Going to the Movies
In spite of my delight at exploring the local culture in Georgia, I sometimes experience an odd sort of homesickness for the familiar. For instance, I went into a grocery store wanting to get my favorite salad dressing, but nobody carries it here in Georgia. Can anyone explain to me why stores in the eastern United States don’t carry “Western” salad dressing? Baffling, isn’t it?
Longing for the familiar has been around since the Exiles hung their harps on Babylonian willows and wept for lost Jerusalem. (Psalm 137) Fortunately for Americans living in the 21st century, there is a solution, even if it’s only a temporary fix. So, fresh from my disappointment about Western salad dressing, my wife and I were able to go to the University 16 theatre to watch American Underdog. This movie is an inspiring story about Curt Warner’s battle with adversity to become the most valuable player in Super Bowl 34. Pardon me, XXXIV. For the better part of two hours the darkened theater, the comfortable theater seats, and the aroma of fresh popcorn took us home.
Theaters around the world are a slice of home for Americans. We quickly point to Edison’s 1891 kinetoscope as the beginning of movies. However, the early film industry’s murky beginnings developed throughout Europe, Russia, and the United States. Arising from the depths of the Depression era, Hollywood, California, became home to the right mix of producers, directors, actors, and production crew members to spark a new art form, the American movie. Audiences caught in the agony of a jobless economy, the frightening climate disaster of the Dust Bowl, and the sinister geopolitical calamity of World War II fueled the development of cinematographic storytelling. A movie’s true power lies in its ability to transport us to new places, times, and cultures. We travel on the wings of movie makers’ skillful imagination to a vast variety of venues along the space/time continuum. This power has expressed itself so many times in our lives that the theater has become a kind of universal home, or at least home base, for us.
I walked out of Georgia’s lovely theater fully reconciled to the fact that the supply chain will never recover to the point that I can buy Western salad dressing in Publix. But how did going to the movies become a home for me? The first movie I ever went to was Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.” My parents told me they took me, but I only have foggy memories of an elephant ballet. By the way, when did they drop “Walt” from Walt Disney? It doesn’t seem right to have generations of Americans consuming Disney products without knowing that friendly man who used to pal around with Mickey Mouse. My wife is right with me in this concern. As a child, she used to race her siblings for the weekly newspaper to see what would be showing at the movie theatre. If it was a Walt Disney feature then she knew her family would be going.
During high school, my only choice for a movie theater was the Panida in Sandpoint, Idaho. It would regularly rotate its one feature each week and I just hoped that the rating would be G or PG so I could go. The Panida never had an X-rated showing that I know of, but on occasion, there were R-rated shows that made it a week-long wait for the next movie in the season. Late in high school, I learned that the Panida had love seats in the balcony for use by couples. Several of my classmates bragged about their exploits in Panida’s upper level. Even though I dated fairly often late in high school, I stayed out of the Panida’s balcony. I never could understand how you could keep track of the movie plot up there.
By the time I got to college and seminary, theaters had begun to have multiplexes. The variety of offerings made getting out to the movies a reliable weekend expectation. However, the thin budgets afforded by higher education made off-time showings and smaller orders of popcorn a necessity. I’m still not sure how I found the funds to see Star Wars 5 times.
Outings to the movies were a regular part of our growing family’s life. All three of our children shared our love for the theater, and only one displayed an aversion to popcorn. By the time they were in high school, they would carry on entire conversations with each other using nothing but quotes from movies. I am a great lover of the cinematographic arts, but I never memorized entire movie soundtracks the way my children did.
As our offspring spread out to the four corners of the earth with jobs in Singapore, Canada, Norway, and Korea, I had occasion to see how movie theaters worked in other parts of the world.
Singapore was easy because the official language of the country was English. And occasionally Singaporeans actually spoke English when they weren’t speaking Chinese, Hindi, Malay, or one of several local dialects. But it worked out well in the theaters because American films were shown just as they were in the United States. It was in Singapore that I first noticed the ability of an American movie to transport you home from any place on the globe. It was amazing to enter a theater from the densely crowded streets of Singapore where they drove on the left. With the first whiff of popcorn, the train was pulling out of the station for hometown USA.
Canadian theaters presented no discernible difference from their American counterparts except that you could buy concessions with one and two-dollar coins called loonies and toonies. I wonder if that had anything to do with the Looney Tunes cartoons they sometimes showed in advance of the main feature? Probably not.
I don’t remember going to a theatre in Norway. That was probably because we would have had to take out a second mortgage to pay for the tickets. Family outings can be quite expensive in Norway. We had to make do with my son’s Apple TV to share movies from the USA. Naturally, snuggling up with my grandkids to watch a Disney animated movie was wonderful beyond imagination, but I stayed firmly in Norway the whole time. There was no trip home.
Korean theaters took us to another plane of existence. Koreans love movies a great deal, so their selection of timely theater offerings rivals the United States. They also have a fairly active movie-making community in Korea that has been steadily making its way onto the international stage. Parasite won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 2019. But Americans tend to avoid Korean movies since they are normally shown in Korean without subtitles. However, all American movies do have subtitles that can catch the American viewer off guard because they are in Hangul, the Korean script. Watching a movie in Korea takes a few minutes to retrain oneself to not look at the subtitles. However, after making this adjustment, the setting, the comfortable seats, and the intoxicating smell of popcorn soon have you back in the USA in no time.
Small town theaters in the United States tend to have multiplexes that number in the single digits. They also have ticket and concession prices that enable you to see change from a ten-dollar bill. I especially enjoy going to these theaters because they have more character. Some, like the theater where my daughter now lives in North Dakota, are old-time theatres that present one movie each week just like when I grew up. I haven’t checked to see if the Delchar Theater has loveseats on the balcony. My wife and I could probably sit up there without getting too distracted and it would better facilitate sharing the popcorn.
On a recent trip to North Dakota, we had the joy of taking our youngest grandchild to his first movie along with his two brothers. Typical of a third child, his parents were willing to give up the privilege of his inaugural movie to go do something like talking to each other for a couple of hours straight. Just barely two, there was some concern about the little tyke’s behavior, but I promised that I would go out with him if the necessity arose. We needn’t have worried. He sat with rapt attention throughout the entire movie and fell hopelessly in love with the big red dog, Clifford. On the way home my wife called ahead to ask our daughter to find the stuffed Clifford from Kohls that we had given to the boys a couple of years ago. It was waiting for our youngest grandson as he walked through the door. He swept it up in a giant hug calling out, “Kwiffode, Kwiffode, Kwiffode!” He refused to be separated from it for the better part of a week. Rarely have I had a movie-going experience be so satisfying. It was another powerful reason why moving-going is a way home for me.