On Going to the Movies
"A super assorted audience. Kids. The elderly. Gen-X couples. A guy in a very Joanne-looking cowboy hat."
January 27, 2019
New York, New York
I was 25 years old
Saw The Wizard of Oz with Austin this afternoon. Got to his place around 1:00 but we had a quick turn-around to the theater. Our seats weren’t pre-assigned so we got there early to claim a good spot. The AMC in Union Square. It was a super assorted audience. Kids. The elderly. Gen-X couples. A guy in a very Joanne-looking cowboy hat. I was the perfect amount of mildly hungover and sleep deprived. I was ready to emote.
Austin and I were very cuddly. Very. Like really leaning into and against each other’s arms and lingering with our whispers in each other’s ears. And, perhaps, this was the moment for me. That I really sort of blossomed feelings for him. Cause blossom they did. So, I guess I have Judy Garland to blame. Or thank. It was certainly the perfect scenario to get swept away.
I can’t remember the last time I saw The Wizard of Oz, let alone in full and in one single sitting. Not since childhood. And it was just spectacular. All I could think about was that line from that essay David Sedaris read on an old episode of This American Life, an essay I love so much, in which he describes his mother being caught unawares in a home video they came across after she died:
“It was such a small thing, our mother snapping shut her purse and putting one foot in front of the other but it seemed to us like a miracle—like the way the movies must have seemed when they were very first invented.”
A line that, in and of itself, has always been enough to make me cry. But it so perfectly captures what it was like watching the movie. In all of its simplicity, it felt so huge, so magical. So miraculous. And so unbelievably human, picking at a scab of loneliness, wistfulness, lost innocence that everyone in that theater understands. What is it but a story about a girl who loves her dog? I cried through the last 20 minutes, and crying harder than I have at any other movie I can recall. Easily one of the most affecting movie-going experiences I’ve ever had. And I’m so glad I had it.
December 8, 2021
Brooklyn, New York
I am 28 years old
In this, our ever-flattening modern world, where the requirements of a job and the maintenance of friendships and the acquisition of even the most obscure trinkets of good taste can all be achieved at any time from any place, it can be a little difficult to explain—using logic, at least—why exactly I live in New York City. It crowds, it cramps, and while it is the champ, I recently spent $9 on a quart of half-and-half the very same day that I saw more than one human turd on the 42nd Street A/C subway platform. It’s a tough town. But then, a couple weeks ago now, Austin’s family visited us and his littlest sister—surveying the island of Manhattan unfurling before her, hands on five-year-old hips—commented, “You guys live in a dirty country.” My heart swelled. It was a sentiment sweet and sincere enough to remind me that while this place may indeed be filthy, it does have a way of feeling like a nation all its own. An empire governed by some chaotic magna carta. Its skyscrapers and street corners: the dressed sets of a place that so often looks and feels and sounds like cinema. And while this might seem to only heighten the difficulty of explaining why I live here, it really doesn’t. I’m a New Yorker first, and an American second, because I love going to the movies.
At my most broke, the post-grad days when I’d traipse into the Brookline Trader Joe’s through its front entrance only to get a free sample and promptly exit through the rear, I never thought twice about spending $13 for a movie ticket at Coolidge Corner Theatre. An independent cinema within walking distance of my college campus and, eventually, my Allston apartment. It was the first place that I ever saw old movies in a theater, watching the original Grey Gardens for the very first time in a very gay packed house. It was also where I saw Carol and Jackie and 20th Century Women and Lady Bird and Phantom Thread...several weeks after all the New York City-dwelling fags I follow online saw them at their own local arthouse theaters. I’m the first—then and, unfortunately, now—to come to Boston’s defense, to argue that it is a cultured, artful, interesting city. But when Call Me By Your Name had been showing long enough in New York for Contrarian Twitter to start shitting on it an entire month-and-a-half before it’s first screenings in Boston? Well—what’s a boy to do?
What that boy does—eventually—is move to New York. From what I understand, Los Angeles gets advanced screenings of new movies as well but in the immortal words of Joan Rivers, “I’d rather be in hell than in Los Angeles.” It’s the kind of thing that really makes the superiority complex that is living in New York feel at the very least rational, if not completely warranted. Yes, there is the character-building plight of needing to leave my home to do my laundry, of sacrificing hours of my ever-shorter life to a broken transportation system, of spending three times as much on a third of what I could get anywhere else. But how could any of that ever compare to the way it felt taking my seat at Village East Cinema, watching Licorice Pizza in sumptuous, shaking 70-millimeter weeks and weeks before anyone else on earth? My face hurt from smiling, this latest Paul Thomas Anderson film soaring to the kind of ending that makes you wonder whether romance even existed before movies taught us what it could look like. And while I don’t think I liked the movie more for seeing it before most other Americans have their chance, I can’t pretend there wasn’t something just a little tribal going on in that theater. I’m not usually one to place much value on “hot” or “hip” but there’s no use denying the attractiveness of the audience and—even more to the point—the cleverness. Everyone laughing at all the right places, at all the asides that, I fear, wouldn’t quite land most anywhere else. Because pardon me for being something of a Narcissus here, admiring the soapy reflection on the inside of our metropolitan bubble, but who else would I want to share a city with other than the kind of people who don’t need a punchline to recognize the joke?
The first day I ever met Austin, we went to the movies. I hadn’t been living in New York for 24 hours yet and we saw A Star Is Born. (A day before it was released anywhere else.) He laughed at a boisterous albeit appropriate volume, kept his whispered comments brief and entertaining, and he was the first to applaud when the credits rolled. I knew immediately that not only did I have a friend here in this massive, massive city but a friend whose favorite thing to do was my favorite thing to do. Like a plot point that marks the end of act one and the beginning of the second, it was only logical, just the natural sequence of events that it’d be in a movie theater where, all at once and all along, I fell for Austin. That afternoon with him, with The Wizard of Oz, it was comfortable and it was moving and it was mystifying. Head-spinning technicolor giving way to soft and familiar sepia, the fearful loss of friendship soothed by the warm compress of home. Suddenly recognizing all my fondness for Austin as something more than I ever figured it was, pointing a finger at each feeling, identifying them for who they really were all this time. Shattering my suspension of disbelief only for everything to feel so much more real. As Dorothy said there’s no place like home and the MGM Studio Orchestra swelled in response, I looked to Austin, tears in my eyes and something new on my mind. I was turned away from the screen but, looking at him through the reflection of his glasses, I never stopped watching the movie.
Nothing better than falling in love❣️
Oh My B I truly loved this story. Sharing this was so sweet and tender. I so get it! Love you 😘