I really kind of hate to invoke Kane Parsons’ mostly dreadful Backrooms, but it’s the most obvious thing to turn to after having rounded the bleak corner from that opening paragraph. It’s almost embarrassing to have to point it out: mainstream cinema (which quite rapidly devolved into the only sort of cinema we really access) has now largely become that endless labyrinth of grim indistinguishable rooms and hallways where everything looks deadeningly the same, a self-consciously horrifying prefabricated hedgework maze of disconnection and dissociation. Not that the film itself has some type of durable analytical framework to approach those ideas in any useful way. It’s simply (and overly simply) a blunt example and symptom of the selfsame cultural deadlock that’s produced it, or given rise to it, or rather, sunk and lowered it as far as it’s been sunk. Somehow improbably, an even worse example came out in American cinemas a bit earlier this year, a Japanese film called Exit 8, in which a guy walks around endless identical white tiled corridors trying to find his way out of a subway pedestrian tunnel. I don’t care whatsoever that these films originated as internet phenomena or video games or whatever. That very lack of any serious or meritorious or educated provenance, and the increasing distance from its own historical sense of echolocation that instead results in a form of infinite unfolding simulation, is exactly what all of the postmodern theorists theorized is where we’d now wind up, and so we have.
Each spring I teach a course on music lyricism, and the most difficult aspect of it is getting the students to listen intently to songs with some intricacy of thematic meaning, structure, or songcraft, and then to analyze even briefly what makes it intricate and how. They’re so accustomed to listening to and watching things only in brief snippets that I have to keep the pace moving swiftly in order to huddle them together inside the boat, which is fine by me since I can row us alongside and past more songs and lyrics that way. I encourage them to bring in whatever interests them in any way on the days that they present songs they’ve selected, rather than forcing them to stay within any sort of rubric, almost as a way to create formal contrasts that they might or might not notice. While any kind of immersion is good in these days of continual distraction (though sometimes it’s cleverly disguised as meditation), in the realm of cinema I think it’s even more important that it be worthwhile immersion, the kind that wakes you up as it envelops you because if there’s one thing that I can assure you of after watching pretty much every single cinematic release so far this year, it’s that our cohesion to forms in a truly generative sense is actively fading; I would argue it’s even willfully fading. The more complacent you are, the more they can continue to sell you at far too high a price.
How strange then, and strangely sensible, after making us essentially strangers to ourselves, that the outcome and ultimate downfall of it all would be a glaringly obvious cultural narcissism, wanting to see only your own face in something: that’s what’s funny enough to laugh at, or sad enough to cry about, because if I can’t see myself in this thing, then why am I paying to sit here? There has been almost no cinema this year for me that’s represented any kind of serious travel, intellectual or spiritual travel. As if seriousness or rigor or historical reference to form (or even an authentic challenge to that form) would too easily upset the simplistic tidiness of capitalist narcissism, which has reset the terms in such a way that the form can only function as you’ve come to expect it to commercially, no matter how ironically you title it Spider-Man: Brand New Day because there’s not a single fucking new thing about it, nor do you want there to be. Or maybe Avengers: Doomsday can just obliterate it all, set a continent of wildfires around the endlessly skull-numbing repetition, or you can just suddenly kill off James Bond at the end of the last movie if he no longer suits your purposes or your bankroll, who cares if he ever comes back or not, even The Odyssey isn’t worth reviving if all you have is a grand technician like a wizard of detritus to knock stuff around with bombastic drumming while sucking the poetry out of all of it since poetry’s not worth writing anymore anyway, but people sure will shell out $30 or more to pack every seat in front of the wall-to-wall IMAX screen to convince themselves that they’re inside Plato’s cave and it's art. Give all of that money to the small people out there who’ll still know how to take you on an actual journey, an experience that’s the psychological opposite of your own, one that’s not wrapped up in the blindly inherited narrative that you demand.
When I was in college back in the 1990s, I worked in the box office a couple of nights a week at a cinema in Cambridge that was at the time the largest art cinema in the country, nine screens that showed nothing but art films and independent fare all day every day. Now that cinema is showing only all of the same junk that every other cinema is showing, and for only about half of the day most days of the week. You still had over 200 cinematic releases per year that were indie films or more artfully crafted only 20 years ago now. This year you’ll be lucky to have barely 50 or so at the very most, and all of those I’ll have to watch at the art museum in Portland. So I don’t want to hear anything about how we’re in some cinematic golden age, or wow look at the young people returning to cinemas in bigger numbers because of something as comically dumb as Obsession or as much of a blatant substandard retread as Project Hail Mary, and don’t even pretend that to some degree the more artful and more culturally crucial films aren’t dying because “well they’re being made just not widely distributed anymore, you’ll just have to catch them at film festivals instead” since that’s clearly equivalent to some kind of death. People better start teaching future creators in the right ways again, and fast, yet even that’s too hopeful. More likely I’ll be back to scanning the underground, not for the exit, but for those rarer ways to burrow in more deeply. It’s still there in quick flashes, if you take the time and have the patience and insight to look for it. Robert Aramayo’s performance in I Swear. The opening credits sequence of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. André De Shields setting the pace of heartbreak in the recent cinematic release of Hadestown. Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen in The Invite. Leo Woodall in Tuner, Rose Byrne in Tow, Paul Rudd in Power Ballad. So much that nearly nobody is seeing because we now live in a culture almost entirely devoid of curiosity and adventure, just sell sell sell sell sell, and so everything with a heart behind it gets missed.
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Some Thoughts on Cinemas
One morning a few years ago, I woke up from a dream that I’d been watching a movie at a little cinema in Harvard Square. The layout of the cinema felt very real to me. The entrance and ticket booth were located at street-level on JFK Street. Downstairs from the box office and concession stand were two long skinny auditoriums behind two slim doorways that sat side-by-side. Despite how familiar the space seemed to me within the world of the dream, I wasn’t sure if it had been an actual place or just a fabrication of my sleeping mind. When I was awake enough to start thinking about it more deeply, trying my hardest to remember something that now seemed to be long gone, I reached over to grab my laptop from my bedside nightstand.
I searched online and found only a few ghost-like traces — a brief mention of it on somebody’s film blog, some photos of old print ads for the theater — to prove that this cinema in my dream had indeed once existed: it was called the Janus, and I’d frequented it semi-regularly when I worked in Harvard Square in the mid-1990s. The Janus permanently closed its doors before that decade had ended. I can still recall quite vividly that I’d watched Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia there with one of my first boyfriends, a tall and handsome Mormon guy from Utah who was then a graduate student at Harvard. Of course, Tom Hanks went on to win an Oscar for playing a gay man who died of AIDS in that movie, a film that’s very much of its era in that the AIDS epidemic remained a serious concern among gay and bisexual men at the time Philadelphia was released. I’d also seen Tim Robbins’ movie Dead Man Walking at the Janus, for which Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for playing a nun who counsels Sean Penn’s death-row inmate before his execution. I was young then back in my twenties, and I remember crying a lot during both of those movies.
One day I also took a long lunch break to head over to the Janus to watch my very first film starring Alain Delon, René Clément’s 1960 French thriller Plein Soleil, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. I became fairly obsessed with seeing all of Alain Delon’s early films after that, and young Alain Delon remains my favorite face in cinema to this day. I was fortunate in that I’d grown accustomed to subtitles during high school, when I convinced a friend to go with me to see our very first foreign film, 1990’s Cyrano de Bergerac with Gérard Depardieu, at the gorgeously restored Esquire Theatre in the downtown Clifton neighborhood of my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. That same friend returned to the Esquire with me the following year to watch Isabelle Huppert as the title character in Claude Chabrol’s adaptation of Madame Bovary.
Because I remember all of these kinds of details so well, it’s a mystery to me how I could have forgotten about the Janus in Harvard Square less than two decades later, and that only one of my random nighttime dreams could have returned me there. Why had the experience of seeing movies at that little cinema engraved itself so deeply in my memory that I may not have recalled the place in waking life, but the dreamworld was able to transport me back to it? Plenty of people have written about the relationship of movies to memory throughout the past century, but I think my dream speaks to something that’s equally important: how the special cultural ritual of moviegoing shapes our minds via the spaces in which we encounter art, and how exactly that ritual puts us in close physical proximity to films that we carry forward with us, to the extent that they intimately surround us, whether we fully remember those spaces or not.
This is especially worth thinking about now since my fear is that this significant cultural ritual at present is in the process of gradually becoming lost over time. I’ve read several in-depth articles recently that examined various demographics among cinema fans and concluded that the younger generation of filmgoers — those who are currently in their twenties or teenage years — don’t really go to the movies like we did when I was their age. They might go to see a movie every now and then, like a superhero blockbuster, a romantic comedy, or a popular horror flick, but most younger people don’t “go to the movies” as a matter of routine anymore. Obviously, the internet and online streaming have changed all of that, and it’s easier to stay at home and watch most films for little to no money in the comfort of a living room or bedroom.
Cinemas are trying to attract patrons in various ways lately, adding benefits like roomy “luxury” reclining seats, specialty concession stand items, and alcoholic beverages, while raising ticket prices to levels that make less and less sense for customers to pay, considering that movie audience members can turn out to be annoying or disruptive more often than they’re quiet and considerate of people around them. As often as I’ve been in a cinema auditorium that’s more than half full over the past few years (and I’m someone who usually watches two or three movies at the cinema every week), I’ve been in an auditorium that’s totally empty except for myself almost as frequently, so that I’ve gotten to have some nice private screenings, an indication that cinemas are now an aging business model that probably won’t remain sustainable anymore at some point in the near future.
I also remember David Lynch, about a decade ago now, saying that he’d been in a cinema recently and didn’t think it felt like movies would really be at home in moviehouses for too much longer. I hope he’s not right, though it does increasingly seem like cinemas will become more of a cultural novelty fairly soon. I think they’ll always be around, especially in urban areas, but perhaps in a more limited and rarified capacity, just as record stores of all sorts started to disappear after the advent of online streaming and digital downloads, which have now saturated global culture in a far-reaching and widespread way. As usual, community gets subsumed by consumerism.
Just last weekend, I went to a small-town cinema in Wellfleet on Cape Cod to see the movie Sonic the Hedgehog (believe it or not), during the film’s opening weekend. It was the 7pm screening on a Sunday night before a Monday holiday, and including myself, there were seven people total in the audience: a dad with a young son and daughter who were about 8 and 10 years old, a brother/sister pair in their early teens (whose parents were in the auditorium next door watching Parasite), and a young military guy in mud-spattered camouflage fatigues sitting by himself along the aisle.
That cinema in Wellfleet has the same kind of long skinny old-school movie auditoriums that the Janus in Harvard Square had back in its heyday. While it was a bit of a sad sight to see this slight scattering of people spread out in the dark auditorium, it was also reassuring that some parents were still taking their kids to the movies at a cinema these days, trying to hand down a tradition that had no doubt been important to them during their own childhoods. Even in a light-hearted movie like Sonic the Hedgehog, there were scenes worthwhile enough to enjoy and lessons to be learned. Whether those kinds of cinematic moments will still be learned from and enjoyed within the walls of a movie theater for many people in our culture a generation or so from now remains to be seen, yet it’s a dream that’s worth keeping alive.
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