miss-the-movies

I Really Fucking Miss The Movies

The last movie that I saw in theaters was The Way Back on March 7th. I reviewed it essentially as a bad movie that I more or less enjoyed. Its sense of melodrama (and its depiction of basketball) hit me at the right time, even if its attempts were misguided. It’s a redemption tale straight out of Hollywood, taking shortcuts to get your tears in ways that are painfully obvious. Nothing more noble than a white ne’er-do-well passing life lessons to a frisky, multicultural collection of children. I didn’t hate it, and yet, the fact that this is the last time I visited the movies in 2020 tinges this holiday season with a sense of loss. Is that really it?

The following weekend in March, I headed over to BAM theater in Brooklyn, looking to see First Cow which had just been released to overwhelmingly positive reviews. On the train I found myself fighting feelings of guilt. Earlier that week, the NBA had suspended its season after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus. Like many others, this was the moment that COVID-19 became something agonizingly serious, and just a few days later, with the world swirling into chaos and New York City on the cusp of stay-at-home orders, I was deciding… to see… a movie? All advice was to stay home unless absolutely necessary. I rationalized to myself that First Cow was supposed to be a “good movie” and that the risk for myself and others was worth it. If this had been The Way Back, I likely would have just stayed home.

Despite all evidence online to the contrary, when I got to BAM, I discovered that the theater was closed. To this day, I don’t know if there was a miscommunication or if this was literally BAM’s staff refusing to come to work (I’m rooting for the latter), but I must concede that I had a feeling of relief, that my guilt floated away as I returned to my apartment two subway stops away. I had no idea at the time how long it would be before I could step into a movie theater again. I still don’t know how long that will be. But since then, I have been without what is easily my no. 1 hobby, my weekly escape into fictional worlds big and small. It was 2020 where I realized that the very act of going to the movies was such a large portion of my very identity.

I did eventually get to see First Cow, months later, at home in the Summer. It was a setup that I was forced to get used to throughout the year, trying to replicate a movie theater environment at home. My television is big enough, but not 34 feet wide. My apartment has a bevy of natural light which is a gift for nearly all household functions, but not for mimicking movie theater darkness. The height of my building (I live on the seventeenth floor) means that sounds find their way into my windows with ease. This means every garbage truck, every loud car stereo, and certainly every malfunctioning alarm system can be heard pretty clearly. And that’s not even mentioning the biggest impediment to at-home viewing: the phone.

So I tried to pretend like watching films at home was the same, and many times I failed. I turned down blinds, I placed my phone in the other room. Sometimes the movies were so good (WalkaboutThe Taste of Cherry) that it didn’t matter. I found myself so engrossed that outside distractions melted away. Other times, atmospheric films like Josephine Decker’s Shirley or stripped-down documentaries like Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film were not served by my inability to concentrate. Particularly shadowy films like The Vast of Night or Lovers Rock were undone by my failure to make my apartment adequately dark, while watching movies at night presented a different problem: my failure to stay awake in the comforts of my home. I knew that movie theaters were ideal for watching a movie for the first time, but I never really understood how crucial they were until now.

I don’t mean to make it sound like my movie year was all bad. Through seven months of unemployment, I picked through Criterion Channel’s selection and acquainted myself with many classics I’d yet to see. I took a deep dive into the filmography of Agnès Varda and Abbas Kiarostami, I watched Hu Bo’s four-hour An Elephant Sitting Still and then followed that with Béla Tarr’s seven-hour Sátántangó. I watched all five episodes in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s mini-series Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, and sat through all of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Decent Maybe became a repertory review site for a few months which forced me to really pay attention when watching these older films. I bought a new notebook and took lots of notes.

I saw plenty of 2020 movies. The Assistant feels like unquestionably the best of the bunch, though I feel like putting together a list feels incredibly superfluous. It’s hard to tell how much of that film’s solid placement on top comes from merit, and how much comes from it being the only above-average 2020 film that I saw in a movie theater. That February screening – half-empty in an early Saturday afternoon showtime at the AMC Kips Bay – feels like a lifetime ago. How do I compare it to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of films or Samuel Pollard’s brilliant documentary MLK/FBI, both remarkable feats that weren’t watched in the same circumstances? How do I contend with the fact that I watched The Way Back in much better conditions than the incredible Eliza Hittman film Never Rarely Sometimes Always?

I thought things would change with the Fall movie season, as ten months of the pandemic has led to more films being available for streaming than is usually the case. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Mank were on Netflix, and Disney’s Soul was on Disney+. Small Axe and Sound of Metal were on Amazon Prime. It seems like more than a few studios were deciding that people actually seeing their films was more important than enforcing movie theater windows during a time when no one can go inside a movie theater. Instead of perking up with this new slew of options for new movies, I deflated. I found it very difficult to really get excited to see a new movie on TV. Without the spectacle of traveling to the theater, even the grandeur of Fall Movie Season felt hollow.

If anything, it was easier in the off-months to see the new streaming releases. I took great escape in the Andy Sandberg-Cristin Milioti time loop comedy Palm Springs and wandered aimlessly through the indescribable world of Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (the fact that I was also reading Kaufman’s equally unhinged but brilliant novel Antkind actually did quite a lot toward helping me power through it, if not exactly understand it). I do carry around with me the not-altogether-rational thought that I saw all these movies but I didn’t really watch them. Past the darkness that shuts out the world and the sheer size of the screen, the rituals of going to the theater – of having my ticket ripped, of finding my perfect seat – were all missing. So did these viewings even count?

Of course they did. The pandemic has created a national mourning for our natural way of life, and for me, the movies are a central part of that. Even the annoying parts of going to the movies – overpriced food options, having to go to the bathroom halfway through the movie, talkative moviegoers – were things I found myself desperate to experience again. I wish I could have watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 in a packed theater filled with people who would have fully consumed the film’s timely subject matter. I wish I could have felt the discomfort of an audience trying to sit through Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. I would have loved to laugh at all the unintentional comedy throughout Hillbilly Elegy or Wonder Woman 1984. Maybe what I’m actually saying is that I miss people. Yes, that’s true. I do. But I miss the movies more.