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The films stink more than the greasy audience

By RUSSELL SMITH

It’s time someone came out and said that not only are movies terrible,

but that the whole experience of going to movies is highly unpleasant.

How is it possible that this sensory stressfest has become the most

popular entertainment of the contemporary age?

How can people possibly enjoy the lining up, the waiting with coats on

for tickets, then the shuffling with the heated herd toward a crowded,

windowless room? And when you get to that butter-scented trough, with

its seats piled high with coats and scarves, the representatives of

humanity who surround you are anxious: They are focused on their feed.

This focus is quite dramatic. Their eyes are glazed and dilated, their

shoulders are hunched over their cartons, they are stuffing themselves

with viscous oil products with orange cheeze whip on fried nachos, with

yellow “topping,” with gallon jugs of liquid sugar. They have the

concentration of chess players, of athletes before contests, of the

starving. Do you like this, the greedy scrabbling in greasy boxes, the

whole herd determinedly chomping and chewing and slurping . . . don’t

you feel even a little bit as if you’re in the pig barn, at exactly the

moment the big trough full of ground intestines slops over for all to

rush towards and snuffle in?

They will settle down, after 15 or 20 intense minutes. Once they have

had their fill of trans fats, they wipe the chemical film from their

faces and they start talking to each other. This is where my angst goes

up a whole notch on the hystero-meter. Because I have been trying to

distract myself from the nauseating smells and the comical cacophony of

crunching by watching the slides on the screen. These slides test your

knowledge of Hollywood stars. They are there to remind you of death, of

your inevitable subsumption into the great terrifying artistic void

that is movieland. They are there to remind you that you do actually

know all the stars’ names, even without wanting to: As soon as you see

the blurry visage and the clue “went postal” you murmur, automatically,

Kevin Costner, and then you are amazed at yourself. How do you know

every Hollywood star’s name? It has happened by osmosis; you are so

immersed in it every day, like a nacho chip in a tub of yellow goop,

that it has seeped into your pores.

Anyway. The slides are at least better than hearing your neighbours

begin to talk. The sociological lessons learned from overhearing

conversations in cinemas are even more depressing. One learns that most

people like to communicate by announcing what food they like to eat and

what food they don’t like to eat. This is an interactive discussion:

Each participant takes a turn. You may change the subject slightly in

the second or third rounds — you may, for example, announce how tired

you are today as compared to how tired you were yesterday or on

Saturday, and then everyone may follow suit with similar admissions.

This apparently amuses and interests most people, for it can go on for

some time.

You will think that there is a merciful God when the lights finally

dim, because the movie is about to start and save you from the insane

boredom of your surroundings. But you will be very, very sadly

mistaken. Because this is the beginning of the ads. These are ads you

must watch. When you are watching television, you can change the

channel during ads, you can get up and have a sherry. But here you are

trapped, and the ads are amplified. Everyone sits docilely munching and

slurping and watching extremely loud ads on a big screen for a

half-hour. And they pay to do so. They pay to have various cheery

jingles and swooshing automobiles blared at them for a half-hour. No

one seems remotely uncomfortable or bored.

Who can make it this far into the movie-watching experience without

being so agitated, so depressed, so foul-tempered that even the

greatest masterpiece would not provide anything, at this point,

remotely resembling pleasure? At this point I have wanted to leave for

half an hour, and that desire to leave will simply continue for the

length of the film.

I don’t even need to go into how disappointing that great payoff

invariably is. You’ve heard me on this before: It doesn’t help that 90

per cent of films shown here and discussed here are made by the great

schmaltz factories, the megastudios of southern California. So that the

great treat of this experience, the feature presentation that is the

point of all this suffering, is going to contain a lot of very

emotional music which lets you know when to feel sad or happy or

scared, and a lot of huge close-ups of the sad faces of famous actors,

and very probably a final scene with a sun-dappled forest with a deer

emerging to remind our characters of their natural wonder. . . . (I’m

thinking here of the film Kinsey, which I was persuaded to see because

otherwise intelligent critics, their minds numbed by exposure to

schmaltz of even more preposterous gooeyness, had proclaimed it

brilliant, and which turned out to be, of course, another Hollywood

weeper made according to the strictest rules of narrative convention.)

Honestly, why, why, why do we pay to have ads broadcast at us at insane

volume? Why do we pay to have productive hours of our lives removed and

replaced with the sameness, the predictability, the boredom of the

grave? Explain it to me: rssllsmth@yahoo.ca .

While I’m forced to agree with him that the opening weekend movie

experience sometimes ain’t all that, he bitches in such a godawful,

pretentious, “I’m superior and did I mention I wrote a book about the Toronto art scene” way that you want to reach through the screen and strangle him by his immaculately knotted tie.

Part of the problem for me is that I love movies, and I love most of

the movie going experience. Yeah, you can run into some real idiots,

and the deluge of ads is a little ridiculous. But when things click,

and you see a really good move like Lord of the Rings on opening

weekend, with a crowd that’s just as hyped as you are to see a glorious

big screen spectacle, the movie theatre is almost magic. That’s

something ol’ Russ will never get, not that he’d bother trying.