Opinion
How I fell in love with the flicks again (while dressed in pink)
Matthew Knott
National correspondentAround halfway through each episode of the delightful American podcast Las Culturistas, hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang ask their guests the same question: “What was the culture that made you say ‘culture is for me’?”
While I’ll almost certainly never appear on the podcast, the question makes me think about how I’d respond if asked to nominate a formative popular culture experience. Perhaps I’d say when I was six and my father took me to the cinema to see The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, an M-rated film full of crude language and decidedly adult themes.
I was six when I saw Priscilla.
Or maybe I’d nominate the moment in Strictly Ballroom when Barry Otto’s character Doug Hastings tells son Scott that “a life lived in fear is a life half lived”. Or simply name Catherine Zeta Jones’s short black bob hairstyle in the 2002 movie musical Chicago.
As much as I love many books, songs and plays, I know my answer would involve the movies. Like Proust biting into a madeleine, going to the cinema transports me back to my childhood: the smell of buttery popcorn, the rustle of Fantales wrappers, the roar of the MGM lion as the lights go down. Throughout my life, going to the movies has not just been a tradition but a secular ritual.
As the Academy Awards ceremony approached each year, I would try to watch as many nominated films as possible like a student cramming for their final exams. Each Boxing Day my family would take my grandmother to watch the latest release – preferably anything starring Judi Dench. More recently a close friend and I developed a tradition of heading to the cinema slightly hungover each New Year’s Day.
While I cherish the experience of going to the movies with friends and family, I’ve never understood people who fear seeing a film by themselves. Going to the cinema solo to see whatever you want whenever you want can be a thrilling act of self-care.
Like most people around the world, however, my lifelong movie-going habit came to a halt in March 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak hit. Suddenly, sitting in a crowded room to watch a movie seemed like a high-risk, low-reward activity – especially when you could stream the best films of all time safely at home.
When the world began returning to normal more than a year later, I went to the cinema to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, but the vibes were off. Hardly anyone was in the theatre and the movie was not a masterpiece. Going back to the dance floor, concerts and the theatre for the first time after being vaccinated proved to be a far more significant and emotional experience.
Matthew Knott with some high school friends before Barbie.
Even as the virus became less of a concern, my movie habit didn’t return to anything like its previous level. New Year’s Day came and went this year without the thought of going to the movies and I took little interest in the most recent Oscars.
I was not alone in my drift from the cinema. North American box office receipts were down 33 per cent last year on pre-COVID levels; in Australia they were down 25 per cent.
In March, A.O. Scott announced he was giving up his dream job as The New York Times′ chief film critic because he increasingly found going to the movies to be an unsatisfying experience. The huge profitability of franchise superhero films such as The Avengers, Scott explained, was squeezing out space for the romantic comedies, literary adaptations and adventurous films that made him fall in love with the movies.
In our “golden age” of prestige television – of Succession, The White Lotus and The Crown – many of the most captivating stories are made for the small rather than the big screen.
Then something shifted in the universe: the bizarre cultural phenomenon that is Barbenheimer. Thanks to these yin-and-yang blockbusters being released simultaneously, the movies have catapulted back to the centre of the zeitgeist.
Three high school friends and I joined in by booking Barbie tickets ahead of time and dressing up in as much pink as we could find. Before seeing Greta Gerwig’s fluorescent fever dream, with its meditations on feminism and self-actualisation, we posed for daggy photos together in a life-sized doll box, just as many other people around the world have done.
Three days later I took myself to see Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic on the father of the atomic bomb. Watching the film at home, I thought afterwards, could never match the intense aural and visual experience of seeing it at the cinema. At no stage was I tempted to check my phone. Despite the film’s heavy subject, the theatre was packed: I was alone, yet partaking in a communal experience. Days later, the moral issues the movie raised about the development and use of the nuclear bomb were still buzzing in my brain.
The legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael argued that the cinema is “the most total and encompassing art form we have” and this remains true in our atomised, distraction-filled age of streaming-on-demand.
“A good movie,” Kael wrote, “can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city.”
Of all the habits that I want to quit, going to the movies isn’t one of them.
Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.