It was my birthday this week and the older I get, the less meaning I see in presents. I don't need anything. If I need something, I'm going to go out and buy it, not bother people several months about it and HOPE someone saved up to offer it to me on my birthday. So, I like to get creative with my present requests. Knowing Josie systematically hates every movie I grew up and rewatch obsessively, I asked her to watch with me one of the most puzzling cult experiences of my youth: PURPLE RAIN. I love to get my girlfriend all riled up about my cinematographic obsessions and it made for a memorable birthday evening.
The narrative of PURPLE RAIN will sound familiar to you even if you've never seen the movie. The Kid (Prince) is a young, tormented and visionary musician sharing a dance club with two other house bands, including the immortal Morris Day and the Times, who are actually portraying themselves in the movie. Nobody understands The Kid deep and visceral connection to music, except maybe his violent, abusive wreck of a father who he doesn't have a great relationship with, to say the least. Then, the beautiful Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero) arrives in town and it pretty much gives every musician in town a reason to try and become the top dog in town.
PURPLE RAIN is pretty much the life story of Prince told by him, though the deforming prism of his artistic vision and profound desire of being depicted as misunderstood. It only makes sense if you imagine that Prince himself is telling you the story and that he's probably leaving out crucial pieces of information. Fortunately, it's also exactly why PURPLE RAIN is still insanely entertaining thirty years later. It's a relic of an era where artists had the necessary aura to pull such insane vanity projects. If PURPLE RAIN came out today, it would be meme'd to death (it already is) and it would crumble under criticism and intellectualizing think pieces that would drain all the silly pleasure from it. In order words, it belong to another era.
What would a girl want more in life than go skinny dipping in the holy waters of Lake Minnetonka with Prince in 1984?
There are many baffling moments that make PURPLE RAIN unforgettable. For example, I forgot that Prince slaps Apollonia in the movie. Not a gentle slap either, He backhands her across the room. A couple scenes after, there's the famous montage on When Doves Cry where they're having sex every three seconds, which prompted Josie to say: ''What the fuck? Did she come back to that scumbag?" It takes a second to realize is a montage of guilt and regret because Prince doesn't speak the same language than us mortals. He speaks the language of music. He is also a bizarre, disconnected man living in his own world and PURPLE RAIN is like being in his head for a moment.
Josie had a great question after the viewing: "Why the fuck do you even like this movie? It's not even good." She makes a valid point. Objectively speaking, PURPLE RAIN is a bit of a mess, but it is a celebration of everything Prince-related and Prince's career in itself is kind of a celebration of another era. I'm getting old and perhaps I'm starting to love the past more than I should. The pre-internet world was never all that kind to me and I much prefer the way things are now, but I consider it a richness to have known both eras and PURPLE RAIN belong to a world that doesn't exist anymore where celebrities lived in a parallel dimension we could only perceive through their artistic output. I love PURPLE RAIN because it makes me feel privileged to be old enough to "get" it.