INTERRUPTIONS
RIAN JOHNSON on THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and ¡THREE AMIGOS!
One of my least favourite things is the type of “magic of movies” promo that they run in theatres, with the camera pointed back at the people in their seats, wide-eyed, gawking at the screen or stuffing their face with popcorn. The last thing I want to be reminded of when I think about seeing movies is that we’re all a bunch of meat-bags sitting in comfy chairs. I go to a theatre to forget that I even have a physical body, or that there are other people sitting next to me — I want that ethereal rush where the movie is a dream and the crowd around me is like a guitar amp plugged into my own reactions. It’s hard to get that on your couch in your well-lit living room with an ipad next to you. That’s what I miss about going to the cinema.
Maybe that’s why the moments I remember about being in theatres are the moments where that dream gets interrupted, like an alarm clock going off. Example: seeing The Lady From Shanghai at the New Beverly, totally lost in it, when a mouse crept across the bottom edging of the screen, perfectly silhouetted, and began pawing at Rita Hayworth’s chin. And the audience lost it, and suddenly the movie’s spell is broken and it’s like turning on the lights in Space Mountain — we’re no longer sharing a collective dream, we’re all just sitting in the dark in this smelly (this was years ago) room on Beverly and La Brea watching a horny mouse. Or when I was a kid and we all went as a family to see ¡Three Amigos!. Right after the campfire scene, after the turtle says, “Goodnight, Ned,” and it fades to black, timed perfectly in that polite silence, my cousin Adam let rip a sharp, percussive honker of a fart. C.S. Lewis said the oldest joke is that we have bodies, and Adam did him proud that night. The audience never recovered.
The collective dream state of being an audience, and the moments of total absurdity when you remember you’re sitting in the dark with a bunch of snacking, farting strangers. That holy yin and the yang of going to the movies. I miss it.