...So we pulled up to this googleplex of a cinema, and the pre-fab movie-torium before me just served as another reminder, not of the wonder and surprise I had experienced as a young cinephile, but of that awful, blank feeling of entertainment as an industry and the celluloid equivalent of high-school cafeteria food.
My mood sank. God, I didn't want to see a movie! In the past week, American banking had gone through its largest collapse since the great depression, and in the face of that and other financial news, I, as a breadwinner, was worrying with the rest of the nation about the possibility of a poverty unknown among working people since my grandparents' day. In the face of this looming danger, a trip to the flicks seemed wildly irresponsible, a flippant attempt to spend cash in the face of an obvious, forthcoming need. Unfortunately though, I had no way to get out of this little trip. After all, I had been the jerk who had originally pushed not only for this outing, but for this specific picture. Worse though, unlike myself, Carol had spent the last several weeks cooped up in our house, and I couldn't exactly ignore her need not to go stir crazy.
Oh, the hell with it! We went up into the theater's lobby, a large chamber of shiny plastic surfaces meant to seem both efficient and attractively futuristic but which was really more empty and blank than anything else. Frustratingly, once at the ticket counter we found that we were actually over an hour early for the next showing....
These things happen. Carol and I live less than a hundred yards from one of the very arbitrary lines between Eastern and Central time, and occaisionally we misunderstand which time zone something is in or which one is stated. In short though, we suddenly had a lot of time to kill, and we decided on a trip to a local burger-flippery called Schoop's.
Now Schoop's was a fixture on route 66 in the days of an allegedly more innocent and adventurous America. People had sat in these very booths on their way home from France or Korea, or on their way out on a psychedelic trip to some better, freer place; and the decor definitely showed these themes. Alongside coke ads from before my birth hung posters of James Dean, glossies of Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., album covers from the sexy 70's and art photography commemorating the history of The Blues. The booths, tables, seats and counter were shiny, hygienic plastic, a previous age's vision of a possible high-tech future; and the menu, of course, featured the favorites of every roadside diner: burgers, fries, shakes, coffee and assorted quick-friable treats. Carol and I both ordered cornbread, hers with tea and mine with java, and we decided to take in the retro-pop on the sound system.
I needed to relax. Yes, on one hand Carol had spent the past three weeks as a prisoner in our home, but on the other, I'd spent those weeks sweating hard enough at work to earn a promotion. I did have to be doing at least something right then, and I supposed that, in light of all that, I could use a break. I got into the music and the food and just started to let my mind wander.
The stereo was playing a top-40 hit of the late 70's, and it took me back to my high school days. I imagined myself back in tenth grade again, also in a diner, and still having the same food but with my friends of that time. I thought about us dreaming of our intended futures as film directors, comic book writers, or science fiction novelists, and I began to miss them. My friends and I had wanted to change the world, to re-make Hollywood, comics and sci-fi into something truly worthwhile, but apparently we all got into the real world and gave up those dreams to pay the rent.
Out of nostalgia, I began to affect the slang of my teens and started discoursing on the films of Robert Altman, my favorite director back then. I hadn't talked about that sort of thing for about twenty years, but somehow I was still able to develop and defend new ideas about the art of cinema. Apparently that teen-age film-freak who I once was still lived inside me, but I was surprised and saddened to see how long we'd been out or touch. Why hadn't we talked more?
With that question in mind, however, I looked across the table to my beautiful wife. Clearly, I had not become a great writer or film-maker, but I had made a decent life for myself and our family, and after so many years together, Carol and I had literally evolved into a unity. Okay, we had done so through a long series of conflicts and unexpected rewards, but we were indeed together and basically happy. In a way my dreams of literary or show-biz success had probably been just hopes for recognition and affection, and well, now I had them both.
Heading back to the movie theater though, I continued to contemplate the views of that allegedly artsier version of me, and I couldn't help thinking about how much our personalities affects our appreciation of films, music, television and books. A few weeks ago, my pop-culture brother had sent me a wonderful gift, the first two volumes of DC comics' anthologies of its original Sgt. Rock, and, upon opening it, I had remembered reading those same stories as a young boy and thinking to myself that they gave me an incredibly tough and therefore very real view of the war my father had fought in. Now however, quite incredibly, I found these very same stories to be quite sentimental, even purposefully so; however I also found a new and rawer kind of violence in them, that of someone making an entirely unselfconscious recollection of utter brutality. The very bright grade-schooler who had read those same stories might not have been able to see that quality in the work, but the current me could. With this thought in mind then, I contemplated the idea that reviewers might want to write their reviews, not as a Consumer Reports of the movies, but as descriptions of their own personal experiences in the theater, a travelog of their latest trip to the flicks.
I was in a markedly better mood by the start of the film. True, I could not foresee the fate of the world's economy, but I could certainly enjoy a movie. In fact, tonight's fare, Duplicity, let me appreciate it in many different ways. That young film-freak still inside me could contemplate it as an interesting portrayal of the world of corporate espionage; and the simple fan of entertainment sitting in my seat could just enjoy it as just a taught-plotted thriller with all the needed twists and ironies. Lastly, my wage-earner self could just take it as a two hour break from his responsibilities. All in all, that wasn't too bad for a "B" flick.
Leaving the theater, I was inwardly laughing at both myself and my situation. in a way, this movie had, like some of the great works of cinema, let me contact some unaccessed part of myself. In another way though, that part of me was not some higher self, but merely a happier, simpler and earlier version of the current me. The flick was just some B-grade celluloid of course, but it had definitely given me more than a simple distraction. Like some great works of cinema, it had changed me just a little.
No comments:
Post a Comment