Rabbit Rabbit #18: Hooked to the Silver Screen

An ode to the movie theater experience

Amélie (2001)

A couple weeks ago, my friend Sarah and I went to see a screening of Robert Altman’s 3 Women at Metrograph. It was my first time seeing the film –so sacred to me– on the big screen. I knew it would be big and exciting. What took me by surprise was my being emotionally overcome when the previews began.

Metrograph is an independent arthouse theater with very distinct programming and a fast screening turnaround. Typically, a movie will play for one or two days before being replaced by another in a thematic series. The previews at Metrograph are expertly crafted supercuts of movie moments showcasing upcoming programs. This time, it was for “Ethics of Care,” which the website quotes as “a program of diverse titles exploring the myriad ethical quandaries and spiritual rewards that can come with taking the role of caretaker to another human, be it parent, child, sibling, romantic partner, or some other, more ambiguous arrangement.” I had seen many of the films in the series so the montage was particularly affecting with its pianissimo score. I was tearing up before the feature presentation.

Friends of mine who accompany me to the movies know I am a highly emotional watcher. Crugg likes to announce that I am “so easily moved,” which makes me cackle with delight. At our showing of Barbie last summer I turned, eyes glistening, to Jessica during the trailer for, of all things, Wonka when “THIS CHRISTMAS” splashed across the screen. “We are so lucky. We get THIS CHRISTMAS and THIS THANKSGIVING every year and each time it’s a new movie,” I blubbered incoherently.

I wonder if it is possible to correctly describe the feeling of going to the movies. I wonder if, despite efforts to be articulate, I will end up regurgitating Nicole Kidman’s line, “somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this” in the now three-year-old AMC ad (which, despite its pop cultural status as cringe-yet-kinda-camp is pretty truthful.) How to capture such a specific experience, which is different for every person yet virtually the same anywhere you go? What is it about the movies as a concept, an activity, a ritual, that keeps us coming back?

Our 3 Women excursion was not a one-off plan. The following weekend, Sarah and I were back again, in the same row no less, seeing Kelly Reichardt’s aptly-named Certain Women. We began calling it Women Sundays." Hopefully, they would play Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown next. I am resisting the urge to use a church metaphor here, which feels overdone when describing moviegoing. “It’s my religion.” “The theatre is my cathedral.” Blech. Must. Find. New. Comparison. Maybe let’s go back to the beginning.

Patrons in front of Vitascope Hall in 1916.

The first accredited cinema in the US was Vitascope Hall on Canal Street in New Orleans, which opened on a hot summer night in July of 1896. A vacant storefront was converted into a nickel-a-piece theater to screen such early delicacies as Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph and Les Chutes. One can imagine the classic lore, where patrons ducking in horror truly believed a train was rushing toward them and would leap off the screen. The films played continuously all day with breaks every three hours. Imagine how mesmerized people must have been to watch things like robberies, mother nature, and kisses onscreen– things they only experienced in their imaginations, the present moment, or behind closed doors were up there, presented to crowds for public consumption and reflection for the first time ever. It’s still transgressive –radical even– to me.

Then came the advent of movie palaces between the 1910s through the ‘40s: gigantic, multi-story halls that drew large crowds by promising the royal treatment and delicacy in the form of seatside snack service and plush cushions to the commonfolk. When those closed with the rise of television and antitrust lawsuits involving studio ownership of theaters, some independent houses were forced to stay afloat by converting into race and pornography theaters. (Think that one scene in Taxi Driver.) The ‘80s and ‘90s saw the rise of megaplexes and more family-centered experiences. It’s always been a balance between profit and experience; I could do an entire essay on the evolution of concessions at the movie theater.

Nowadays, theaters boast different aesthetic experiences, like Metrograph’s elite, bourgeois college-seminar-style programming replete with introductions and talkbacks, or the Paris Theater’s unwavering commitment to classics, down to its Golden Age popcorn boxes. AMC and IMAX capitalized on the Barbenheimer phenomenon last summer, resulting in both a key example of counterprogramming and a renaissance of the kind of communal moviegoing on a massive scale that had all but been consigned to cultural oblivion.

It’s easy to get cynical about it all, to call everything a cash grab or a marketing ploy these days, or to grieve the loss of so many storied cinematic spaces that have shut down over the years, especially during the pandemic. But I think there is a hopeful truth that still exists, which is that people still crave community. We remain hungry, starved even, for the act of gathering and bearing witness to the unfolding of a story.

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Perhaps, then, the movie theater is a spiritual place, a center for meditative practice. Or a warm, dark womb. An incubator. A blip in the space-time continuum as we know it. The holographic version of Pensacola, Florida in Contact. I’ve resorted to using movie references to describe the movies because this is of course what happens. Once you spend enough time in the movie world, it becomes vaguely indistinguishable from the “real” world.

In the introduction to his 1992 book The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely, architectural theorist Anthony Vidler describes the uncanny feeling of “distancing from reality forced by reality” that propels us into a bodily state resembling “the slippage between waking and dreaming.” Often, Vidler argues, this “distancing” occurs during profound aesthetic experiences, usually an interaction between humans and art. In Vidler’s case, he means architectural spaces and twentieth-century homes, but I think this surrealist theory directly applies to the cinema.

Vidler writes about the “mental projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and unreal” which must be present to allow for such a feeling. Not only is the central instrument for the cinema a projector, but we as viewers cannot help but project our own lives and experiences onto the thing we are watching. Where and when else are we afforded the time, space, and luxury –because it is a luxury, we must not forget this– to reflect in such a deep way, free of distraction? Or to escape, to forget and remember all at once? To enter the reality of another and suspend disbelief to simply find out what happens next? It is, I am realizing, a true act of empathy.

I always say that what I enjoy most in a movie is seeing my world, reality as I have come to understand it, reflected back to me in a different light. I don’t mean to suggest I only consume naturalistic movies set in the here and now. (Science fiction and fantasy provide perhaps the clearest windows through which to examine life on our planet.) I just mean that when I sit down to watch a movie, I hope it will show me some truth intrinsic to human life, and encourage me to think about it differently. In the best cases, it completely disrupts my pattern of thinking and feeling. I am taught something. In the most comforting, it confirms it. I love to finish a movie and think, how lucky am I, are we all.

Donnie Darko (2001)

When I attend a movie, I am certainly plunged into a fugue state between waking and dreaming. I remember leaving TÁR at the Angelika right after I moved to New York and walking the fourteen blocks uptown to the L while listening to a symphony, my eyes darting around. It was like I had forgotten how to interact with the world after seeing the movie. I needed a while to come to, to replant my feet on the real live ground. Seeing a movie feels like going through the Wonka Mobile. In fact, the advent of the movie theater is the closest we’ve come on earth to building a time machine. It’s no wonder we come back.

My favorite theater in the world is on Main Street in my Massachusetts hometown. It’s called Loring Hall Cinema and first opened in 1852 as a meeting house and social gathering space. In 1936 it was converted into a one-room cinema and has remained in operation ever since. It looks like a big white church with a steeple and an old-timey schoolhouse. My favorite seat is the first-row balcony overhang, where I lean forward and rest my chin in my hands on the railing to peer below at the smattering of a crowd, typically folks aged 60+ and somehow always including my retired eleventh grade math teacher, who I then inevitably see in the bathroom. They sell hot chocolate and tea and the best boxed candies and have a bin of old posters you can take for free in the lobby.

In high school and college, my friends and I had a tradition of seeing whatever was playing between Christmas and New Year’s. I mark the passage of time by what movie we saw during the holidays. “The election year was when we saw Jackie and Kyra had to close her eyes during the assassination scene.” “No, 2015 was Joy. Remember how hard we cried?!” My favorite year was Lady Bird, which Ethan and I saw during our senior year of high school. The movie ended, we walked outside, and it was dark and snowing for the first time that winter, like a page from a children’s book, or a miracle, or waking up from a dream.

Rec: my favorite montage. And RR17, which is a short story by me.