Theater Hopping is like Being Ozymandias

When I go to a movie, I tend to literally go to the movies. I’ll spend an entire day in a theater, gorging myself on cinema: explosions, car chases, silences that think they’re saying a lot more than they are, homoerotic bromances, vulgar gross-out jokes, artsy angles that reflect a character’s inner turmoil, witty banter delivered more quickly than people can speak in real life. These things pile on top of each other in a cacophony of modern pop culture and I love it. It’s my favorite way to watch films. Here’s why.

I’m working on becoming fluent in the language of pop culture. The words we use to label our environment are so vital to the way we end up perceiving that environment (everyone’s favorite example is the Inuit people and their hundreds of words for snow, which is actually inaccurate of the Inuit but true of the Sami people, so let’s use the Sami as an example for the rest of this parenthetical statement that has already gotten too long. Just imagine how different snow would be to us if we had as many categories for it as the Sami do. The same holds true for anything. We know as many trees as we have names for–even if we made that name up ourselves. The One with the Stinky Berries is different from The One that’s Good to Make Swords out of because I have words to differentiate them from one another. Every tree we don’t have a name for is just a tree.) Obviously English is the language of the culture I’m mired in–and I’m working on learning it as thoroughly as I can–but we speak pop culture too, whether we know it or not. From “Beam me up, Scotty” (which was actually never said in Star Trek canon, look at all the things I’m teaching you today) to “Get the hell outta Dodge.” That’s the reason half my netflix queue is old movies like The Apartment. Now I know the significance and history when someone says “Shut up and deal.” Movies like The Apartment and books like The Great Gatsby make up the very basic grammar of our popular culture. It goes even farther back, Shakespeare is so much a part of the way we speak that we frequently don’t even realize we’re quoting him. There’s a lot of history to our cultural language.

Anyone will tell you that complete immersion is probably the best way to learn a language and that’s what devoting an entire day to the movies is. Swim around in a lake of diet soda and liquid butter flavor, bask in the glow of Ryan Gosling‘s face projected twenty feet tall. Now you’ve really got a sense of our popular culture.

This practice always reminds me of Adrian Veidt (superhero moniker Ozymandias), from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, watching an entire bank of televisions at once. He takes in all this information simultaneously to more fully comprehend the state of the world and the direction it’s heading. Watching 5.5 movies in a row is vaguely equivalent to his method of understanding current culture. You see themes and plot threads that connect and reveal the current cultural zeitgeist that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. For instance, the last time I spent a day at the movies two of the films I saw were Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and War Horse  and these movies became a good deal more interesting when one considered the different ways they were presenting WWI. Sherlock Holmes created an alternate history, wherein Moriarty was working to cause the War to End All Wars, and War Horse took place in the war he’d caused. Imagining this scenario provided not only an interesting diversion from two rather mediocre movies, but also seemed to illustrate that maybe films are moving away from venerating WWII as the most epic and grand war to make a movie about. Also, having seen War Horse some hours before, the use of animals as emotional catalysts in We Bought a Zoo was  far more interesting. Neither of these films quite made their animals speak, but they came pretty damn close. Both tried to remain respectable and realistic while still having animals as protagonists. I’m not sure they succeeded, but that they tried is what’s interesting. Talking pigs is so mid-nineties, now our animals emote through careful lighting.

Anyway, this is what I’m saying, in a very long-winded fashion: these movies mean something different when they are placed in conversation with one another, and viewed in such close proximity to one another they seem to reveal glimpses of our current cultural mind set. (Why did Bug’s Life and Antz both come out the fall of ’98? And what happened in 2006 that made movies about Victorian era magicians seem like a good idea?) Like I said, I’m obsessed not only with English, but also the narratives that influence it, and there’s no better way to become fluent in that narrative language than listening to movies talk to each other. Ozymandias could tell you that.