On Going To A Matinee

Commonplace Newsletter #45

Yes, I am talking to you.

As I write this England is open for business. Lockdown has ended- near enough- and the pubs and the shops are awaiting us with open arms. The economy will bounce back any day now, so the headlines claim amidst the standard daily scandals and doomsaying. The Soaring Twenties are imminent.

And so in this time between shifts and with time on my hands (and writing projects to cheerily procrastinate on) I think I’ll do what I used to do before the plague-time, and go and see a matinee.

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2:45, Screen 4, Seat F6

‘The world has changed’ said the sign stickered to the entrance-glass ‘and so has Vue. Allocated seats, contactless payment, mask unless eating, hand sanitiser’. Ah, the glamour and the romance of the silver screen. And here’s a handheld device and visored goon by the concession stand queue, scanning a smartphone QR code of a mother and her young daughter. 

Now me, my phone is too old for that business, and besides I’ve left it at home, and besides that I am not interested in the popcorn and fizzy drink deal* so I swerve the queue and head to the prepaid ticket machine. Code in, ticket out, off to Screen 4 at the top of the escalator. No punters, no cleaners, no ushers, no ticket-rippers. Nothing. From the outside world to my seat in Row F without a single human interaction. Such is the brave new world that we are in the midst of. 

(*£6.99! I winced in the way I’m sure my father used to when he took us all to the pictures. Our local cinema back home, so I recently learned from my sister, didn’t survive Covid and is now in the process of being flattened and turned into a car park. Joni Mitchell tried to warn us.)

I ponder my complicity in this state of affairs (I opted for the prepaid ticket and cashless convenience after all) as I settle into my seat and look at the blank screen and the vaguely heroic music comic through the speakers.

I’ll be honest here. When I initially decide to go and see a film and to then write about said experience, my plan- with all of the instincts of a crowdpleasing entertainer- was to come and intentionally see something awful so that I could carp about it and make fun of it. And then me and you- my urbane and worldly readers- could all smile smugly and pat ourselves on the back, secure in the knowledge that we were superior to the mouthbreathing phone zombies who are presumably the demographic for the franchise crap that contemporary Hollywood in its death spiral is trying to palm off on us. 

That was the gameplay anyway. Elegant in its simplicity. But while I was at home scrolling on my sadboy tablet an hour ago (I renounce tech as being a nerdy blight on the world and somehow beneath me but of course I use it just as much as everyone else, even if I am holding my nose as I do so) I saw it. This mainstream multiplex nestled in among the never-ending construction site of perpetual fancy student accommodation building was showing Taxi Driver of all things. A beacon of culture in among Godzilla vs King Kong, Mortal Kombat, Peter Rabbit 2 and other cynical pre-existing intellectual property cashgrabs.

I had to see it. I owed it to myself to see this work of art in its natural environment, no matter how many times I had seen at at home over the last two decades. And so that’s what I did.

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‘I Just Want To Go Out, And You Know, Really, Really Do Something.’

But there could still be scope for entertainment, I thought, as the lights faded and the film began. A gaggle of students entered the screening a few minutes late(there had been no trailers for some reason and only one noisy, awful, interminably loud and clearly TikTok inspired advert for Coca Cola. I assumed TikTok inspired because everyone was dancing with that combination of pop-and-lock spasticity and completely joyless affect which I take to be emblematic of that cursed platform). ‘Here we go’ I thought, my mind tragically still on the task of what I was later going to write rather than just being in the moment with the film itself. 

Here we go, I thought, expecting packet rustling and inane chitchat and notification pings and the perpetual distraction of the blue light of a phone screen in the sacred darkness of the matinee. 

But no. They were respectful and respectable and transfixed by De Niro and Scorsese and Keitel and Jodie Foster and the others. By the long gone New York of ‘whores, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies’ , by Michael Chapman’s dreamlike cinematography, all midnight neon as reflected through burst water main jets and yellow cab glass. 

Many of those kids were first timers, you could tell, and they smiled when you were supposed to smile and gasped when you were supposed to gasp. Second only to having a great experience with a piece of art is to be able to witness someone else having this experience for the first time. My cynicism and misgivings towards this pack of young strangers floated away like the Bernard Hermann score that drifted out from the speakers as Travis Bickle descended to his strange and bloody denouement.  That main refrain is destined to loop in my head for the rest of the week.

Bickle completed his journey. The credits rolled. (I won’t spoil the ending if you are like on of the young people there who haven’t seen Taxi Driver before). The house lights came up. The students in their nice middle class voices started to discuss what they had just witnessed, making comparisons to films of their own generation- The Joker and such- and pretentiously going on about the themes and the performances and the politics underpining it all. And God bless em. Because that’s what going to a matinees with friends and living life and being young should be all about.

I left the screening contented, daydreaming. I followed the Covid arrows to the outside world. I put on my sunglasses against the post-cinema glare of a weekday afternoon. ‘I hope they all skipped a class to go and see that’ I thought and then I headed back to my desk to write this.

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