Going to the movies on a rainy night

Returning to the city from the north woods, we decide to spend a rainy Friday evening going to an early movie and then on to a favorite bistro on Shattuck Avenue. Movie going in Berkeley, California lost its enchantment at least twenty years ago when most of the theaters were bought out by large national chains, thus squeezing the smaller independent theaters one by one out of business, a lamentable event that was similarly visited on our once thriving community of bookstores. When I first lived here in the seventies you could go to any number of tiny indie theaters and for two bucks see a Fassbinder or a Bergman or an Antonioni. Sometimes the projector would break down or you would notice that your seat was held together by gaffer’s tape, but the experience was nonetheless personal and genuine.

Friday night we make a disastrous decision to see a film called “Men Who Stare at Goats”, thinking, “how could a movie that stars George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey not be a slam dunk?” But it turns out to be a terrible movie with a slack, meandering script and painfully labored set-ups to slapstick jokes. The rhythm that good comedy requires is non-existent here. Instead you suffer through a sequence of terrible gags involving extrasensory powers and the stupidity of the US military. Toward the end someone puts LSD in the unit’s K-rations. This joke was already tried and found wanting in 1969, and it’s beyond the pale to exhume it, primp it up and see if it will fly forty years later. Sorry, but nope.

All this is made infinitely more dissonant for those of us in the theater when we are shown a scene in which a young officer who’s been subjected to “enhanced” interrogation techniques on his own military base goes berserk and, running out naked onto a drill field with a handgun, begins shooting his fellow soldiers—this less than 48 hours after the terrible shootings as Fort Hood in Texas. As the expression goes, “something is wrong with this picture.” Torture and coming undone as a result of it are not funny subjects. The laughter in the audience of the theater seems forced—people paid their nine dollars and are trying to convince themselves they’re having a good time. But the mood in the theater when the lights come up is palpably grim.

I’d been dipping into Adorno lately, mostly by way of preparing for the talk on Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” I gave last week at Yale. Adorno can irritate you big time with his eternal fault finding and what seems like a chronic unwillingness to see anything positive in our modern lives, especially here in market-driven America. I’d even gone so far as to defend our market culture, saying in effect that we in America have the benefit of popular culture to act as a “bulwark” against the kind of societal sterility that Thomas Mann said was the theme of his novel. But there is nothing like a night out in an American movie theater to remind you how inexorable is the grip that the laws of commodity capitalism have on so much of our waking lives.

Going to the movies. The experience is fraught with confrontations and paradoxes. First of all, unless you have an extra two hours to spare, it’s virtually impossible to get to the theater and back home without driving. The theater itself is part of an “octoplex,” actually eight small boxes crammed into what was once a single large theater on the main downtown street. (Unlike most American theaters that are now located in suburban shopping malls, ours is actually in the downtown.) One block away there is yet another octoplex, owned by the other giant corporation. They decide what films you’ll watch, doubtless following minutely detailed demographic surveys.

On the street outside the theater you pass through a cluster of homeless people, kids on skateboards, twenty-somethings talking on cell phones and perhaps one or two confused, slightly disoriented oldsters. The theater is connected to a Starbucks where, on this particular rainy November evening, the tables are all occupied by customers peering into their laptops.

You pay your nine bucks and then pass the concession stand where the kid behind the counter can super size you with a giant high calorie soft drink or an unnecessarily large box of candy or perhaps a jumbo tub of popcorn. There’s a 25-cent difference between the merely gigantic box of popcorn and the washtub-size monster that’s big enough to jump into. The invitation for most customers to overeat and over drink is precisely tuned and nearly inescapable.

Inside the black box you slouch down into a padded chair that can tilt back like a business class seat on an airline. Your armrest has a specially designed holder for your 32-ounce Pepsi. You’re ready to roll.

Going to the movies nowadays means first having to endure upwards of fifteen minutes of advertisements and trailers for coming attractions. As a kid, at the Capitol Theater in Concord, NH, I might have seen one or two good cartoons before the main feature cartoons that were funny and genuinely imaginative, even if someone got whacked with a hammer or fell off a cliff. Now, though, it’s total assault. “Coming attractions” are always packaged to feel and sound like the first day of the Iraq war, a shock and awe of whooshes and exploding bombs that arrive as if launched from a predator drone. There are rarely less than twenty or thirty of these whoosh-bombs per trailer. In these Hollywood special effects movies no door is ever merely shut. Rather it is slammed with kiloton force that shakes the walls and gives you a headache even before the feature begins. Every preview seems to involve someone cocking an automatic pistol or an assault rifle, making a high pitched, menacing click of metal against metal carefully tweaked by the sound designer to guarantee its potential for serious hurt.

…unless of course the trailer is for an “art” film, in which case we get the treacly sound of a sampled piano diddling on Lydian mode while that familiar cuddly baritone voice of the announcer—and is there only this one person in the entire world who gets to voice over indie movie previews?— assures you yet again that your life will never be the same once you see this heart warming narrative about a gay college professor, his anorexic substance-abusing female roommate and the pregnant English sheep dog they share responsibility for.

Indie films feature fewer assault weapons and more broken down Volkswagens. Violence is usually in the form of grand outbursts of anger followed by warm bear hugs of forgiveness. And then, as the Lydian mode piano swoons to a cadence, up pop the ritual medallions on the screen: Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Toronto, Buenos Aires!! All the film festivals just plain ADORED this film. If you live in a blue state, drive a hybrid and shop at Whole Foods, this is the film for you. I’m thinking that although I can’t go the distance with Adorno in his thoughts about music, I’m beginning to see his points about our society.