By Todd Davis
Before streaming, if you were too lazy or too broke to head down to Blockbuster or Family Video to pick out something you wanted to watch, you were at the mercy of what local or basic cable stations ran. There is a Ringer podcast, The Rewatchables, that covers many of those films now. Think movies like: The Legend of Billie Jean, Death Wish, or Heat.
Today, the home screen of your TV does a reasonable job of imitating that by offering a wide selection of movies it thinks you might like from your subscription services. The other night, I saw Sea of Love pop up. I vaguely recall watching it years (decades) ago; probably the same time I watched those other golden-age Al Pacino movies, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Cruising. Feeling nostalgic, I figured, why not? Let’s give it a watch.
The first thing I noticed, movies don’t look like this anymore. There are the technical details. Sea of Love was shot on 35mm film, while today’s movies are almost exclusively shot with a digital camera. Automatically, this gives the movie an authenticity that a similar film today would be forced to recreate what happens here organically. Sea of Love has the gritty look of a David Fincher film without needing David Fincher.
More shocking, however, are the people. It is a movie about messy adult lives. The cluttered apartments, the off-the-rack ill-fitting clothes, restaurants that look like authentic New York locations, drinks, and cigarettes. The film makes you feel as though you are peering into the chaotic, complicated lives of a pre-gentrified New York. A city defined by its organic texture, noise, and authentic imperfection.
Sea of Love is a moody erotic thriller. Today, in this day and age, most thrillers tend toward an ultra-polished, slick aesthetic or lean heavily into digital stylization. Trademarks are neon palettes, aggressive color grading, and those weightless, floating cameras. There are exceptions, but they usually require an auteur like Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan to create them. Sea of Love required no such hall-of-fame talent.
Harold Becker, the director, made the 1980s cult classics Taps and Vision Quest. He put out a 1993 thriller, Malice, that has some of the Sea of Love DNA, but by the late 90s, he was making forgettable mainstream thrillers like Mercury Rising and Domestic Disturbance. You’re not going to confuse him with Christopher Nolan. And yet, Sea of Love feels like something rare, something you will never again see on film. A picture of the past that, despite all its imperfections, you find yourself yearning for in today’s plastic world. I don’t want fake plastic trees, I want a flawed Al Pacino.
Pacino is 48 years old in the movie, and his character, Detective Frank Keller, is something we never see in movies now. He’s a mess with women, pines for/hates his ex-wife, and picks fights with her current husband. He’s probably an alcoholic. He wants the female lead, Ellen Barkin’s character, to move in with him after a few dates. We aren’t even sure he’s good at his job. John Goodman’s character, as his partner, appears to be the better detective. And yet, I am intrigued by his character.
Frank Keller is a beautifully disheveled, unvarnished portrait of a middle-aged guy who’s equal parts compelling and off-putting, and it’s exactly the kind of raw, adult male protagonist that feels increasingly rare in today’s plastic world of mainstream cinema. Pacino plays him with a palpable sense of vulnerability and a quiet, aching desperation. You see the heavy toll of the job etched into his tired eyes, the way he clings to this burgeoning connection as a desperate lifeline, and the haunting, underlying fear that he is slowly becoming indistinguishable from the lonely victims he investigates.
Sea of Love isn’t even a particularly good movie. The obligatory thriller twist falls flat. The movie lingers a bit too long on the Pacino-Barkin relationship, and the second act could use something that thrills the audience. However, because the movie’s aesthetics are so alien to the modern gaze, it stands out as something genuine and valuable. I’m reminded of Rene Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark showing Indiana Jones his watch.
Look at this. It’s worthless—ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless…
Human connection is the relic becoming priceless today. The dream of the internet in 1998 was that it was going to bring the entire world together. Whether you were born in a small Montana town or a mid-sized city, you’d be able to find people you connect with. Into the X-Files? We have a community for that. Like collecting rocks from the lakeshore? Here is a whole group dedicated to those.
On the surface, this was incredible. I can’t tell you how revolutionary it was typing something into a search engine and it spitting out the type of information it would have taken me hours upon hours to find at the public library. People couldn’t simply pull up the capital of Indonesia. Maybe one person in a hundred knew what it was. Even fewer could tell you anything about Jakarta.
And so it went on and on. More and more of our gaze was digital. The imperfections of our world were varnished over as we became exposed to more knowledge. More knowledge than any generation of humans has ever held. Our Faustian bargain came at a cost; however, a deal had been made, we have traded a part of our humanity for this plastic world.
The world of Frank Keller was hard, imperfect. It would have looked terrible in a TikTok video. Many of us have decided to deceive the world, portraying ourselves in social media as a fabricated, perfectly plastic version of ourselves. In so doing, we not only inveigle the world, but also ourselves. We have retreated into digital communication, sending each other texts or not even texting at all, ghosting or blocking people from our lives, rather than having what used to be admired, a face-to-face conversation. Remember that?
For a while, our insular bubble that obscures our relationships and lives works. No one sees our Frank Keller clutter. No room for that, as everyone crawls over each other trying to be an influencer. We can’t expose anything real to the white noise glare of HD. I’ve referenced the plasticity of it all, an ahead of their time idea sung about by Radiohead in their 1995 hit Fake Plastic Trees. Frontman Thom Yorke sings,
Her green plastic watering can
For a fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth…
She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
Fake Plastic Trees feels like stumbling upon a relic from a pre-digital age, an old diary entry you’d long since forgotten. It sneaks up on you, beginning with a fragile, acoustic breath that feels as authentic as a 35mm film grain. But then, the emotional wave hits. Thom Yorke’s voice begins its ascent, trembling with a raw, aching desire that once defined our entire world. “She looks like the real thing,” he emotes, and suddenly you are transported back to those unvarnished nights when a single connection could send your heart tearing through the ceiling.
As the guitars swell, the lights of memory metastasize into an unstoppable surge, a haunting reminder of what we’ve lost. Today, we are fully submerged in the plastic future the song only sensed; we’ve made a Faustian bargain, trading our organic texture for artificial substitutes in love, life, and meaning. Thirty years later, the world has finally caught up to the song, polished, hollow, and utterly plastic. In the sterile, sanitized glare of the modern gaze, the only thing that still feels genuine is the ache.
Are we then doomed to sift through an ocean of plastic until we reach the Great Filter?
Or maybe not.
Every so often, a fragment of reality slips through the cracks of the technocratic eye. These aren’t the polished, branded entities designed to dominate the algorithm or announce their own importance; instead, they carry that same buried, priceless weight Belloq spoke of. They are films that don’t feel manufactured so much as they feel remembered from a dream.
I felt that same organic texture while watching Dust Bunny. It plays less like a slick, modern production and more like a distorted, aching recollection as if Salvador Dalí were attempting to reconstruct The Professional from a hazy memory. The characters are familiar, yet they appear filtered through an Alice in Wonderland lens in a way that feels genuine. This isn’t changing out Leon for a woman and moralizing to the audience. Instead, we witness a dreamworld slowly coalesce. The story doesn’t land with the aggressive precision of a digital clock. It drifts, lingers, and echoes. And in that beautiful lack of precision, something revolutionary happens.
The film actually breathes. It comes to life.
That is the defining difference. Sea of Love had no idea it would eventually become a relic, but Dust Bunny feels as though it was born as one, assembled from the unvarnished fragments of a world we half-remember and can no longer quite recreate. The Professional came out in 1994. Dust Bunny knows it cannot recreate 1994. That time is gone. Buried like Belloq’s watch. Rather than pursue what has been lost, this film conjures up a haunting memory of what that world looks like today.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether we are fated to sift through an ocean of plastic until the end. Maybe the real question is whether we still possess the capacity to recognize the real thing when we see it.
Because, in the end, those are the only pieces that truly last.
