I’m not afraid of the dark. I am afraid of plenty of other things: germs, drunk drivers, and what might happen if the orange Voldemort becomes president again. But I find the dark soothing. Maybe it has something to do with my anxiety: I like quiet, too. Perhaps my sensitive senses prefer to avoid overload.
I cut the lights, not to scrimp on electric bills but to create calm. I pad around in slippers with rubber-dotted soles, sometimes feeling my way in an unlit upstairs. This, admittedly, might be an ill-advised practice since I live alone. I have flashes of friends or family having to find me crumpled up in my red lumberjack plaid onesie at the bottom of the stairs.
Cinematic
So when the lights dim, and then go out, in a movie theater, my shoulders drop away from my ears and my breathing slows. The inkiness cradles me in its cushy cocoon. Popcorn and Diet Coke (de rigeur) at the ready, visible only in the scant glow that the emergency lights emit, I settle in.
I am a die-hard movie buff. A dedicated cinefile. I enjoyed animated Disney films as a child that are now played repeatedly on VCR or DVD - or streamed - at will. Cinderella was born shortly before I, and Sleeping Beauty the same year: they fueled the princess dreams of a little girl in Queens. I sat through Gone With the Wind at a time when films still included overtures and intermissions (I wish some of the current cavalcade of three-hour-long epics would do the same, if only for a pee break). Jaws terrorized me and my high school friends at the Rialto in Westfield, NJ before small one-trick theaters conceded to behemoth megaplexes.
Fortunately, my father fed me on a steady diet of great classics, from which he would randomly quote lines and expect that I could guess the film, in a cinematic version of Name That Tune:
“Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!!” (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston, 1948)
“You talkin’ to me?” (Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976)
“Where’s your Moses now?” (The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)
I, in kind, shared (OK, maybe shoved them down their throats) with my boys. They’d seen Citizen Kane and Cool Hand Luke before they were ten. They had to guess when I quoted “Rosebud,” or “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” from those gems.
Movies, hence, were a regular outing for us. The problem for me was that others insisted upon attending too. I embarrassed my children regularly (before pre-selected seating was a thing) because I’d make them change seats with me approximately 3.14 times before (and sometimes after) the film began because the person in front of me was too tall, or anyone within 3.14 feet of us was:
Talking
Chewing
Unwrapping cough drops
Using their cell phone
Clearing their throat
Commenting on the film
Laughing too loudly
Crying too loudly
Breathing too loudly
Existing too loudly
I disdained late arrivals, especially if they forced those of us with popcorn tubs balanced perfectly in our laps to move. I condemned them to a fiery eternity watching Barney the Purple Dinosaur reruns on a big screen if they arrived late and debated where they should sit for ten minutes. The whole experience was, for me, Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy come to life: the movie was the ecstasy; the movies the agony. Mr. Dickens said it best: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
The Plague
COVID-19 changed that forever, as it did so much. Going to any theater was no longer a thing, much to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime’s delight. And, in some ways, mine. I could sit in my own dark and watch movies on my own schedule. Sadly, sans popcorn and Diet Coke, but delightfully sans other people. I sorely missed the former; I seem physiologically incapable of watching films without the empty nutrition. But decidedly did not miss the latter. I did not get the full cinema experience, but nor did I get the novel coronavirus.
Yet, even post-COVID (are we?), even when the theaters slowly reopened, I dug my heels into my shag-accented area rug. I doubled down: Others may think it’s safe (“Is it safe?” Marathon Man) but I knew better. And then… every so cautiously, ever so tentatively, like the young cardinals who come, timidly, to feast on the seed I throw for them on my tiny deck, I dipped my toe back into the dark, fairly sure I could evade the tenacious pathogens with enough care.
I adopted a new over-protective, control-freak protocol: I buy two big reclining barcalounger seats in the last row, with the stairs (and hence not a human) in front of the aisle seat, for the first matinee showing on a weekend day, Because who, beside me, goes to an 11:30 am screening of Oppenheimer? Exactly, almost no one. I thus create a 3.14-foot force field around me (and even if a friend joins me we can usually spread out and maintain our distance from even each other).
I settle in with my over-sized, refillable tub of unbuttered popped kernels and refillable tub of Diet Coke large enough in which to bathe a baby pachyderm on the swivel tray and in the cupholder, respectively. And inhale a deep, satisfied breath. As I push the button below the tray, the gentle hum of the motorized seat raises the footrest and reclines the backrest, and, like Calgon, takes me away. And then… And then…
In immersive surround sound, AMC subjects us to thirty-to-forty minutes of ads, previews, and an over-dressed and over-Botoxed Nicole Kidman expounding on the benefits of movie-going. We know, Nicole. We are here. But then, finally, the divine dark does the job and allows me to love both the movie and the movies again.
Wonderful essay.
I've seen that Nicole Kidman promo so many times I think I know it by heart. I got sick of it, but it came back around and now I kinda like it, LOL.