The other day I went to the movies. It's something I hardly ever do anymore-- a few times a year, maybe. But Lars Von Trier's Melancholia was playing at the Varsity, so I walked up to the University District, paid my eight dollars, and had a seat.
In the era of Netflix and torrents, we watch most of our movies at home, on television and computer screens. We put on a movie, and sit back on the couch with a box of Chinese takeout and a beer. When we go to the bathroom, we press the pause button. When I watch movies in my apartment, it's usually because I'm bored. I'm watching a movie, and it's usually a movie I've looked forward to seeing, and it's often a movie I wind up being thrilled by. But it is specifically a video experience, dominated by the norms of video viewing rather than theater viewing.
When we go to the theater now, it's a rejection of that mode of entertainment. You don't have the ability to pause, you can't run to the refrigerator and grab another beer. You are in a darkened space entirely devoted to the idea of film.
People wax on about the grand old movie palaces. However, they're not commenting on the quality of the theaters-- they're pining for the sheer beauty of their architecture, for their bannisters and balconies and scrolled columns. And they're pining for a community of film-goers, for a world in which going to the movies was the thing that people did. In Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, the small town theater only barely plays into the plot of the film. But when it closes, it signifies the end of an age of innocence.
And when critics describe the desire to see a movie in the theater, they rarely use logical lines of reasoning. Rather, their desires are driven by something else. For true cinephiles, it's as if cinema is a holistic thing encompassing the film, the theater, and something ineffable. All existence dissolves into projected light.
Perhaps because of this holistic experience, we don't remember how we saw the movie-- we don't remember the color of the seats or the people sitting next to us. And when we do remember these things, they're viewed as a distractions. We want to remember the movie itself. The darkened theater is imagined as a blank space.
Those memories I have associated with movies, apart from the movies themselves, occur in the afterglow: the collective murmur of the audience exiting the theater, the drive home, the way your faculties slowly readjust to your everyday reality.
As I walked home from the theater, everything seemed imbued with dread. The iron bridges over the Ship Canal creaked, waves lapped at rotting piers, a red sun slowly set over Queen Anne Hill. For hours afterwards, the outside world seemed full of omens, and all my life was imbued with cinematic memory.
People wax on about the grand old movie palaces. However, they're not commenting on the quality of the theaters-- they're pining for the sheer beauty of their architecture, for their bannisters and balconies and scrolled columns. And they're pining for a community of film-goers, for a world in which going to the movies was the thing that people did. In Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, the small town theater only barely plays into the plot of the film. But when it closes, it signifies the end of an age of innocence.
And when critics describe the desire to see a movie in the theater, they rarely use logical lines of reasoning. Rather, their desires are driven by something else. For true cinephiles, it's as if cinema is a holistic thing encompassing the film, the theater, and something ineffable. All existence dissolves into projected light.
Perhaps because of this holistic experience, we don't remember how we saw the movie-- we don't remember the color of the seats or the people sitting next to us. And when we do remember these things, they're viewed as a distractions. We want to remember the movie itself. The darkened theater is imagined as a blank space.
Those memories I have associated with movies, apart from the movies themselves, occur in the afterglow: the collective murmur of the audience exiting the theater, the drive home, the way your faculties slowly readjust to your everyday reality.
As I walked home from the theater, everything seemed imbued with dread. The iron bridges over the Ship Canal creaked, waves lapped at rotting piers, a red sun slowly set over Queen Anne Hill. For hours afterwards, the outside world seemed full of omens, and all my life was imbued with cinematic memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment