macho than most of the salads I’ve eaten this week.
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 .
Russ better not commit any jailable offences. I figure some inmate
being put into his cell.
