Going to the Movies in LA

The only times on this journey I’ve forgotten where I am is at the movies. I thought maybe, since I’m bouncing around so much, I’d finally experience that sensation I’d read about so many times: waking up disoriented and not knowing where you are for a moment. This hasn’t happened to me though. But when I go to a movie, if it’s a good one, if I get lost in it, halfway through it’ll take me a minute to remember what’s just outside the neutral space of the theater, which skyline I’ll see when I walk back out into the real world.

I went to see Trance in LA, and experienced this slightly disconcerting experience a couple of times over the course of the movie. I’d pull myself out of the narrative for a moment for one reason or another and try to remember where I’d been a little while ago. What was outside this darkened space devoted to another world?

This sensation was probably heightened by the fact that people take the act of watching a movie very seriously in LA. Going to the movies feels sort of like a religious experience; at least when you go to a theater that caters to cinema snobs the way the Arclight does.

On the drive to the theater monuments to film are all around you. You’ll pass studios with their gargantuan sound stages, sitting like dinosaurs by the freeway. You might drive along Hollywood Boulevard where idols are honored with every step along the sidewalk. Maybe your route will lead you past Grauman’s Chinese Theater where people make a living by giving you a chance to stand next to a fiction. The Hollywood sign looms over you the whole way, as if you could not know where you are.

When you arrive at the theater your seats are reserved for you. This event is too important to leave to chance. (At a play the night before, The Importance of Being Earnest, audience members were allowed to seat themselves willy-nilly.) No ads flash on the screen before the film. There aren’t any quizzes asking you to unscramble the name of Tom Cruise’s summer blockbuster. This time of contemplation and conversation isn’t interrupted by commercials for the latest show on TNT that attempts to prove that they “know drama;” the little screen has no place here. (For a moment or two I worried this experience was so serious there wouldn’t even be previews. Luckily this was not the case. Previews are honored as an introduction to the film experience, the way an organ prelude to a Sunday service might be.)

There’s an acolyte in a blue shirt who introduces the film and offers his and his fellows’ services if the viewing experience does not meet your expectations in any way. He even stands by the exit for the first preview or two to make sure the viewing experience matches the standardized expectations.

Then film plays. Everyone sits in still, respectful silence. You won’t see a single phone screen aglow. No one leaves once they’ve realized the final climax has occurred. In fact, almost everyone stays to the end of the credits, whether the internet has told them there’s something worth staying for or not.

As you file out of the theater it seems like everyone’s discussing what they’ve just seen. This is the air they breathe, the atmosphere they walk through, in two weeks the characters they’ve just spent two hour watching might be standing outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. So they certainly have an opinion on this latest contribution to their environment.

You drive back through the monuments to this art form and that sense of disorientation lasts just a little bit longer than it would in Durham, North Carolina or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania because the line between reality and story is thinner here.