The first movie I ever saw was Mary Poppins. Years later, when she couldn’t get me out of movie theaters, my mother told me that before that first outing I had confided in her that I didn’t know if I’d like being in the dark.
My formative moviegoing years were a mixture of attraction and fear, the knowledge and even the desire to be swept up in something being than myself, the gamble that that bigger thing could be as frightening or upsetting as it was elating. To this day that’s what I look for in movies (and why the tyranny of the trigger warning, in any art, feels like cowardice to me). The shopping mall two-plex where I saw most movies as a child had a recessed screen surrounded on all four sides in such a way that made it look like a rectangular version of The Time Tunnel, and bathed in midnight-blue light. The effect was more than a bit scary. In the moments before the movie started, in those years before audiences were bombarded by ads and graphics from the moment they set foot in a theater, it was an ominous silent portal waiting to suck you into God know what.
I didn’t see its like until some years later when I saw the billowing curtain that served as the backdrop to the credit sequence of Blue Velvet by David Lynch, who died today at 78. The slow, deliberate undulations of that curtain made the screen look like a swelling membrane that the camera was about to penetrate to lay open before us a still breathing corpus. I had already experienced something similar with the first Lynch movie I saw (and his second) 1980’s The Elephant Man. Home on break from college I saw it at a matinee the cold, grey day before Thanksgiving in a narrow theater at a suburban multiplex. The sound was low and I was straining to hear but I had no intention of missing something by going out to the lobby to ask them to turn up the volume. And anyway, I was pinned to my seat, too scared to move. What was being projected in front of me, the tumors and rough patches of John Merrick’s skin, the acrid smoke of Victorian London, was so tactile, so repulsively beautiful that it felt less like I was watching a screen than something organic and breathing that would take note of me if I dared to move closer in order to hear better. It took me a good half hour to work up the courage to change seats.
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