INTERMISSION

A WRITER TAKES PAUSE TO CONSIDER… Loneliness

When asked my greatest fear, I know what I’m meant to say: snakes, heights, spiders, bad things happening to good people. But really it’s loneliness. Deep, soulscouring loneliness. And I’ve felt it most of my life.

The problem with this kind of loneliness is that there isn’t any cure. You can try and treat the symptoms by seeking out meaningful contact with other living creatures, or selfmedicating, but it’s always there, a ghost at your shoulder.

One distraction technique that’s worked in the past is going to the cinema. It’s a strangely contradictory experience. You’re alone but surrounded; adrift from your own worries, yet in tune with those of the people on screen; caught between monastic silence and booming surround sound.

Most films bustle with action – they’re movies; they move – and people – just look at all the names on those everscrolling cast lists. But the cinema of loneliness can be incredibly powerful. Think of the two Travis’: Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), furiously alone in the filth of the city, and Paris, Texas’ Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton), lost in a desert of his own wordless longing.

Some of the greatest cinemagoing experiences of my life have been with other people – the right people – at the right time. I’ll never forget a near-hallucinogenic

Eurovision night showing of the sun-baked Euro horror Who Can

Kill A Child? with my friend Matt.

Or a Valentine’s Day screening of lo-fi LA romance In Search Of A Midnight Kiss with my lovely housemate Vari, now, not entirely coincidentally, my wife.

Perhaps even more have been solo affairs. There’s a stigma about going to the cinema on your own, but I like it. When I have company, I’d rather talk to them than watch a film. And when I watch a film, I want to dive in headfirst, not worry about whether they’re coming too.

My cinema-going came of age in the late 1990s, a great time for North American indie. From Last Night (1998) to Fight Club (1999), Magnolia (1999) to Memento (2000), there was a rich seam of millennial films about lonely souls trying and often failing to connect.

It wasn’t such a great time for me personally, but while trying to make my own connections in the world and grappling with my turbulent mental health, the cinema became a refuge.

As an adult, I’ve moved around a lot and every time I’ve found myself missing home, or not really knowing where it was, the cinema’s always been there, the same but different wherever I was on the planet.

I remember driving around Australia’s empty outback towns, seeing whatever was playing that night, be it Jason X, aka Friday The 13th In Space, LGBTQ+ musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch projected on a pub wall, or Fatal-Attraction-in-a-highschool-pool flick Swimfan. I wonder if even the makers of Swimfan treasure a screening of their film as much as I do.

Next, I moved to Hong Kong, a place, for me, of profound loneliness, despite its pathological bustle. Here, I found muchneeded solace in watching the early Harry Potter films; a Black Hawk Down viewing in which mobile phones rang and were answered with the regularity of friendly fire; and a heart-in-mouth screening of Narc, my first ever professional engagement.

When the winds brought me to London, I was so lost, I threw myself into film. David Cronenberg’s shattered, London-set Spider in a bewildering Hammersmith; the stylised grub of Sin City in the badlands of Bromley; a traumatic Wolf Creek, under the influence, in affluent Islington. The critics’ screenings continued and intensified, but even these I preferred going to alone, without the clamour of other voices overwhelming mine.

Slowly, things got better. I asked Vari to become my rather more permanent housemate, we got a pretty great cat, then a little boy so perfect I can’t look anywhere else in any room he’s in. Those solo cinema trips became rarer.

But then, at the end of last year, we surprised ourselves by leaving London for Glasgow. This meant, in my case, a long appointment with loneliness across the deep, dark Scottish winter. Not wanting to end up like the wrong Travis, I knew what to do: ticket for one, Licorice Pizza, Glasgow Film Theatre, then let the warmth of that California sun wash over me.

Did I love it as much as the films of my youth? I did not. Was it better than Swimfan? Yes, it was. Did it keep the ghost from my shoulder? For a while.

‘The cinema’s always been there, the same but different wherever I was on the planet’