatever movie. Like, someone doing fan fiction, even Twilight or Star Trek, or whatever, it's about the movie, but then it becomes about the social needs of a person.
NT: That’s one of the cool things about this book. I feel like other books about film are really like, self-conscious about making sure that the movies they’re talking about are of acceptable critical acclaim. Yes, there’s a longer section about the only film Cindy Sherman ever made, and there’s also one about getting high with your mom and friends and watching Shrek. You know what I mean? For you, there’s no hierarchy between these films.
CB: Totally. For the purposes of this book, Office Killer and Shrek are the same. It’s about who was gathered around the movie.
NT: Okay, I want to talk about the other thing that the book is really about, which is filmmaking. You and your friends go about making this film about a vampire, like a short film, low budget. It’s the central narrative that these other memories and observations are interspersing. You’re my friend, and you talk very passionately about yourself as an artist, making art. You know that you are driven by this freakish desire you have. The book, in many ways, is an investigation into your own amazement at that drive.
CB: That investigation and even suspicion of that creative drive is maybe the main force in my life. I ran into a friend on the subway the other day, and I just kind of started crying. I was just so relieved to see a friend while I was having this internal conflict. And he was like, What’s wrong? And I was like, My life. Why do I care about making the art I make? Like, why is this what I like? It would be so much easier if I just wanted to go to my job and hang out and have a family and make money and whatever. I don’t know. Every decision I made is about this. Why? I want to make these weird movies. I want to write poems. I want to turn the experience of living, which I love, into art. But part of my loving life and the experience of being alive is being able to make things that capture some aspect of that. That’s such a mysterious capability we have. Even if it is scary to do things when you don't really know why you’re doing it, I have to do it.
NT: In the parts that are about doing filmmaking you continually return to self-doubt, which I thought were some of the most interesting parts of the book. When you watch the first cut of your movie, you are like “I fucking hate myself.” And also, this is the exact experience you’ve had every time you've watched the first cut of any movie you’ve made. It’s like self-loathing. And I was like, damn. All of us who have this drive to walk ourselves into the most predictable situation ever, which is a severe crisis of the self, just by the effort of making something in the world.
CB: Yes. It’s like, okay, I have been doing this thing that’s making me doubt myself and hate myself, that, at every step of the way, was completely voluntary. No one asked for this. No one wanted it. I made this all up myself. I spent money doing this. I rented equipment to do this. I hired other people to come over and watch me do it, like, participate with me in doing it. I did so much stuff that no one was ever asking for. When you get to that point, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s like, okay, the only way to salvage this huge mistake I’ve made is to make this the best work of art it could possibly be. Then you’re going down, it’s downhill, because there is a way to salvage it, by making it great. Or like the best version of what it could be. But you bring yourself to the top of that hill, right? It’s just funny to me. When I think about it, it’s funny because it’s like, you have all this loathing, like true pain. And it’s like, it’s not the pain of the loss of a loved one. It’s the pain of, like, you made something out of thin air that nobody in the world asked for, and it’s bad. You don’t like it. It’s like, well, you played yourself because you’re the one who made it.
