Issue Two: The Movie Issue

editor’s note

T​ruffle oil popcorn at Vara. Film crews unloading gear on Central. An entire block cordoned off in Barelas. Recurring notes in our mailbox, expressing interest in using our house for a movie. Discarded film crew signs along the Bosque trail. Crowds of extras at the convenience store across from Smith’s on Yale. Trailers parked at the Kmart lot in Santa Fe. Evergreen anecdotes about the epic quantities of booze consumed at Dennis Hopper’s parties outside Taos.

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life,” says the flaneur who narrates Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The novel’s eponymous moviegoer resides in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city and state, like New Mexico, with a long history of being on film.

New Mexico has played Iraq, the future, the end of the world, and, perhaps most frequently, Texas. Even when it plays itself, as in Young Guns, one town is sometimes cast as another. But that is what makes a movie a movie: nothing and no one plays itself.

Our search is not the eponymous moviegoer’s search, but it has in common an interest in the ordinary. Beyond stumbling across film crews while running out to pick up a container of half-and-half and some red chile potato chips, how does life’s greatest throughline—food—intersect with the moviemaking and the movie viewing that is the backdrop of our lives?