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Moving Pictures

©2004 David Boyne

Some of the best hours of my life have been spent in the dark.

In movie theatres.

Some movie theatres on this planet are wormholes. When I am in one of these wormhole-theatres at the right time and watching the right movie—I get launched down a tunnel through the time-space continuum. Where I come out is the great Terra Incognita of the Collective Unconscious that Jung dreamed up and crudely mapped for future explorers like me.

But here’s the catch: I never know where these wormhole-theatres are.

One summer night, while bicycling along the walkways around the museums and fountains in Balboa Park, I rolled to a stop at the edge of a large grassy field between two buildings. It was fully dark, so as I straddled my bicycle I tried to figure out why in the world dozens of people were lying on blankets spread on the ground or sitting in lawn chairs—and all facing the same direction. Right then there was the terrifically loud sound of a car crash. I froze, even as a superhumanly loud voice of an enraged man boomed curses that reverberated between the high walls of the buildings. I wondered, had God just arrived? And, as bumper stickers had long predicted, He was pissed off? But no one on the blankets or in the lawn chairs had even flinched, or looked away from where they stared. So I looked where they were looking—and on the four-story high white stucco wall of a building I saw moving pictures showing a man in a pork pie hat driving angry—very angry—through the streets of New York. As I stared, he let go with another long combination of booming obscenities. It was Gene Hackman, in the role of Popeye Doyle, in the climactic chase scene of The French Connection. I had ridden my bicycle into an outdoor wormhole movie theatre.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I grew up in a 300-hundred year-old town on the coast of Connecticut. Somehow, the 17th-generation of flinty, beer-bellied white men who ran that town always managed to come up with enough money in their Wear it out!—Use it up!—Make it Last!—annual budget to ensure that on hot summer afternoons, free movies would be shown for all the town’s kids. Did they do it to get a few more hours on the golf course? Or, looking back from the perspective of my short stint as a surrogate parent, was it really an elaborate scheme to pack all the town’s kids into one secure location for three hours so that parents could play Latin dance albums on the stereo and drink hi-balls and chase each other around the kitchen and into the bedroom?

Those free movies were shown in the cool, dark, smooth stone basement of the old, brick-walled, vine-clad Town Hall. The din of 200 rowdy kids gathered under minimal adult supervision (the same three scowling spinsters were always on loan from the town library) was awesome. The air was thick with the contents of sack lunches: apple cores, fistfuls of popcorn, and baloney-laden mayonnaise-smeared slices of Wonder Bread skimming like Frisbees just over my head. The ancient film projector, jealously guarded and cajoled forward by one acne-plagued, 15-year-old audio-visual geek, rattled as if it were desperately straining to produce enough electricity to power all of New England. But in my mind, there in the crowded dark of the Town Hall basement, all was quiet, and I was entirely, ecstatically, alone. I had been lifted out of the basement of the Town Hall and dropped into a separate world simply by watching the right moving pictures: The Voyages of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and Around the World in 80 Days. I crewed on Sinbad’s ship, guarding the ornate bottle containing the genii who was my own age; I crouched beside Jason inside the minataur’s lair, knowing that even after we slay the minataur, we had to confront the snake-haired hydra who’s eye-contact could turn us to stone; I sailed with Phineas Fogg five-hundred feet above the African savannah, the shadow of our hot-air balloon startling great herds of zebra and gazelle to running. And when it was all over, and the spinsters pried me from my seat in that improvised wormhole theatre, I would walk woozily out into the shocking bright and heavy heat of an August afternoon in that humming-quiet town, and it was that world which now seemed unreal.

Once upon a time, in Portland, Oregon, I was charged with the care, and the feeding, and the telling of stories to, a young boy named Jack. Jack and I would spend many happy weekend afternoons browsing and buying used paperback books in Powell’s Bookstore, then crossing Hawthorne street and entering a wonderfully reliable wormhole-theatre called The Baghdad. Inside that building of Arab-kitsch architecture, inside its vast gloomy darkness, Jack and I sat in the balcony and had countless out-of-body experiences watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (The scene in which Willy, aka, Gene Wilder, painfully hobbles forward—then suddenly turns a forward somersault—still makes me giddy with delight.); The Black Stallion (The heart-pounding action, silence and aloneness of this movie earns it my vote for Frances Ford Coppala’s best film.); The Goonies (One of the movies made in the endearingly goofy years before Steven Speilberg discovered he was meant to make Schindler’s List, and Private Ryan.); and the little-known, rarely shown, Iron Giant. This animated film performed some strange alchemy beyond my understanding, and expressed the essences of my ridiculous, lonely, adult-wary, primary-colored cell-animated Cold War New England boyhood—then transformed it all—making it nothing to be hurt by or ashamed of, transforming its base lead into the gold of stories worth the telling.

I have a theory. Man invented moving pictures—but from the moment of its creation, it has been the invention that has held sway over the inventor. A kind of Pygmalian Effect, yes? Man created movies, the same way he created god: in his own image. His genius was to turn a camera on himself. And there lies the magic of moving pictures: They look and sound like our memories look and sound. We remember in visions, in scenes, in actions and in characters. We remember in story.

Scowling, lab coat wearing scientists have repeatedly proven that when humans are shown a computer-generated, absolutely random series of flashing lights—they insist that they see a pattern in those random flashes. This is because Nature, in its infinite wisdom, chose to hard-wire Man with a tool, a key, to unlock the hidden coding of the world he found himself wandering through. That tool, that key, is story.

Early filmmakers didn’t need the lab coat wearing scientists when they both discovered and invented the grammar of moving pictures. Their experimentation showed them how clips, broken pieces of stories, when viewed by an audience, would be reassembled into an even more powerful and seamless expression of something universal, yet ineffable. They had both discovered, and invented, montage.

This all makes me wonder. When those friendly aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind finally come through a cosmic wormhole and get here—will they ask questions like, “What is this thing called ‘love’?”

How will we answer them?

Perhaps the way to answer is to sit them down in a lawn chair on a summer night in Balboa Park, or in the cool, dark stone basement of the New England Town Hall where I grew up, or in the potent gloom of the Baghdad Theatre in Portand, Oregon—then show them movies. To answer the question, ‘what is love?’, I say show them Cinema Paradisio. By the time those space travelers reach the endlessly breath-taking, heart-breaking climactic montage of kisses and embraces and sorrowful partings and joyous reunions—and pajama-clad James Cagney smearing the morning grapefruit in that poor woman’s face—they’ll have an answer.

But maybe  they, like us, will not be able to put that answer into words, only into stories, and then fold the stories into their memory.