I didn’t have any friends in high school and one way I got through the weekends was to go to the video store Friday afternoons and take advantage of the weekend special deal where you could rent 10 tapes for five dollars. I devoured the movies of Buster Keaton, Orson Welles, John Ford, Jean Vigo, Judy Garland, and Robert Mitchum, but I recall a period when all I watched was Lauren Bacall. Born 100 years ago today, Sept. 16, 1924, in the Bronx, Bacall never seemed to have a pinpointable age in her pictures. She was who she was, an absolute unencumbered by strictures of who or what she “ought” to be. I viewed her as one of those people whose eventual death in real life (at the time, she still had a lot of years to go) you’d have a hard time believing, like here was someone who couldn’t be touched by the laws of the universe. They were too much their own thing. Bacall’s screen moxie lifted you up as the viewer by forfeiting the use of any prescriptive notions of how one should be just because that’s how others had been. You felt like she was slipping you a very important kind of answer for the movie that was your life. Actresses could give tour-de-force performances in mid-century American films, but a lot of the time they were treated as plot devices and romance objects for their male co-stars. Female spiritedness took the form of pluck or winsomeness. There wasn’t a lot of equal footing between the sexes, save in screwball comedies, which is part of the reason they were meant to be funny. That changed with Bacall’s 1944 film debut in Howard Hawks’ “To Have and Have Not.” It was like she’d taken a look at the screen and decided, “I own you.” I’d read many film histories, so I knew she was 18-years-old at casting — barely older than I was — but her age meant nothing to me. I thought, “What is age? Does it mean anything or only if you’ve decided it must?” Paired with Humphrey Bogart — another owner of the screen — Bacall yielded nary a micron. Which isn’t to suggest that her Slim character was truculent, but rather fully-formed, as Bacall the actress was from the jump. You were watching a cinematic absolute of self-actualization. Not only watching — hearing. You could close your eyes and listen to Bacall’s voice as if you’d put on your favorite album. The voice contained levels. You had the top conversational meaning. The middle ground where things got livelier. Then the depths, where life was at its most consequential. It may seem ironic to think of Bacall the model as also a conversation-based musical artist, but what a formidable instrument that voice was. James Agee wrote that cinema peaked as an artistic medium during the silent era, when the camera moved and we had the fluid poeticization of images. I’ve always understood where he was coming from, but then I’ll think how movies almost wouldn’t be movies as a whole without the Bacall voice existing. Critics didn’t know what to make of her. Good. Critics shouldn’t, if what you’re doing has no precedent. They have to deal with you on their terms, and that’s intimidating. People reach for what they know. They look to make comparisons. Wasn’t possible with Bacall, and I’m sure many people found that empowering as a result. We so often try to impose our will. We hanker for control. But control is different than command. When we command something, we’ve let things come to us and then acted with assurance and clarity of vision. Command will always trump control. Bacall was the cinematic analogue of this idea. You see it in that first movie. You see it in the ones that followed as the roles she played changed. There was no neediness. No floundering. Just command. I found the meaning behind Bacall’s method to be mesmerizing. Not in some brain-fogged manner, but as a sort of directional arrow for being who you were. No one in the movies looked at someone else better than Lauren Bacall did. As she saw into them, so did you. She commanded beats, those pauses in life when we partake of the epiphanies to be had if we’re in command. I was grateful for those Bacall weekends, just as I’m pleased when one of her movies comes on TV now. Lessons in command are always worth having, and those from the films of Lauren Bacall are ageless. Fleming is a writer.