Movie Latecomers: What Are They Thinking?
An unapologetic screed against disrespect for cinema.
You know how it goes.
It happens after the 20 minute blitzkrieg of mindless trailers, each of which leaves you never wanting to see another movie in a movie theater or be in the vicinity of anyone who might be titillated by such overcooked and unremitting bombast.
It happens just as the first frames of the film you’ve come to see appear on the screen and you are focusing with all of our expectant faculties on image, sound, energy, event, trying to take in the reverberations of emotion and tone, and searching already for some sense of connection and meaning in what is up there.
You are thinking that no matter on how many occasions you have experienced this thrill of cinema, now always seems like the first time, that what is familiar is also fresh, that film as a phenomenon itself is being born before your very eyes, and you with it, new to the world, pristine to the ages, when…
Some oblivious moron weighed down with skips of popcorn cascading over your crotch and vats of carcinogenic soda effervescent with listings of corrosive additives spelunks along your row to block your view of the screen just as you are in the very throes of observing, taking in, and questioning/interpreting the precious initial images of the movie that’s attempting to declare itself on the planarity of that sacred rectangle known as the screen.
This is how it went at the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd at the 10 a.m. PST packed house screening in IMAX 70mm of Oppenheimer on Tuesday 24th July 2023 along the N440s row.
The opening of the Nolan movie takes no prisoners. An impatient montage rends the auditorium. A flurry of shots flashes across the screen, each cut superseding its predecessor before the accelerating poetry of its visual clout can begin to catch its breath…
The film demands full attention from the word go.
But the interloper was unheeding. He couldn’t have cared less. I tried to shove him unceremoniously out of the way to no effect. He even had the temerity to complain to me! Talk about transference of guilt! I might as well have been Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, or Montgomery Clift, their characters’ souls tainted by a criminality not their own in the dark chasms of Hitchcock’s Jesuit cosmos.
Indeed, this jerk not only completely ruined the start of the film but his insentient voyaging proceeded to resonate after his trek was done — for the remaining three hours of the epic’s duration, its reverberations as ever-widening as the ripples of Nolan’s raindrops or the implications of his protagonist’s quantum transgression of which the filmmaker’s visual symbol so eloquently bespeaks,
I decided to try again. A BAFTA screening. 1St August 2023, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood. 7:30 pm PST. No concessions here. No hampers of rancid popcorn. No sloshing amphoras of diet coke. No reason for latecomers held up in the line for their life-truncating goodies. No threat of silhouetted torsos burrowing along the row, of airborne exploded kernels landsliding over your thighs as you contort sinew, spinal column, and swiveling neck vertebra to catch any remote glimpse of the flow and juxtaposition of image that the writer-director, cinematographer, editor, production designer plus all other contributing filmmakers intend for you to see.
But guess what? Yes, you of already know the answer. And in the very row I was sitting, of course. At the exact moment the film was about to begin, sure enough two tardy wretches attempted to wedge their uncinematic phyla through the slender striation between my sorry knees and the nudging seat in front…
“No!”, I declared to myself, “not this time!”, social decorum cast to the winds.
“Go away!” I hissed, attempting to lock my eyes onto the fast flowing agile montage that announces Nolan’s dance of non-linearity.
“GO AWAY!” I repeated, stridulant fury echoing against the picture’s booming sound design.
And guess what…?
Go away they did!
Almost in the nick of time. By then though, it was already too late. That pristine focus one hopes to bring to the nascent frames of a film had once again been blown out of the water.
I’m old enough to remember that in past decades, people would walk into a movie theater — cinema, we say in England, or did — at any arbitrary moment. They would stay to the end of the film, take in the trailers, then watch the next screening of the feature up until the point at which they had taken their seats. There might even have been an intervening B movie in the mix.
No chance of catching up with obscured opening images nowadays. Once they’re over, they’re over. You need a ticket for another screening in order to attempt a second viewing.
Quite right too — even if Godard said a film has a beginning, middle, and ending — although not necessarily in that order I like to catch the beginning, or whatever else comes first. (Nolan interweaves those three categories, ending with an ending that is, in a terrifying sense, an ominous beginning.)
So please, please be seated before the film begins.
I mean to say, you don’t start reading a book on page 2.
Peter Markham August 2023
Author:
The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen. (OUP) 10/23
What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
. . .
Thank you for reading. Please comment! Your questions and critiques are greatly appreciated.
