My life long friend Howard awakens most mornings and writes before he begins his day. He’s been doing this for as long as I remember and his dedication has always been in my ambient focus since we met in the early 90s. But until very recently I went through a very long stretch of hating to write. Not writing seemed almost like a protest to the world where writers have been devalued to a point of zero. I think part of me wanted to believe that If I didn’t write then, I could no longer be devalued. I’m not sure what has changed. It could be that I sat with putting one of my essays through Chat GPT and decided it lacked soul. Or that as I near the age of 50, I’ve finally lived enough life that I feel I have something to say about it. But daily life at home is a constant distraction between pets and chores and bills and the regular barrage of text messages, emails, slacks and interruptions. Sitting on a stool in the bathroom of my hotel room at 5am a few days before a wedding, my mind is clear to navigate through the connective tissue of creative thoughts. For a few moments, I feel like I can get into a Howard mindset and write.

Since I saw Gary Hustwit’s “Eno” last month, I’ve been thinking deeper about the future of cinema, and I’ve kept asking myself the recurring question I raised when writing about it and referencing “The Red Balloon.” I wondered then, “I wanted to see Pascal’s life from every angle, I wanted to go home with the little girl with the blue balloon, I wanted to ride the trolley across Paris, I wanted to fly over Paris with all the balloons.” I never specifically asked, “I wanted to follow the journey of the other balloons on their day to day life.”

Or do I? Or is it their supernatural life I desire, their life expressed where they no longer resemble what they originally were?

Yesterday morning walking out of our hotel to go on a local food adventure, I observed a lone blue balloon on the street near Gaudi’s Casa Mila. It was like finding a shot of “The Red Balloon” in real life. It felt like a gift and I took the shot above. Sean was with me, but if he hadn’t been, I probably would have stopped and stared at it and cried. It felt like the greatest gift had arrived, a divine intervention from all my filmmaker ancestors to keep imagining, and I collected the thought and we walked to our tour. As we ate a little bit of this and a little bit of that and heard about the Catalan resistance and noticed the tourists go away graffiti on the walls of Gracia, I couldn’t stop thinking about the blue balloon.

The young girl from “The Red Balloon” has always been my silent heroine. I always wanted to know her story, but I suspected hers was more joyous than the boy with the red balloon, also known as Pascal. Since I was a child, I’ve collected Red Balloon ephemera. All the books and posters and even cereal box games, I’ve owned, a strange attempt to be closer to this childhood frame of mind. But really I just wanted to spend more time with the little girl with the blue balloon.

I crave the option of what you could call dynamic point of view. This option would allow you to follow the story you desire in the ecosystem. And if you changed your mind, you could shift it to another and another. Overall, I think this is where cinematic entertainment is headed. This already exists in gaming narratives, but I’d argue it could occur in at-home film experiences, especially if you shoot a lot of extra footage, like you do in documentary or reality. The question may be, do we as society need more entertainment chaos, more non-linear narrative that may lack the satisfaction of linear narrative, or in these crazy times, is this type of narrative a relief to reality?