It's always weird when you watch a movie and realise that you've been given a window into a subculture that you never suspected existed.

I watched Rounders last night, despite having been told by a guy at the movie place in Oxford that it wasn't worth watching for Ed Norton because it wasn't a good movie of his. I would, in hindsight, respectfully disagree, by pointing out that, yes, I really wanted to punch Worm in the face, and when Grama gives him the going-over, all I could think was "Yes!" But I wanted to do that because of Ed Norton, not because this was Tom Cruise doing Yet Another Stock Character. This was Ed Norton using his skill to piss me off. This was in-character dislike, rather than actor dislike.

So, video guy, I disagree with you. Ed Norton is worth watching in Rounders, if only because he uses skill to make you want to beat the crap out of him, rather than simply being an irritating-as-fuck actor. Matt Damon doesn't do anything for me, and hasn't since his extremely underappreciated role in Courage Under Fire, so I can't speak to that.

But one of the things I like to do, when I Netflix a movie, is go read IMDb after I'm done with it. This is where I get the sense, finally, that this is not a made-up movie. And it's a particularly nasty form of wakeup call.

See, okay, Floating - there's a father and a son, and the son has some really crap friends and the son has angst around not going to school, and lalalalala. The reason the son doesn't go to school is, at least in part, because of his father's car accident that rendered him a double amputee. Good movie, in my opinion - still waiting to hear whether people more likely to have experienced a similar thing think it's accurate, but no big. So I go on IMDb. There are the typical dumbass questions on the message boards - one of the most important parts of the movie is that, at the end, the father puts on his prosthetics, that have been shown in at least two other scenes of the movie, and stands up to console his son.

This is, if you watch the movie for ten seconds, a defining moment of the film because at least half of the point is that the father is depressed and alcoholic and unwilling to take care of himself, let alone his son. The son is angry at his father for this. It's well-played, in my opinion. When the father indicates that he's not just going to sit in his wheelchair for the rest of his life, that he is going to extend himself beyond his own misery and understand his son's - that's the point of the legs and the last scene.

Apparently, a lot of morons saw this movie - I don't say that because they had a different interpretation of what the scene meant, because textual interpretation is different for everyone. I say it because they don't know where these legs come from; in fact, they seem to think that all of a sudden, the father has grown new legs. This, bear in mind, despite two scenes that feature the legs rather prominently, including one where the son puts them on his father for him.

We call these people "morons", and we gently step aside.

So Floating left me feeling quite smug about my own interaction with movie texts and lalalalala. But Rounders - Rounders was a horse of another colour.

Brief overview - Mike (Matt Damon) gambles and loses, vowing never to gamble again - this is how he's made his living. Worm (Ed Norton) gets out of prison with the need to pay debts that, it turns out, don't stop accruing interest just because he's been away. The 10K he gets from, basically, fucking Mike over (this is his best friend) is only enough to scratch the surface. Mike's girlfriend leaves him, and this causes them, apparently, to snap and go gamble like crazy. Worm Cannot Keep His Fucking Yap Shut, so they wind up with three days to get $15K - at which point Worm fucks up again, by obviously bottom-dealing in a cops' game. In the end, it all turns out all right, with all lessons learned, all debts repaid, and Mike off to go find out if he can compete in the World Championship Poker Tournament, while Worm is last seen, after the cops give them a going over, in upstate New York.

So. This is the situation. There is very little comedy. But rather than there being amazing textual discussions (or moronic things like "What wuz up with that hawt chick in the casion was that the same chick as in the bar") on IMDb, all but one of the messageboards are about poker.

Seriously.

There's ONE that goes into baseball. Other than that, it's all about poker.

And that was when I realised that, once yet again, a movie is not merely a piece of art, divorced from the world. It is, almost inevitably, someone's way of life. I don't care what the movie is, there is no movie out there that has been made that is not being lived by someone somewhere.*

But look at it from another perspective. I adore Twist, I think it's an excellent movie, I think there are a couple total fuckups in it, but that overall the movie is very good - but I knew going into it that there are orphans and junkies and abusers and hustlers in the world. It didn't blow my mind quite as much as it might have, if I'd gone into it with some naive belief that The World According To Tom Cruise was gospel - but it might well blow someone else's mind the way that realising that people live Rounders blew mine. I had no idea, in the back of my mind, that for people I don't know and likely will never know Rounders is not fiction.

It is biography, instead.

For people I have never heard of, poker is more important than anything, is better than having a straight job, is better than living a life I would consider appealing. But I am so far removed from this subculture that I never, ever suspected it truly existed. And realising that makes me realise how shallow my interaction with that text is, of necessity - I cannot understand the drive to gamble that the movie shows as not only multi-layered but also as something of a virtue.

There's getting a movie through empathy, which is probably the hardest part of an actor's job, and then there's realising that no matter how much you watch it, you will never experience the thing that the movie is based on, and in a niche movie like Rounders, I will never have that sense of gambling it all and what it means to do that, because I am, basically, a cautious person in such matters. But there are people in the world who do gamble it all.

And somehow, that is a surprise.

Not a small-town boy,

Channon

* I can't divorce what I see as the essential truth of this statement from something like Mars Attacks, or Total Recall. Please do me the favour of understanding what I am trying to say without forcing me to go through all movies ever and assigning them a likely "lifestyle relevancy".

Or, just assume I'm talking about serious dramas. Yes, even Fight Club.