I got a hold of some bad cheese yesterday.  Not spoiled cheese or tainted cheese, just bad cheese.  Inferior.  Inadequate.  Un-good.  It was a mild cheddar, the in-store variety (on sale).  Now,  I’ve had mild cheddar before and liked it and this particular store’s in-house sharp cheddar is pretty good but this, ugh, this abomination was a spongy, glomulous (okay, I made that word up but it freaking fits!) confabulation that couldn’t even be properly sliced off the brick without the slices being crushed under the weight of the thinnest of knives so that I was left not with individual rectangles of cheese but rather amorphous globs that looked unattractive, like a poseable Pokey figure that had been melted in a microwave.  And the taste -  taste-less would be the appropriate word in this setting… leading me to proclaim in my outside voice “This cheese tastes like synthetic flesh.  Who made this cheese… Preston Foster?”

Mind you, I was alone, so there was no one there to answer my question, laugh at my joke or have the end of DOCTOR X (1932) spoiled for them.  (Oh… I probably should have warned you about that.  Oh well.)  Anyway, the first thing that occurred to me while I was still shaking off the non-flavor of this bad cheese was how quickly I defaulted to a movie reference.  Not that anyone’s counting, but I think it was two steps: taste, disgust, movie reference.  That’s pretty fast.  I’m sure there are long-haul truckers, triage nurses and CIA black ops out there whose real lives don’t include so many movie references, but my life is different.  Movies surround me in a cluster like moons around one of your bigger planets.  They’re always there. A few months ago, a topic sprouted up on The Mobius Home Video Forum about the subject of “imprinting”… which is to say, scenes or even just moments from movies that you recall while doing some ordinary thing.  The most obvious example would be thinking of PSYCHO (1960) when you step into the shower and pull the curtain closed.  If you’re of a certain age, you always expect that curtain to be pulled back at the moment you’re most vulnerable…

So yeah, imprinting.  Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve had a garbage disposal in every apartment I’ve rented and have one now in the home I own.  And if you’ve ever seen ROLLING THUNDER (1977), you’ll never look at a garbage disposal quite the same way.  In that brutal film directed by John Flynn and written by Paul Schrader, William Devane stars as a former POW who returns to his hometown to find his wife has been unfaithful in his absence and to be victimized by a gang of lowlifes, who try to beat out of him the location of a cache of gold coins presented to him by the town fathers in honor of his service in Vietnam.  The Major’s stoicism costs him dearly when the thugs force his arm down into the garbage disposal, turning the limb into chowder and resulting in the character being fitted with a prosthetic hook.  As a teenager, that nasty bit of business really stayed with me but didn’t truly haunt me until I had one of those devices in my home.  And I’ll tell you what, they’re always getting clogged, so I’ve got my hand thrust down in my garbage disposal about thrice weekly I’m thinking ROLLING THUNDER the whole time.

Here’s a random one.  You know those blood pressure stations in shopping malls and pharmacies?  Every time I see one of those I flash immediately to DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), where a motorcycle gang member in a sombrero picks the worst possible time to sphygmomanometer himself.  If you’ve seen the film, zombies chew his arm off at the shoulder, which causes a precipitous decrease in his brachial arterial blood pressure.

Being the father of two children under the age of 5, I’m spending a lot of time at the playground these days.  And you’d think those jolly, sandy, wide-open, sun-kissed spaces would be the last place on earth for me to flash on horror movies… but you’d be wrong, of course.  No sooner does my son and/or daughter scoot into one of those circular kiddie tunnels…

… than my mind goes to the air shaft scene in ALIEN (1979), where ship’s captain Tom Skerritt pulls the short straw of having to chase the eponymous bogey through the Nostromo’s ventilation system…

… and we all know how that excursion turns out!  (“No, kids, you have your fun in the tunnel.  Daddy’s staying out here in the sunlight, where the Alien can’t get him.  But knock yourselves out and scream if you need me!”)  Actually, in the spinning CD-ROM of my brain, I have many air shaft references to flash on, including claustrophobic bits from DEMONS (1986), ALIENS (1986) and DIE HARD (1988), but this one is really the best illustration of why you should never shinny through an air shaft, if you can absolutely help it.

Here’s an odd one – let’s see a show of hands for anyone else who, when they slide the porcelain lid off of their toilet tank (if you don’t hide booze or drugs back there, then you’re probably doing this to reattach the lift chain to the trip lever so that the tank ball can be raised up from and lowered back down onto the flush valve seat – and yes, I looked all of that up because when I initially wrote “to reattach the chain thinger to the lever dealio so that the ballywhatsit can be raised up from and lowered back down onto the bottom hole” I felt seven kinds of stupid) they flash on…

… that scene in almost any old vampire movie where some foolhardy soul unwisely slides the stone lid off of the creature’s coffin or, even worse, the lid slides off unaided by dint of some supernatural accord.  That grinding sound always brings me to this place of horror and fear, even in the relative security of my master bathroom.  Anyone else?  Anyone?  Anyway, I’ve got a million of these.  The medicine cabinet mirror fright from REPULSION (1965) and four-score of movies that have ripped it off have me prepped to see someone behind me every time I close the medicine cabinet door; a bowl of pea soup will, of course, remind me of THE EXORCIST (1973); Milk Duds will bring me back to THE EVIL DEAD (1981); and of course countless songs (Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You,” Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve Got You, Babe,” and Andy Williams’ “Happy Heart”) are no longer listenable in their original contexts but jerk me back to the movies (RESERVOIR DOGS, GROUNDHOG DAY, SHALLOW GRAVE) that so savagely repurposed them.

I could go on and on.  And I will, mentally.  But let me physically stop here and ask you, in your day-to-day life, as you go about non-movie business, what kinds of cinematic impriting manifest themselves?  What movie moments are branded upon your brain?