There is a series of vignettes in which Louise, a libertine in her native Oregon but John Reed's blushing shadow in New York, is asked her opinion but doesn't have one, and says she's a writer but doesn't really write. Her constant embarrassment and frustration galvanized me. At 13, I resolved to never be like that, to always have an opinion, to stick up for myself when a bully like Emma Goldman isn't taking me seriously. I didn't want to go through that, and I didn't want to be in some man's shadow, even a man as appealing as Warren Beatty. That was Feminism 101.

But the deeper lesson I learned from "Reds" was more traditional, and more profound. I have never forgotten Keaton's scenes with Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill. Louise and Gene, as he's called, have an affair while John Reed gallivants around promoting his political career. Louise is a nincompoop spouting a bunch of secondhand free love nonsense, and in one devastating glare, Gene looks her straight in the eye and delivers a manifesto: "If you were mine I wouldn't share you with anybody." That isn't movie romance. That is real and wise and true -- that love is not about freedom, it's about desire, which means it's jealous, a force. This is an incredibly handy thing to know when you're 13 and on the verge of woo, though it does make teenage boys seem a little less impressive. Of course, Gene doesn't get the girl, another useful if unsettling fact. But in my own future romances, I always had that line in the back of my head, and it's always been a spark of strength -- not to cave in to the pressure to be casual, not to settle for low-key.

When Bill Murray said that films have a life, he implied that films could keep insinuating themselves into our own lives. Watching "Reds" again on Showtime, nearly two decades later, I wondered if I've lived up to the expectations of the teenager who saw it the first time, if I've disappointed her or not. I won't answer that publicly. But I did just rent "Caddyshack" again, and Laura Seitz, wherever you are, rest assured that the candy bar in the swimming pool still cracked me up.
salon.com | June 2, 1999

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