An Italian Word For "The Feeling of Missing Something You'd Barely Notice Had Gone"

"Jesus, Tom." A dozen characters in the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing are pissed at Tom Reagan, and half of them sigh or mutter or yell "Jesus, Tom" as the character, played by Gabriel Byrne, crosses them. Like many noir protagonists, Tom's a combination of a misunderstood fella with good intentions and an actual asshole, the kind of character who gets punished worse for saving a person's life than he does for sleeping with a woman already involved with a mob boss.

There is one "Jesus, Tom" that stands above the rest in my mind and it comes when Byrne's Tom smashes Mike Starr's Frankie across the face with a wooden chair. Frankie holds his nose, looks down at the blood gathering in his hand and says "Jesus, Tom" with a deep, childlike hurt. The line reading would work just as well in a story about a bully stealing a first grade kid's juice box and it hits beautifully as a brief moment of comic relief in an especially stressful stretch of the movie, when some of Tom's biggest lies start falling apart and it becomes clear he's doomed.

You won't find that two-word line in the Criterion Collection blu-ray of Miller's Crossing. When Criterion re-issued the movie, my favorite movie, they silently did so as a director's cut with two minutes missing. My frustration over the tiny, unannounced cuts that turn Miller's Crossing into an almost imperceptibly different version of itself is also a deep, childlike hurt.

You can read about the edits online, and, the "Jesus, Tom" aside, you truly would have to read about them or watch the two versions of the movie side by side to notice anything. The website movie-censorship.com (which cops to the changes not really being "censorship") catalogs them. Nothing gets more significant than "Tom lingers a few inconsequential frames longer at the end of the scene" or "The shot of the lamp starts a few frames earlier." Really– "inconsequential" is their word. And anyway, I own an original copy of the movie on DVD. And if I didn't, I could buy the standard, non-Criterion blu-ray for less than $20 right now. And if I couldn't, I could rent that cut online. This is not some Golden Age of Hollywood film improperly stored and disintegrating, not some George Lucas insistence that the past be scrubbed down with bleach until only a preferred item is available.

So why am I mourning 120 non-consecutive seconds of the least crucial parts of a film? I don't fully know. But some of this is due to those parts existing in a crucial film. I would rather the things I love simply exist, for artists to evolve but for their art to stay what it always was. Brett Ratner and Max Landis can team up to make Miller's Crossing 2: Cryzark's Revenge, retcon the first film's setting from "probably Chicago" to "definitely the planet Helos IV of the Grimp Nebula," have Jared Leto dress up in Albert Finney make-up and replace composer Carter Burwell with Weezer and I'll only feel a little annoyed. The world has already begun to leave me behind and I don't resent it for having done so. Change away. But there aren't many pieces of perfect art and I'd like to keep the ones we've got.

And "evolve" may have been the wrong word to have used back there because artists are not machines learning how to correct their deficiencies. They aren't RPG characters becoming stronger versions of themselves. There are just the versions of Joel and Ethan Coen that existed in 1990 and there are the versions that exist now, and to them I say "Jesus, Joel and Ethan." Because:

1. If you are talented and lucky enough to ever make art this good, you should let it lie.

2. How did the Criterion Collection, whose stated mission is to restore and archive films, agree to this?

3. You start removing small things, the slope gets slippery and maybe you go further the next time. This is how guns become flashlights.

4. That "Jesus, Tom" is a perfect moment of humor in a movie that, while very funny, barbs most of its other jokes with a viciousness. It's mostly people taunting each other or Sam Raimi laughing at the way a guy twitches after being shot. The "Jesus, Tom" is a different type of joke and that diversity helps it land even better than it normally would. Remove it and a unique element of the film, even an element that lasts ten seconds, is gone.

5. We've all seen the movie, or at least I assume we have if we're willing to pay $40 for a copy. The missing moment is confusing, a strange "Did I hear that right?" fuzz that tickles at your brain when you're sure you were supposed to experience something that just isn't there anymore. There is a moment being subtracted here, but there is also a distraction being added.

Stray seconds of my favorite film have been excised from the record. Put together, they last two minutes, which is less time than you've just spent reading this essay. The time is negligible, the "Jesus, Tom" great, if unnecessary to Miller's Crossing's plot. You tinker with these things and cut out unnecessary parts, though, and something else goes away. The art is traded, in some tiny way, for precision. The movie becomes a car you're tuning up.

You need two parties to make great art– one to actually make the art and the other to hit that person over the head when they've finished. Somebody hit the Coens over the head 33 years ago. It may have been a mistake to pretend that person never existed. And there is nothing past perfect, no matter how hard we try to get there. And whittling away at a triumph does not make it triumph-er. It's two minutes, but a tiny portion of your favorite art can stretch to infinity once they've been given new weight.