The hopeless dream of being but never seeing

[sovay]

spatch thoughtfully made me a batch of rice krispie treats last night so that I would have something to eat this morning before beginning my transit across the city to my doctor's appointment. The last time I got up this early for something, I think it was an Amtrak train. I really prefer getting up for trains.

I had something of the experience of this tweet last night while reading Jonathan Lethem's "Empty Theaters" (2020) because the second he wondered whether there was some cultural antecedent for his description of going to see a movie by oneself as "going to a brain laundromat. I'm there to have my brain rinsed in the stream of images," I could yell mentally all I wanted that the answer was yes and Wittgenstein, Lethem writing his essay three years ago wasn't going to hear me. But it is Wittgenstein, according to Norman Malcolm in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958), who used to bolt directly out of his own lectures to the local cinema where he would install himself in the very first row of the theater and absorb himself in whatever was happening on the screen which filled his field of vision to the exclusion of any comment on the experience, except for the relevant time he whispered to Malcolm, "This is like a shower bath!" He loved the films of Carmen Miranda as much as he loved pulp detective fiction and kitschy Christmas cards. Technicolor musicals seem to have been one of the very few things that, however temporarily, got his brain out of its own way. I continue to hope that sometime he encountered Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943), a bath bomb of a movie if ever I saw one.

Noir City Boston is returning next week to the Brattle. Under normal circumstances, I would have already marked my calendar for the double feature of Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and Larceny (1948). Under the current ones, I think I'm just going to be resentful.

Comments

[asakiyume]

That tweet is right! And yes, I think yelling at something written three years ago is even more ghost-powerless-making than yelling at the news: at least the news is happening more or less in the present. You were yelling across time. (Shades of your 1917 review...)

Re: your last paragraph, I feel resentful too, knowing that if *you* were to be able to go to that film festival, I'd benefit too, because you'd surely write up your experiences and thoughts, and I'd love reading them. Grrrr.

[gwynnega]

I wish it were safe for you to go to that film festival. (I haven't been inside a movie theater since the Before Times.)

[minoanmiss]

Huh, interesting. I don't consider going to the movies by myself as rinishing my brain -- I just want to experience this particular movie's story/visuals/casting and don't have anyone to come with me at the moment. And yet I can see what they mean by submerging oneself in the experience. Hmm.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Getting up early should only be for nice things! *hugs*

I really like the idea of movies as a way to rinse our brain "in the stream of images", it's very relatable--bath bombs/shower baths are a good comparison for something that gives our brain some escape. It makes me think of Manuel Puig and movie theatres being the only place where he felt that he could breathe.

(I'm sorry you can't go to that double feature, it sounds great--I haven't seen "Larceny", but "Sorry Wrong Number" is amazing! Yay for another Wendell Corey movie, although I must admit that I remember this one mostly for Barbara Stanwyck--she is *incredible*, and does so much with such a small, confined space, if that makes sense?)