Ebert's death feels like Vonnegut's and Updike's. I discovered all three authors when I was in high school. I never read a single movie review before I went to his website. I don't think a week passed since then when I didn't wait for Ebert's thoughts on what was playing.
No, I didn't wait for Ebert to tell me how to think. That's not how movie criticism works. I saw The Master and The Raid: Redemption despite scathing reviews by him. Reading Ebert is similar to debating a friend on which Scorsese movie is the best. Or whether The Tree of Life was overrated. You want validation but you also want someone to occasionally challenge you, make you explain yourself, support your beliefs.
Almost as much as any other author, Ebert has influenced my writing. Besides being features editor, I also contribute movie and TV reviews to the Insider section of the Beacon. Ebert taught me the purpose of a review. It's not an open forum to spew your private likes and dislikes, it's a recommendation to a reader. The reader has to trust you and you have to earn that trust.
Every time I write a review, I try to convince someone to hand over money to a theater. I want people to go out of their way and see NO or The Place Beyond the Pines. I try to convince them that these movies are worth two hours of one's life.
But Ebert did much more than that. Although he never labeled himself, he was an atheist, a secularist, a liberal and a gun control advocate. Those views we are so afraid of sharing, he wrote books and syndicated columns about them. About his own impending death he said:
I know [death] is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.
He is, of course, channeling Mark Twain, another great author who was also an atheist. I like to think that Ebert would have felt the same way had he lived before Twain.
My own views about death are not as poetic. No one knows what happens after death, and if someone did, I wouldn't believe him. We are all agnostics before the end. So I turn to science and logic in moments of doubt. This is why I want to be buried instead of cremated. I want living organisms to feed on me as I have fed on them. I want to be part of the soil and the cosmos after that.
And I'm channeling Richard Dawkins and Neil Tyson. But, I like to think I would feel this way even without them.
Lastly, I want to thank Roger Ebert for introducing me to Scorsese, Malick, Park, Inarritu, Herzog and countless of other great directors. I want to thank him for explaining Kubrick, Welles, Hitchcock and Scott to me. And I want to thank him for improving my writing, for letting me stand on a giant when reviewing movies.
The world is a poorer place without you but so much richer because of you. We will see each other in a world of peace and freedom, at the movies, if the accident will.
Roger Joseph Ebert (1943-2013)
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