imperial spaces for democratic man
David Denby pines for the past and logs his predictions for the future of Hollywood. (Hint: He seems to like the ArcLight.)
The old downtown picture palaces have been gone so long that to think of them at all is to indulge in nostalgia for nostalgia, a faintly remembered dream from childhood of cathedral lobbies and ushers in red uniforms with gold braid. The palaces had names like the Alhambra, the Luxor, the Roxy; the auditoriums were evocative of pagoda pavilions or Persian courts or some celestial paradise with flocks of fleecy blond cherubim suspended in blue ether. They were uninhibited American kitsch, the product of a commercial culture dizzied by fantasies of European or Eastern magnificence. The absurdity of the theatres—imperial spaces for democratic man—was reassuring; they were the perfect environment for an art form that was so lovable precisely because it was devoted to the unending appeal of illusion.
The neighborhood theatres that thrived at the same time were easier to deal with. Slipping in and out of them, we avoided the stern white-shoed matrons who patrolled the aisles; sometimes we arrived in the middle of the movie and stayed on until it reached the same point in the next show—we just wanted to go to the movies. Even now, moviegoing is informal and spontaneous. Still, we long to be overwhelmed by that flush of emotion when image, language, movement, and music merge. We have just entered from the impersonal streets, and suddenly we are alone but not alone, the sighing and shifting all around hitting us like the pressures of the weather in an open field. The movie theatre is a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are—our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out to the screen. The experience is the opposite of escape; it is more like absolute engagement.
Such is the ideal. But how often do we find it now? Consider the mall or the urban multiplex. The steady rain of contempt that I heard Hollywood executives direct at the theatres has been amplified, a dozen times over, by friends and strangers alike. The concession stands were wrathfully noted, with their “small” Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit, their candy bars the size of cow patties; add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries— anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand, where the theatres make forty per cent of their profits. If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies, with bodies bursting out of windows and flaming cars flipping through the air—a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you’ve seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.
