Ralph Arlyck is a groundbreaking American independent documentary filmmaker, who came to prominence when his film Sean received wide acclaim in US and Europe for its frank portrayal of 1960s counterculture. Following Sean (which I reviewed for culturevulture in 2004) received similar praise at international film festivals. His latest film, “I Like It Here,” was released in 2022. At the time he was 78.
“I Like It Here” is a very personal, and moving, farewell to the now passing 1960s generation, of which he is a member. He tells both a universal story of old people approaching the end of their life as well as a witness to the end of a culture. Arlyck sharply observes details through an emotionally inflected personal “rogues’ gallery” (his many fellow aging friends), which reflects on the present “twilight of the American Century.”
Arlyck lives in the countryside outside of Woodstock, NY, on the east side of the Catskill Mountains. He and his neighbors do not live in sight of each other, some of them live off the grid. One neighbor is a Hungarian immigrant, another is from Iran. Arlyck originally intended to make a documentary about his Hungarian neighbor Ernie. But when this neighbor proved reluctant to be filmed, Arlyck shifted the focus of his film.
The film opens on a large country backyard turned into a junkyard, everything buried in snow. The image evokes several of the themes Arlyck weaves together—the isolation of old age, personal retrospection as the awareness of approaching death hits home, the abandonment of broken dreams, and the coldness death is expected to be. As Arlyck asks himself later in the film, “How did this happen to me?”
Arlyck revisits numerous old friends, meeting with some of them for the first time in 40 or 50 years. His friends are fellow creative bohemian types—writers, painters, photographers, and others of that ilk. As Arlyck records them catching up with each other on film, he intersperses photographs and film segments from their shared past, mostly during the 1970s, and stock footage of significant world events that shaped their lives.
He recounts his own childhood and youth. His father encouraged his interest in film, setting up a movie lab for him in their house. Arlyck documents another profound change—the shift from celluloid film and relatively simple way of splicing film together to the current highly complicated digital system (“you need to be an engineer”). He shares memories of his first two important girlfriends, his friend Mel Watkins (an “actual existentialist”), how he cast about looking for what he would devote his life to, and to avoiding being drafted and sent to Viet Nam. He had a “dismal foreboding of the awfulness of the life awaiting him” in a cookie-cutter nine-to-five career.
He recounts his early life of relative privilege, comparing it to the early lives of his parents growing up in a Polish ghetto. His father emigrated to America in order to avoid serving the Russian czar and wound up dodging a bullet, being spared the later horrors of Hitler and Stalin.
Several vignettes capture his transition into old age. He is relieved he no longer lives from project to project, concerned about success. He and his wife speculate about whether they should be cremated or buried. On a visit to Paris, another old stomping ground, he notices the city is filled with young people and that “women never look at me now.”
Perhaps the most explicit metaphors in the film of how he experiences old age are the “ghost diner” and the “spider in the window.” The “ghost diner” is in the nearby countryside. He had observed the diner being renovated over a long period of time, but never reopening. He remarks “I like it like it is.” During the covid pandemic he observed a spider trapped between the inner and outer panes of a window, and wondered where it found food.
Having taken a spill from his bike on a country road, lying on the side of the road in pain, with no cell phone on him and undiscovered for hours, Arlyck begins experiencing what lies ahead of him in the not too distant future–his gradual decline into incapacitating old age. Rehabilitation requires him to use a wheelchair. His sons start taking care of him. Colleague friends start doing his grocery shopping for him, suddenly realizing they are a generation younger.
This film is very personal to me. Arlyck and I are of the same generation. We share some of the same social and political influences, found our way to lives as bohemian creative types, and, above all, share similar perspectives on attaining old age. (As I write this review I am 71.) Death is not “awful” or feared or not looked at, but rather mostly calm, low-key, a comfort and a quiet joy.
My tangled memories interwove with Arlyck’s as he spelled his out in the film. It brought back memories of teaching “Death: The Journey of a Lifetime” (Greg Palmer’s four-part documentary for PBS) to my Literature of Death and Dying students. (I was untangling memories of all those I had lost in the AIDS epidemic and working through multiple grief as a long-term HIV/AIDS survivor myself.)
” I Like It Here” also feels imbued with preoccupations of Wim Wenders’ 1987 film “Wings of Desire”—film as memory and public space, Arlyck as an “angel of storytelling,” and capturing an era on the cusp of its ending. (No one realized the reunification of Germany was only two years away.) Tony Kushner borrowed the angel metaphor from “Wings of Desire” for his play “Angels in America,” about the AIDS epidemic in the gay community (another work I taught in my Death and Dying course). Having lived, most unexpectedly, to reach old age, I, like Arlyck, ask “How did this happen to me?” Despite differing personal details, I can attest to the veracity of Arlyck’s experiences and observations. Looking beyond my own personal, subjective read of this film that speaks to me as accurate and truthful, I hope it resonates to a wide audience. It is the kind of sharing of lessons learned from a long life that I look for in autobiographies.
I am struck not only by how life is haunted with half-remembered memories, individual and collective, but also by how our work as writers, filmmakers, and other creative types are also attempts to preserve the past. Today, in old age, Arlyck observes, “we keep doing what we’ve been doing.” I like it here. Do you?
