Friday, November 28, 2003
There were things I'd been planning to write about this morning. Like the fact that this frelling holiday has loused up my writing week and I sucked again yesterday. Just a little revision, nothing new. Anyway, I'm not going to write about writing just now (go read Poppy's livejournal for that; she has a great entry on "being a writer" vs. writing). Because last night, after I'd given up trying to write, I got dressed and Spooky and Jennifer and I went out for Indian food and a movie.
The Indian food was great. Lamb vinda-aloo, chicken madras, aloo-motor-paneer, and crispy samosas. And my grumpiness at not having been able get anything written began to lift, amid the swirl of smells and spices and the satisfaction of being full of good food. But then we went to a 9:45 showing of Gothika, and the next two hours or so were nothing short of a pointless sort of torture. And no, I'm not talking about the movie. Near as I can tell, the movie was okay, not a great movie, just a an okay, spooky movie, the sort of thing I was in the mood for on a rainy, blustery Thanksgiving night. I find myself largely in agreement with Ebert on this one, so read his review if you want to know what I thought of Gothika (I also recommend his exquisite bit on the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). We went despite mostly bad reviews, because Spooky and I had been impressed by Crimson Rivers, also directed by Mathieu Kassovitz.
The torture was entirely the product of the audience. What passed for an audience. Those of you who read what I had to say about the audience I was subjected to during an advance screening of Alien: The Director's Cut already know my feeling on noisy audiences and inappropriate response to what's on the screen. I've come to accept that when I venture past the quasi-sanctuary of the perimeter of I-285, to the suburban googleplexes, the audiences are to be expected to act more like they've gathered for a monster truck rally than a movie. But last night was the worst I've endured since a screening of Blue Velvet, a year or so ago, where the audience cackled through the whole film, start to finish, creating a scene so surreal it was difficult to tell what was onscreen and what was off, as though Lynch had broken down that fourth wall and extended his nightmare into the theatre.
Anyway, last night the screening room quickly filled up. At least three toddlers were brought into the R-rated film. And just before the film began, I leaned over to Spooky and said, "This is going to be a laughing audience." She agreed. But I don't think either of us were prepared for the sheer force of the idiocy that followed. We're not talking nervous laughter here, a few titters and giggles from people embarrassed at having allowed themselves to be frightened by fiction. We're talking a very, very loud, full-on guffawing, hee-hawing, side-splitting hyena-fest. We're talking hooting and hollering. We're talking about most of the audience, which must have been several hundred people, behaving like drunken high schoolers, even though most of them appeared to be sober twenty- and thirty-somethings. As we were shown scenes of sadism and degradation in a high-security prison for the mentally ill, as Halle Berry did a fairly decent job of conveying her character's horror and disorientation, the crowd roared with laughter. About halfway through the film, when I could no longer stay focused on the action on the screen, I leaned over to Spooky and told her I might not be able to endure much more of this, then spent the next fifteen minutes or so concentrating more on the audience than the film. You know those historical epics about Roman gladiators, the lions and the Christians, etc.? The faces of the leering, cackling crowd that has come to the Circus Maximus to witness the carnage? That's what I saw in the faces of this group. At one point, one of the three children, seated just to Spooky's left, pleaded to be taken home, but to no avail. She had my sympathies.
I sat through the credits, livid and speechless, watching the crowd as it trickled out. I swear, to whatever being agnostics are left to swear to, that there was a time, a time I remember, when movie audiences sat and watched the movie. A time when their responses were, by and large, appropriate to the events being enacted in the film. A time that only ended at some point in the last decade. It's not as though I've only recently started seeing horror films in the theatre. And I am left to wonder what the fuck has happened to people. Has some sort of emotional disconnect severed "us" from undertstanding how "we" should respond to the pain and suffering of fictional characters? That good fiction might not be factual, but that its is true? The spectacle last night was sickening, almost physically nauseating, and never again will I pay what we're expected to pay at the cinema for such an object lesson in the depths to which humans can sink. I will stick to the art theatres and maybe catch a few big things, like The Return of the King and The Last Samurai, at mall theatres, well within the perimeter, with more mature audiences (I've never experienced this sort of shit at Phipps, for example).
The thing I kept thinking, again and again, was that so many people had worked so hard on this film, and there were ways that it was meant to be taken. And even if the film did not entirely succeed, it still deserved far better treatment than the idiots at that screening were giving it. But - and I know this, having watched those faces last night - it's not that they were laughing because the film was bad, because it had screwed up and made that all-too-easy slip from horror into the comedy of self-parody. It was because these people didn't begin to grasp how else to respond to the situations on the screen.
After last night, after that screening of Alien, after what have now become more unpleasant audiences than I can even recall, "I'll wait for the DVD" is beginning to sound better and better.
At least no cell phones rang...
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