Half-Priced Double Feature
"It’s now a weekly ritual I look forward to; a remedy for a year that's left me feeling horribly astray and dumb and suspended, like I’m dangling upside down with a knot around my ankles."
From all the New Year's resolutions that I’ve bothered myself with since the start of the year, only one has stuck and actually changed how I’ve been managing so far. No, it ain’t the type of resolution that gets me to the gym, unfortunately. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite, since more than a couple of pounds have definitely been added to my already fat ass thanks to all the butter poured into my popcorn. And that’s how every Tuesday, after work, I’ve taken up the commitment to do a pilgrimage to the movies, with friends, with my partner, but mostly with myself. Queuing to get my regular combo of medium popcorn and Coke, waiting like in holy communion, movie-going has been my only constant in a world plagued with algorithmic variables. It’s now a weekly ritual I look forward to; a remedy for a year that has left me feeling horribly astray and dumb and suspended, like I’m dangling upside down with a knot around my ankles.
Exposed to so many on-screen realities, my eyes have been bench-pressing like Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. Some kind of a Luddite, instead of a Letterboxd, I have a red binding folder where I keep all the print-out calendars that’ve been unpinned from the corkboard hanging above my kitchen counter; I punch holes and put months to sleep with their siblings, all with the clickety-clack of three rings. In case I want to know which movie I went to see on Tuesday, January 14th (Almodóvar’s La Habitación de Al Lado), I know where to go, where the intel is.
Most of the time, I just wing it. And the trick has been mainly to arrive with absolutely no expectations, knowing as little as possible about the production. This way, I don’t get lost in preconceived notions, and the internet is kept at bay from undermining my experience. There are times, yes, when there’s an expectation, say from a name or production company, or even a friend’s recommendation. Still, I prefer to lose myself in the media conversation the next day, devouring press junket videos while commuting to work. One week, it’s a romantic comedy, the next, I’m mindfucked with Eddington; there’s no distinction between genres. At the end, a story is a story, and stories deserve to be tended to.
Franz Rogowski and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Ira Sachs’ Passages.
My favourite ones involve complicated people. You know, the type who go through life like bumper cars, making a mess of themselves and others. I’m still hung up on Passages, for example, the 2023 film by Ira Sachs, about a gay couple going through a rough patch when one of the guys, a movie director with sociopathic tendencies, gets a stranger pregnant, or Joachim Triers’ The Worst Person in the World. I like movies that expose people’s mistakes. I like realism, movies that depict what life is: a chain of decisions, events, of fireworks, that, while some smaller than others, are thundering nonetheless, and that, in more than one way, do bring clarity to an otherwise pitch dark sky. There’s something valuable in the unaffiliated errors of others, I believe; it’s what experts call ‘transient stress.’ Why, at the movies, crying becomes a psychological restorer; fear becomes a pathway to pleasure, to joy; and collective laughter prompts our frontal cortexes to reverberate. As mimical animals, we’re then able to assess complex emotions and mirror them without any real repercussion. It’s at the movies where I’ve learned how to draw a better map of myself. There, with Seat K23 as my only identity, I feel guarded, inside a chrysalis, its shielding allowing me to think, reflect, reminisce, elaborate, and rebuild.
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodovar’s English debut in The Room Next Door, inspired by Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through.
Overworked and just blasé about pretty much everything, this year has blessed me with a dry spell. With little time and energy left at the end of the day, writing has become a task. Doing research, normally my favourite part of the process, is now a luxury I can barely afford. But from previous strains, I’ve learned to lighten the weight on my shoulders. I think it was Salman Rushdie who said that reading is as, or even more important than the actual writing, and I’ve taken that as my prerogative. Writing, after all, is way more than just typing; it’s living, observing, noticing, analyzing.
I return to Leïla Slimani’s musings on Les parfums des fleurs la nuit:
“[Cinema] is feeding dreams of expansion, of conquest, of wordliness, of the Other, of the unknown.”
As society grows more divisive, this habit of going to the movies every week has made me more empathic, more human, I guess. It’s given me the vocabulary to understand and accept the different pathways we all walk, and the maturity to appreciate the unavoidable overlappings that life sometimes presents. In seeing others, I also see myself, and in seeing myself, I can still be the writer I aspire to be. At the movies, I shed my skin. I move on with my life, my eyes always looking forward—luminescence bathing my face. I am no longer afraid of losing my mojo because, while it might not always be thumping, that doesn’t mean it’s gone; it’s loading, it’s feeding, it’s becoming.
And… cut!
Acknowledgement
I couldn’t have finished this without all the inspiration Christopher Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River brought. Always a loyal teacher, whenever I feel lost or struggling to fight the intrusive thoughts that prevent me from expressing what I’m feeling, I can always count on him and his dense prose. His work is forever conducive to an ego death. I am thankful to him, and I’m grateful to you for taking the time to read the silly things that keep me up at night.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Further Readings
Isherwood, Christopher. A Meeting by the River. London Meuthen & Co., 1967.
Slimani, Leïla. Les Parfums des Fleurs la Nuit. Folio, 2021.
