The first movie that a friend of mine recalls watching as a child was a gay porn flick. Telling me this story, he remarked that while he had most likely been introduced to Sesame Street before John Holmes, puppets didn’t make quite the same impression. My friend described it as akin to watching Freud’s primal scene with a twist: He wakes up one night and goes over to his door, which is partly open. As he looks through the crack into the living room, Mom sits alone, watching two men go at it on the same TV he sits in front of to read with Big Bird every day. He doesn’t comprehend the images, but cannot go back to sleep. This memory does not surface until we are teenagers, and neither of us knows whether to believe it or not.
The first movie I can recall watching, in a theater, was Ghostbusters. My mother went to see Lady in Red and my father and I met her in the lobby afterwards. Everything in my memory of the experience is glimpsed through outstretched fingers: the dog in the fridge, a ghost in the New York Public Library, Rick Moranis. I think I cried at one point, but no matter how much I wanted to stop watching, I couldn’t. I am still this way. Two days ago, I repeatedly fled from American Idol. Against my better judgment and the general concept of free will, however, I crawled up the stairs and watched it around the corner of the magazine I held up in front of my face.
My friend and I had dissimilar experiences losing our cinematic virginity, but one thing in common—the excitement and fear that mixes together to keep everyone, me most of all, returning to gape and gawk at a screen full of lies. We go to the movies in groups, but remain isolated in our feelings, our reactions and the memories they feed off. I tear up when Frodo does, mainly because my eyes spontaneously water at the sight of anyone else doing so. The person next to me may also get weepy, but perhaps her uncle similarly had to carry an evil ring to a distant volcano. The man behind us laughs because he enjoys mocking the tears of those smaller than he. It’s hard to say why movies affect us the way they do. I love to sit in the dark, for hours at a time, untouched by the reality of actual people. I don’t know if that’s normal.
Movie critic Pauline Kael published several collections of her reviews for The New Yorker. Wonderful old lady that she was, her books all have very suggestive titles: I Lost It At The Movies and Taking It All In, for example. Pauline, better than anyone else, realized the brilliant erotic potential of the cinema and understood the lasciviousness inherent in just sitting in the dark with lots of people and watching others do things. I notice the reactions of those around me during a film and this is what I hear: laughing, gasping, sighing, screaming, shrieking, moaning, sharp intakes of breath and heavy breathing. Does that remind you of anything?
I imagine that many share the experience of losing it, whatever it is, at the movies. Back home, in the Bronx, my friends and I all shared small apartments with too many siblings. So, on those rare occasions when we had dates, off to the movies we flew. Co-op City, a large and vertically sprawling housing complex, held Bay Plaza, at the time a cheap and violent movie theater. Fights broke out here daily—whether in the ticket line, at the concession stand, while playing Tekken, or in the theaters themselves. But with the fighting, there was also the loving. I can’t really say I watched Congo or First Knight or Dangerous Minds or Dumb and Dumber. Everyone has his or her own list. The memory of those fumblings, which cast mutating shadows on the aisle carpets, are etched in the associative portions of my mind. This energy still haunts every movie I go see. As the lights go down, I feel electricity and anticipation, waiting for what is to come as I sit up in my chair.
Films are scary and funny and sexy and thrilling. In the case of some, they can be psychologically damaging. Movies can be everything to everyone and I find that their allure lies in the way they allow me to operate subjectively and objectively at the same time. My emotions, as true as they can be, are tempered by the patently false, larger-than-life images on the screen ahead. It is the sole province of cinema, as movement and emotion through space and time, to hurl its audience from laughter to fear to tears in less than two hours. The acetic nature of obsessively watching films, sitting lost in a reverie of images for hours at a time, week in, week out, is not lost on me. I am beginning to believe that I suffer from headaches and a skin ailment on account of it. My friends tell me that life is better lived in reality, amongst the heat and dirt of real people. I’m still on the fence.
Gilbert Cruz is a senior in the College. He lives in Shaolin, but represents Boogie-down.
