I spent 10,969 hours away from the movies.
In that time, I could have watched Titanic 3,375 times, and maybe by then I'd stop tearing up around the time she lets go, though that also means I would have heard Rose say the name "Jack" exactly 270,000 times and even for me that would be a bit much.
As much as I missed the movies, I wasn't really planning on going back quite yet, but last night my husband and I talked about the need to start doing things we might not entirely be ready to do, and how we have to trust that the vaccine really does work. The world might not be as safe as we used to think it was, but it's safer now than we knew it to be a year ago.
So, 457 days after I walked out of a matinée of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, blissfully, rather stupidly ignorant on February 29, 2020, that a pandemic was raging 7,000 miles away, completely unaware that it was the last time I would go to the movies for 15 months (would we be able to function effectively if we considered that this time could, potentially, be the last time for anything we do?), we sat in the dark again and we let ourselves be carried away.
The movie was A Quiet Place, Part II, which is a very good, exceedingly effective movie, made with care and precision and craft, even artistry, by John Krasinski. About 20 minutes into it, my husband turned to me, face back behind a mask having eaten our popcorn and followed the rules still in place in Los Angeles, and said, "My nerves are already shot."
He wondered, later, if this was quite the best movie to see just as we're (oh, let it be so) coming out of this terrifying pandemic. Oh, yes. It's the perfect movie.
Watch it and tense up. Watch it and be afraid for the people on screen. Watch it and (like me) actually scream and jump when one of those aliens with the flower for a head comes crashing right through -- well, no, don't let me spoil it for you. Just watch it. Ideally in a movie theater.
Because after the longest time I've ever spent away from the movies in my life, here is what I discovered:
There really is magic at the movies.
In the last 15 months, there's been a lot of discussion about whether the movies are dead. I found out today that they are gloriously alive. Oh, they are, they are -- they most certainly are.
We've gotten used, in these interminable, sometimes terrifying, months to watching movies at home. To calling the act of sitting down in front of a TV screen or, worse, a computer screen "watching a movie." And there's nothing wrong with that phrase. That's what you're doing.
But it's not going to the movies.
When you go to the movies, the lights go down and the screen comes alive, and if the movie is even remotely good enough it grips you and pulls you in and you are enveloped in the story in a way you can never, ever, ever be at home, not even if you have one of those big mansions with a purpose built 15-seat movie theater with a 160-inch screen. Then, you're still watching a movie at home.
You're not going to the movies.
Yes, I know, I know. You will say that the popcorn is too expensive and the floors are sticky and the staff is apathetic and the projection is off and the image isn't always great and the other people around you are talking and texting, and for all of that you have to pay somewhere between eight and 25 dollars. You could just microwave some popcorn and put it in a bowl and curl up with a blanket and watch something at home, where the image is sometimes even better and the sound sounds pretty good, relatively speaking, and if someone is texting you can tell them to put down the phone without fear of a fight breaking out (well, sometimes), and you don't have to put up with that hassle.
You're right. I can't argue any of that.
But if you're going to call it quits with the movies over those things, why do anything? Why go to a restaurant or get excited about seeing a play again or buy tickets for a concert or go to a baseball game or book a cruise or go to a theme park? Because the truth is, most of those things are, on some level, miserable experiences that never work out the way you want them to. But there's still something wonderful about them.
And they're not even magic.
No, the movies really are magic. It's not just a line. At the movies, the lights come down and you sit up in your chair and you maybe get a little closer (or wish you could) to the person you came with and you give yourself over to it.
You don't say, "Pause it for a minute, I'll be right back." You don't say, "If you don't like this, we can change it?" Mostly (there are exceptions) you shut up and two hours fly by and you laugh and you cry and you scream and you think very little about all the other things that are happening in your life, because here you are at the movies, in the dark, simultaneously in your chair and somewhere else entirely.
There is magic and it is real. It doesn't matter if you know how they do it, and you can be as cynical as you want to be about all of it – Lord knows that in the last year, I've turned as cynical about the movies as the worst of them as I've watched Hollywood seemingly work overtime to hasten the death of the very thing that made it into what we used to call "the dream factory," because in so many ways that really is what it is. Movies are dreams – someone else's dreams, your dreams, sometimes both things at once.
In the classic movie structure, the kind of a plot we all know because it's embedded in the very fabric of these dreams, at the end of the second act, everything seems lost. Nothing could be worse for the hero of the story, whether it's a farm boy from a two-sun planet or a giddily singing nun or an alien lost and alone on earth. Things are as bad as they're ever going to get, and the outcome doesn't look very good.
That's not the way the movie ends, though.
Things get better.
It takes a while, but even if the boat sinks and the love of her life sinks with him, Rose is going to be fine, she's going to be on that horse on the beach in Santa Monica and she's going to throw the Heart of the Ocean back into the sea, and as a reward she will live happily with Jack on the Titanic that will always exist in her heart.
And it's sappy. And it may make your eyes roll. But it's going to work out, one way or another.
For the movies, too.
I found that out today.
To paraphrase Rick Blaine: We'll always have the movies. We didn't have, we lost them until you sat in that chair and the lights went down. We got them back.
So, stream all you want. Sometimes I'll even join you. But from now on, whenever I can, as long as I can, I'm going to once again (and always) be one of those wonderful people out there in the dark.
See you at the movies.
