Perfectly Useless
On the life of moviegoing
Here’s the last in a series of posts on the life of play. Hope you have/will like ’em. —Jim
Though I’ve had my fair share of fantasies like everyone else, I’ve never really daydreamed about being a professional actor. Or a director. Or even a screenwriter. This is one reason why I love movies so much—or, more accurately, moviegoing so much. It’s an arena where my mind feels most fully at play.
This passion is a family trait. Both my parents are movie buffs, though it seems my father put movies aside early in his adulthood (he recollects going to double-features during his childhood in the 1940s with great affection). My mother, by contrast, has been a moviegoer her whole life, and this was a shared activity for the two of us through much of my adolescence and early adulthood. We still bond over discussing the latest releases of any given week during our regular phone conversations. An acute judge of character in reel no less than real life, the multiplex has been my mother’s public library, and her conversations with friends and family have been impromptu seminars.
I’ve continued moviegoing with my own children, with this key difference in consciousness: I’m aware that its days are numbered—this was true even before the pandemic of 2020, which may have dealt a mortal blow to the movie theater industry— which is part of why I cherish it so. I arrived at college in the waning days of the college film society and repertory houses, which is how I saw classics like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. By the time I graduated, home video had begun to transform the experience of watching movies by making them less an event you hoped to catch than an on-demand experience that you could summon at will from the comfort of your own home. The notion of a personal film library suddenly became a possibility, and I began to build one along the lines of my record collection. But I never gave up on trips to the theater. In part, that’s because of my appetite for new releases, which could still only be seen that way. But it’s also because moviegoing was a superbly cost-effective way to structure and pass an evening, particularly when you factor in travel time, a meal, or simply a cup of coffee afterward. The price of a ticket was less than the price of the few drinks you’d consume at a bar over the course of a night, among any number of other pastimes. In this regard, I partook a century-long tradition of movies as the supremely democratic form of art in the world’s foremost democracy. Nickelodeons were long gone, but my hometown theater showed movies for a dollar (it’s now a pricey live theater and music venue).
In the 21st century, moviegoing became less of a bargain than it used to be. The advent of streaming has once again de-materialized films for viewers (and de-materialized them even for filmmakers and exhibitors; the term “film” is now a metaphor rather than a fact, as most movies are now lines of digital code), and many new releases are now available without theatrical release, a trend sharply accelerated by the Covid-19 epidemic. The movie business has compensated for the decline in attendance by raising ticket prices, which nevertheless remain a relatively good value compared with other forms of entertainment, despite the huge profit margins on concessions such as popcorn and soda (the life blood of theaters, since most box office receipts go to the studio and distributor).
One of the great things about moviegoing is its social character. Sharing a theater with strangers for two hours on a Saturday night, as I did hundreds of times in the first half my twenties, was a genuine source of solace in a lonely time. Then the woman who became my wife came along, and I had—so wonderful!—a date to take to the movies, something we did through our courtship into the first few years of our marriage. My wife ceased to be a regular moviegoer once our children came along, but the multiplex now served a different purpose: as a refuge would be where I’d go to have a precious few hours to myself. But as soon as they were able, I began taking my kids, individually or in groups (the inappropriate fare to which they were exposed in their childhoods is still a source of family jokes around my house).
Up until this point, I’ve been talking about what might be termed the external dimension of moviegoing. But if we shift our gaze to actual movie content, we can most fully see the gigantic role cinema plays in framing and purveying the American Dream as we go about the business of living our days. Simply put, nowhere is the Dream more intense and alive than in the movies. A lot of this has to do with the nature of the moviegoing itself: sitting in a dark room to experience an uninterrupted, complete piece of storytelling. Few other cultural experiences are so concentrated and compel such attention.
Consider, now, the meta-movie you’ve seen countless times. It involves a plucky young person who imagines a better life. Sometimes that better life involves true love (though true love always usually at least implies some sort of upward mobility, social, economic, or otherwise) and sometimes another aspiration. There’s always an obstacle that challenges our protagonist to the breaking point. Following a climactic struggle of one kind or another, the character emerges triumphant, even if, as is sometimes the case, the Dream that gets realized is somewhat different than the one originally imagined.
Such stories have been told in all times and places. But nowhere so insistently, and on such a massive scale, than the United States, where in the words of film historian Julie Levinson, “America is both nation and notion.”
The epicenter of this myth factory is Hollywood, California—the locale is a literal and figurative repository of aspiration in its own right. For all its variety (and, for that matter, for all the repetitiveness of its recycled formulas) Hollywood as a whole is dedicated to the proposition that the American Dream is the essence of our culture and history, transforming myth into nature, which is to say (virtually) lived experience. Countless movies have told us, over and over, that a dream is a wish your heart makes—and that holding fast to your dreams, never letting them go, is the state of our nature.
It’s not quite that simple, of course. There are plenty of films that question, challenge, reject or otherwise engage the Dream, and have been doing so all along. And even many of those that appear to affirm it—here I’m thinking of the films of Frank Capra, dismissed at the time as “Capracorn”—can be downright harrowing in showing its costs and unrealized longings. (Have a close look at his 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, which plunges to vertiginous depths of despair before its resolution, if you want to see what I mean.) But even when pulling against the tide, these movies—from the glorious subversive artistry of Charlie Chaplin through the surprisingly gleeful slacker films Levinson devotes a compelling chapter in her study of the success myth—are still swimming in an oceanic Dream. The latter-day feminist princesses of Disney movies may dispense with princes in favor of becoming a soldier or starting a business; the identity-minded protagonist may embrace racial, or gender, or some other kind of outsider status; the lover may sadly surrender romance for the sake of self-actualization; but the legitimacy of chasing the Dream remains stunningly intact, even when—especially when—some of the basic institutions of American society (government, family, private enterprise) are the subject of critical scrutiny. I’ve become increasingly astounded by the sheer durability of this template.
How long can it last? Not forever, because nothing does. But dismantling myths takes time: individual wars, depressions, and elections are not enough. Such ravages must accumulate before they can breach the walls of our imaginations, constructed as they are to shield us from drab repetition and intimations of dread. Our collective production will eventually be canceled, as per the order of new management. But until then, the show must go on. Revivals with a new cast, but a merely revised script, will follow. The play’s the thing.
Coming up: a series of posts on the notion of home in American life.