Last Rites of the Saturday Matinee--First experience of the movie house.
I remember the first time I 'went to the movies.' Many people will not remember their 'first time,' either because it is lost in the mists of memory, so early as to be un-remember-able, or because they went often enough that the memories blend together into one mighty trip to 'the movies'.... This was not my experience.
I grew up in a home that was loving and liberal in so many respects; but it was entirely contradictory in its views toward attendance at performance. On the one hand, I could watch as much television as I wanted, in the privacy of my own comfortably appointed basement. But other than annual visits to the Stratford, Ontario stage to see a performance of Shakespeare, and church two or three times a week, I was not allowed to attend any public gathering that included performance. This included any public screening of a film.
There was one singular exception, at a Christmastime when I was thirteen, when one of my older brothers, in open rebellion against our parents, gave me a present of two tickets to go with him to see a movie. I don't remember the reaction in my family at the time, but I'm sure it wasn't pleasant. I was probably too astonished by the offer to notice.
So my brother and I went to see a movie together, my first. My brother was twelve years older than me, and no doubt would have attended an evening performance, if he hadn't been taking me. For this reason, we experienced a kind of audience that my brother had never seen--he was raised like me, after all, not going to 'the movies'--and that I had certainly not seen, because I hadn't seen anything. We experienced a 1968 Saturday matinee of The Planet of the Apes.
The place was filled from front to back, from top to bottom, with pre-adolescent young people, all of them unchaperoned. They had apparently all been sent or went or--well, I have no idea how they got there, because I wouldn't have been there. But there were hundreds of them, all free to do whatever they wanted. It was as if they had all been given license 'not' to pay attention.
Not for one moment of our time in the theatre was there quiet, or calm, or attention, or a stillness. Young people were rushing everywhere, to and from the concession stand to buy more candy and drinks, rushing up and down the aisle to whisper and not-whisper opinions and secrets and gossip and jokes to friends and enemies sitting in other parts of the theatre. The place was filled with activity, almost none of which--actually, in my recollection, none of which--had anything to do with 'watching a movie.' It was a carnival, the primary goal of which was to do the opposite of the intentions of the venue.
There were all kinds of young people there, not dressed up but not dressed for the playground, in constant movement. I remember people jumping up and down in front of us, chattering, sometimes yelling, popcorn and sticky drinks spilling. I thought I recognized people from my own Sunday School in the crowd, so I think the theatre was in the East End, working class section of Hamilton. I remember a girl in a white dress--for no particular reason, other than that it might have been unusual.
My poor brother was perhaps ten years older than anyone there, and clearly didn't know what hit him. I remember him intently concentrating on the screen, attempting to shut out the entire world around him, unable to control this audience--to him--from hell, forcing himself to watch the screen. I know that I sat quietly, watching everything around me, dumbstruck and over-stimulated.
And I remember the last shot of the film, very well indeed, not from seeing it later in life, but I'm quite certain from that particular experience. Charlton Heston, confronted by a half-buried Statue of Liberty, falls to his knees on the sandy beach and cries out against a world that has been lost through the stupidity of humanity. And I got that--so I must have been watching.
But most of all, I watched my older brother watching the film, treating it with the high seriousness and sense of profound meaning that he believed that genre of literature, science fiction, deserved.
But the audience surrounding us was unimpressed, and continued its noisy rebellion against any attempt to control their time, their space, their conduct, their story.
Context:
My brother and I watched a lot of television together when we were young, and we were always very intense in our viewing habits. We both focused on the full sound-and-light-show of the event, and every nuance of the narrative. We could be demanding partners when other family members joined us. For myself, I was so intent on what was happening 'on the screen,' that I lost all sense of time and space in my own world. My brother and I did discuss the show as we watched--we attended to it, as if any distraction would make it go away. So we were not, by training or disposition, the best people to attend a Saturday Matinee. This may be why I remember it so well.
The movie house wasn't, I believe, one of those older, fallen-on-hard-times vaudeville houses that either showed repertory films or double-bill 'grindhouse' movies. It was a standard commercial house, showing standard commercial fare, likely in a recently-built shopping mall. The film was chosen for me because, though my brother was certainly acting on my behalf and intent on opening my eyes to the world, he also knew I was 'secretly' in love with his collection of science fiction paperbacks, and wanted company to see this particular film.
I know the history of the 'Saturday matinee'--and I know that over the decades, there had been cartoons and short films and newsreels, and even occasional live performances and contests and games, in addition to a double bill of films, generally made by film companies on the cheap, anticipating that the films were of secondary importance to 'the day out'--for a date, a chat, a party, a way of communing and eating and drinking and oh yes, there's something on the screen. The carnival atmosphere of the event was built into the presentation, including the way the afternoon or evening were organized, in small pieces. But this kind of Saturday matinee had all but disappeared with the advent of television--itself a Saturday matinee without the crowds. This was no longer a part of the movie industry's business strategy; but off in the real world, in Hamilton, Ontario, it took a long time for this ritual to disappear. I don't believe anything was on the screen for this afternoon's entertainment but Planet of the Apes, and the intention was for us to pay attention. That was not what the audience had in mind.
To me it was a brave new world, of course. I thought this was what going to the movies was all about. And I have to say that, in retrospect, I have a lot of respect for the open rebellion I witnessed that day.
And to be fair, my brother was rebelling, too: by spending his allowance on 50-cent pulp paperbacks that both home and school believed were a blight on the culture of the young; by encouraging my own interest in this genre, giving me science fiction paperbacks for my birthdays and for Christmas (paperbacks I still have, and are prized possessions); and by taking me to see my first 'movie.'
This was a very different kind of rebellion than for all the other citizens in that movie house. They were there to escape the status quo, and to rebel against the rules of the house. His rebellion was very different. So we sat there (goddammit) and rebelled, in the face of a somewhat more boisterous uprising.
