Shadows and Flickering Lights
Mar. 22nd, 2009 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purple_penWhen I was a kid, we used to go to Saturday afternoon cinema - me and my little sister, and our friends from down the road, with our mum or theirs.
Of course, where I lived we didn’t actually have a cinema, but there was an old theatre in the town centre, and the Friends of the Theatre put on plays there and ran films when they were in rehearsal. It was a beautiful place, with red velvet seats and high ceilings decorated with gold scrolls and swirls. To an eight year old, it was another world, the kind of place where I believed magic could happen, and the films were real.
I wanted to be an usherette. I thought the little pen lights they all had were beyond cool, and they looked so smart in their black and white uniforms. They always smiled at us when we climbed the stairs up to our seats at the front of the balcony, and there were a couple of regulars who recognised us after a while and said hello.
For a long time, I believed they controlled the films that were being shown, and I thought it would be great to be able to pick what was on. To sit in the theatre and watch it as many times as I wanted. Plus, they had trays of ice creams that they wore round their necks – I suppose they must have had intervals in the films, since they were only meant for kids with short attention spans – and I used to think they got to live on ice cream. They were like teachers, without an existence outside of the cinema.
We must have seen every Disney film that was released before I turned twelve and declared that I was too old for kids’ cinema, especially since that was the first birthday I was allowed to have a sleep-over, and for which my parents bought me a tiny bottle of perfume. I was a proper grown up then.
Until then, though, my sister wanted to be Cinderella, or Belle, from ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the beautiful princess with the dashing prince who came to her rescue. Personally, I think that was more about the clothes than anything else – the Disney princes were never really all that, considering they were fairy tale princes, let’s face it. Either that, or she was sold on the glass slippers Cinderella wore – my sister’s always been into her shoes.
I suppose we must have been to other things as well – I remember seeing ‘The Secret Garden’, and crying, though what it was about it that made me cry I can’t now remember – but the biggest excitement was going to an evening film. It meant getting dressed up, not just going out in whatever you were wearing that day, and putting on smart shoes, not school shoes.
My best friend’s mum took her and me to see ‘The Aristocats’ one evening, that I do remember. She picked me up in her car, which was a tiny white Fiat Panda – isn’t it weird the things you remember, years afterwards? I must have been about eight, I guess, because we went to different middle schools not long after and lost touch, and we had seats near the screen, not on the balcony like usual, and it was dark when we left. None of the usherettes I recognised from Saturday mornings were there, but we had sweets, M&Ms, I think.
There must have been loads of other children there with us, because I remember it being crowded, but we both felt so grown-up, going out in the evening – which was probably about half past five, since it was a kids’ cartoon. I’ve forgotten almost the entire film, apart from one scene with a lot of cats singing and walking on a piano, I don’t even remember the story-line, but I remember it being the most exciting thing that had happened to me for quite a while at the time.
I also remember crying when we had to go home, because I didn’t want it to be over.
Some things never change.
***
Some things never change, but plenty do, and by the time I was old enough to start going to see films that featured people rather than animals or fairy-tale characters, they’d built a multiplex cinema on one of the industrial estates on the very edge of town. Which was hardly the ideal place for a cinema to be, since none of the buses went anyway near there, but that’s what parents are for when you’re fourteen, right? Plus, it showed five different films at a time, was open every night, and sold popcorn.
I went with my new friends from high school on Saturday afternoons – see, some things really do never change – because our parents were protective and didn’t like us being out there in the evenings, when the older kids would be out. It was a nice feeling even though, like being part of a group, being accepted and belonging.
I couldn’t tell you, now, what we used to see, just lots of romantic comedies, nothing particularly memorable. Is there such a thing as a memorable romantic comedy when you’re fifteen?
It really was an excellent cinema, with huge screens and black aisles with little lights in them, like on an aeroplane. Lots of shiny glass and metal in the foyer, with plenty of lights, and bright posters advertising the latest releases, the smell of popcorn permeating the whole place, clinging to our clothes when we went home. The cinema staff all wore black uniforms, and little black baseball caps with the cinema’s name on them in silver script. They called the films ‘movies’ and charged twice as much as the theatre, which was still showing kids films.
It made us feel very American to go there, like the girls in the Sweet Valley High books. All we needed was a diner where we could go and hang out afterwards, drinking cherry Cola and eating curly fries, and never putting on weight, so all the boys would still want us. As if they wanted us in the first place.
It’s funny, the places you have sudden moments of revelation. We were sitting in the cinema’s café bar, drinking Diet Cokes, because at sixteen we figured that was as good as salad, especially if we shared the French fries, instead of having a box each. My friends were talking about the lead guy in whatever film we’d just seen, I don’t know, how cute he was, and I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention because I was thinking about the girl who’d checked our tickets at the door, who was two years above me at school and probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
There should have been a light bulb going on by my right ear, but I was a sixteen year old in a small town, and there wasn’t anybody there who didn’t want to get married and have kids – I was just glad my friends didn’t choose that moment to ask me what I thought about whoever I was supposed to be talking about with them.
After that, I paid even less attention to the films than I had before. I liked watching the other people in the audience, and the staff, especially once the lights had gone down and everything was bathed in the flickering grey light on the screen. I suppose I was mostly looking for the girl from my school, at least at first. We used to sit about halfway back, not far from the entrances, which were the easiest to see, and the staff were more interesting than the audience staring transfixed at the screen.
They weren’t like the usherettes at Saturday cinema, who used to sit just inside the doors throughout the film. These slipped in and out, checked tickets for late-comers, walked up and down the aisles, hushed people… they certainly didn’t seem to be there to watch the films.
Sitting there, in a proper, American-style cinema, I felt nostalgic for Saturday films in the theatre, with the red and gold and the usherettes with ice cream trays. That had seemed a lot more magical – we’d really believed, for quite a while, that the people on the screen lived there, and that if we saw that film again it would end differently. The dimming lights in the cinema were exciting, the start of something amazing, no matter how many times we went.
Somehow, the modern, state-of-the-art cinema wasn’t the same, and it wasn’t as good.
***
Of course, it’s not that hard to get used to a lot of things, and I got used to the new cinema, and to being different from the people I was there with. I suppose you’d say I got used to pretending, or maybe acting, since we’re talking about films.
I got used to it, and then I got a place at university, and off I went. It was a campus university, so no cinema unless we wanted to trail into the city centre on the bus, which most of the time we didn’t. There was an arts centre that sometimes showed films, but it was expensive, and they tended to be the kind of foreign language films that the slightly pretentious English Lit student across the corridor from me in halls would see and come back and rave about. And this was in the days before everyone had DVD players on their laptops, so no films at all.
Then, about three weeks into the first term, we discovered the student cinema. They showed a different film every night, some new releases, some classics, and a whole bunch of things I’d never even heard of, but which my new, film-mad best friend, Anna, would scream with delight about, and the tickets were only one fifty for students. They were even based on the campus, a ten minute walk from our hall of residence.
In a lecture theatre, to be precise.
It was certainly different, and looking back, I suppose it was a bit weird, but we were first years, living away from home for the first time, and it was just one more thing that made university different from home, and an infinitely preferable place to be. And so, with a student loan dictated social life (which is to say, not much of a one), my new friends and I saw a lot of the inside of that lecture theatre. Some more than others, since it turned out to belong to the Computer Science department, and us two girls, despite knowing very little about computers beyond how to turn one on, seemed to have somehow got ourselves taken in by a bunch of male com-sci first years.
Well, stranger things have happened.
We saw everything, from major films – ‘Lord of the Rings’, anyone? – to teenage feel-good movies – ‘Save the Last Dance’, where the entire female half of the audience sniffed their way through the scenes about her dead mom – to martial arts flicks – the lads mocking the story-line of ‘Romeo Must Die’ from start to finish while the Anna and I were busy being amazed by the fight scenes, that being in the pre-‘Matrix’, pre-‘Crouching Tiger’ days, when those were still new and amazing.
We saw ‘Memento’, and spent the next week trying to figure out the plot, which made our heads hurt. We saw the first ‘Ghostbusters’ movie, and bonded over shared childhood TV shows. We even took my little sister to see ‘U-571’, the most unintentionally funny Second World War film I’ve ever seen, when she came to visit.
Sometimes we went with all the guys, sometimes just one or two of them, sometimes half the corridor tagged along and sometimes it was just me and Anna. Whoever came with us, though, it was always the two of us.
It took me till Easter vacation to realise what was going on – I’d got used to pretending, and I suppose when I went off to university, I forgot that I could stop. Didn’t realise, for a while, that there might be something in not pretending any longer.
I’ve always had best friends, since as far back as I can remember, and they’ve always been female. We’ve always done everything together, and I’ve always wanted to spend all of my time with them, and share everything with them. Anna was just like that – when it came time to choose housemates for next year, we picked each other and then set about finding a few people who’d come in with us; we went looking for each other as soon as we got in from lectures, we went to breakfast together, we rang each other during the day, and on weekends when we went home. The boys joked about us being joined at the hip, and everyone assumed that in inviting one of us along they were inviting the other one as well. I think they knew before we did – our hall-mates weren’t stupid.
I could go on about what happened, in great and probably mind-numbing (not for me, obviously) detail, but I won’t. I like things that are just mine, and this is one of them. Suffice it to say that it’s funny, the places you have sudden moments of revelation, and it’s even funnier the number of mine that have taken place in cinemas, because we’d actually made the effort to go off campus and into the city, to the real cinema there. We were supposed to meet the guys afterwards and go ice-skating, but that never happened. They’d refused to come with us, even when we argued that the film was about football. Even when we told them that the original script had the two main characters in a lesbian relationship. Even when we told them one of the main characters was played by Keira Knightley.
Which, as it turned out, was all for the best, at least for me and Anna.
And now? Ask any student, they’ll tell you that student loans don’t go far enough, and that there’s only so many hours you can fit into a vacation job without killing yourself. Also, that shared houses for eight aren’t cheap, particularly if you’re sharing with six computer science students, who run up best-left-unopened electricity bills.
All of which is a long way of saying, second year rolled round, we moved off campus and into a house with the lads, and Anna and I went off and got part-time jobs.
Leamington, as it turns out, doesn’t have a multiplex cinema. The one they do have, the Apollo, has been around since the 1950s, and hasn’t been what you’d call extensively refurbished in that time. It’s old and a little battered, with red velvet seats and thick blue curtains covering the two screens. The ushers and usherettes wear black trousers, black shoes – not trainers, under any circumstances – and smart white shirts, with little name tags. We have pen lights for showing late comers to their seats and we always go home with our pockets full of torn off cinema tickets from checking them, because the cinema doesn’t even run to single hold punches.
The two screening rooms are tiny and too hot, no matter what time of year it is. Even when a film’s being shown, they’re not completely dark, full of flickering shadows from the projection equipment.
Anna and I have a door each, opposite each other, and when the lights are dimmed and everyone’s involved in a film we’ve already seen half a dozen times and could probably recite on request, it’s light enough that we can smile at each other, and sometimes even catch the promises the other one is mouthing.
We started our relationship in a place like this, of shadows and darkness and flickering light. There’s nowhere more appropriate for it to be carrying on.
Of course, where I lived we didn’t actually have a cinema, but there was an old theatre in the town centre, and the Friends of the Theatre put on plays there and ran films when they were in rehearsal. It was a beautiful place, with red velvet seats and high ceilings decorated with gold scrolls and swirls. To an eight year old, it was another world, the kind of place where I believed magic could happen, and the films were real.
I wanted to be an usherette. I thought the little pen lights they all had were beyond cool, and they looked so smart in their black and white uniforms. They always smiled at us when we climbed the stairs up to our seats at the front of the balcony, and there were a couple of regulars who recognised us after a while and said hello.
For a long time, I believed they controlled the films that were being shown, and I thought it would be great to be able to pick what was on. To sit in the theatre and watch it as many times as I wanted. Plus, they had trays of ice creams that they wore round their necks – I suppose they must have had intervals in the films, since they were only meant for kids with short attention spans – and I used to think they got to live on ice cream. They were like teachers, without an existence outside of the cinema.
We must have seen every Disney film that was released before I turned twelve and declared that I was too old for kids’ cinema, especially since that was the first birthday I was allowed to have a sleep-over, and for which my parents bought me a tiny bottle of perfume. I was a proper grown up then.
Until then, though, my sister wanted to be Cinderella, or Belle, from ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the beautiful princess with the dashing prince who came to her rescue. Personally, I think that was more about the clothes than anything else – the Disney princes were never really all that, considering they were fairy tale princes, let’s face it. Either that, or she was sold on the glass slippers Cinderella wore – my sister’s always been into her shoes.
I suppose we must have been to other things as well – I remember seeing ‘The Secret Garden’, and crying, though what it was about it that made me cry I can’t now remember – but the biggest excitement was going to an evening film. It meant getting dressed up, not just going out in whatever you were wearing that day, and putting on smart shoes, not school shoes.
My best friend’s mum took her and me to see ‘The Aristocats’ one evening, that I do remember. She picked me up in her car, which was a tiny white Fiat Panda – isn’t it weird the things you remember, years afterwards? I must have been about eight, I guess, because we went to different middle schools not long after and lost touch, and we had seats near the screen, not on the balcony like usual, and it was dark when we left. None of the usherettes I recognised from Saturday mornings were there, but we had sweets, M&Ms, I think.
There must have been loads of other children there with us, because I remember it being crowded, but we both felt so grown-up, going out in the evening – which was probably about half past five, since it was a kids’ cartoon. I’ve forgotten almost the entire film, apart from one scene with a lot of cats singing and walking on a piano, I don’t even remember the story-line, but I remember it being the most exciting thing that had happened to me for quite a while at the time.
I also remember crying when we had to go home, because I didn’t want it to be over.
Some things never change.
***
Some things never change, but plenty do, and by the time I was old enough to start going to see films that featured people rather than animals or fairy-tale characters, they’d built a multiplex cinema on one of the industrial estates on the very edge of town. Which was hardly the ideal place for a cinema to be, since none of the buses went anyway near there, but that’s what parents are for when you’re fourteen, right? Plus, it showed five different films at a time, was open every night, and sold popcorn.
I went with my new friends from high school on Saturday afternoons – see, some things really do never change – because our parents were protective and didn’t like us being out there in the evenings, when the older kids would be out. It was a nice feeling even though, like being part of a group, being accepted and belonging.
I couldn’t tell you, now, what we used to see, just lots of romantic comedies, nothing particularly memorable. Is there such a thing as a memorable romantic comedy when you’re fifteen?
It really was an excellent cinema, with huge screens and black aisles with little lights in them, like on an aeroplane. Lots of shiny glass and metal in the foyer, with plenty of lights, and bright posters advertising the latest releases, the smell of popcorn permeating the whole place, clinging to our clothes when we went home. The cinema staff all wore black uniforms, and little black baseball caps with the cinema’s name on them in silver script. They called the films ‘movies’ and charged twice as much as the theatre, which was still showing kids films.
It made us feel very American to go there, like the girls in the Sweet Valley High books. All we needed was a diner where we could go and hang out afterwards, drinking cherry Cola and eating curly fries, and never putting on weight, so all the boys would still want us. As if they wanted us in the first place.
It’s funny, the places you have sudden moments of revelation. We were sitting in the cinema’s café bar, drinking Diet Cokes, because at sixteen we figured that was as good as salad, especially if we shared the French fries, instead of having a box each. My friends were talking about the lead guy in whatever film we’d just seen, I don’t know, how cute he was, and I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention because I was thinking about the girl who’d checked our tickets at the door, who was two years above me at school and probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
There should have been a light bulb going on by my right ear, but I was a sixteen year old in a small town, and there wasn’t anybody there who didn’t want to get married and have kids – I was just glad my friends didn’t choose that moment to ask me what I thought about whoever I was supposed to be talking about with them.
After that, I paid even less attention to the films than I had before. I liked watching the other people in the audience, and the staff, especially once the lights had gone down and everything was bathed in the flickering grey light on the screen. I suppose I was mostly looking for the girl from my school, at least at first. We used to sit about halfway back, not far from the entrances, which were the easiest to see, and the staff were more interesting than the audience staring transfixed at the screen.
They weren’t like the usherettes at Saturday cinema, who used to sit just inside the doors throughout the film. These slipped in and out, checked tickets for late-comers, walked up and down the aisles, hushed people… they certainly didn’t seem to be there to watch the films.
Sitting there, in a proper, American-style cinema, I felt nostalgic for Saturday films in the theatre, with the red and gold and the usherettes with ice cream trays. That had seemed a lot more magical – we’d really believed, for quite a while, that the people on the screen lived there, and that if we saw that film again it would end differently. The dimming lights in the cinema were exciting, the start of something amazing, no matter how many times we went.
Somehow, the modern, state-of-the-art cinema wasn’t the same, and it wasn’t as good.
***
Of course, it’s not that hard to get used to a lot of things, and I got used to the new cinema, and to being different from the people I was there with. I suppose you’d say I got used to pretending, or maybe acting, since we’re talking about films.
I got used to it, and then I got a place at university, and off I went. It was a campus university, so no cinema unless we wanted to trail into the city centre on the bus, which most of the time we didn’t. There was an arts centre that sometimes showed films, but it was expensive, and they tended to be the kind of foreign language films that the slightly pretentious English Lit student across the corridor from me in halls would see and come back and rave about. And this was in the days before everyone had DVD players on their laptops, so no films at all.
Then, about three weeks into the first term, we discovered the student cinema. They showed a different film every night, some new releases, some classics, and a whole bunch of things I’d never even heard of, but which my new, film-mad best friend, Anna, would scream with delight about, and the tickets were only one fifty for students. They were even based on the campus, a ten minute walk from our hall of residence.
In a lecture theatre, to be precise.
It was certainly different, and looking back, I suppose it was a bit weird, but we were first years, living away from home for the first time, and it was just one more thing that made university different from home, and an infinitely preferable place to be. And so, with a student loan dictated social life (which is to say, not much of a one), my new friends and I saw a lot of the inside of that lecture theatre. Some more than others, since it turned out to belong to the Computer Science department, and us two girls, despite knowing very little about computers beyond how to turn one on, seemed to have somehow got ourselves taken in by a bunch of male com-sci first years.
Well, stranger things have happened.
We saw everything, from major films – ‘Lord of the Rings’, anyone? – to teenage feel-good movies – ‘Save the Last Dance’, where the entire female half of the audience sniffed their way through the scenes about her dead mom – to martial arts flicks – the lads mocking the story-line of ‘Romeo Must Die’ from start to finish while the Anna and I were busy being amazed by the fight scenes, that being in the pre-‘Matrix’, pre-‘Crouching Tiger’ days, when those were still new and amazing.
We saw ‘Memento’, and spent the next week trying to figure out the plot, which made our heads hurt. We saw the first ‘Ghostbusters’ movie, and bonded over shared childhood TV shows. We even took my little sister to see ‘U-571’, the most unintentionally funny Second World War film I’ve ever seen, when she came to visit.
Sometimes we went with all the guys, sometimes just one or two of them, sometimes half the corridor tagged along and sometimes it was just me and Anna. Whoever came with us, though, it was always the two of us.
It took me till Easter vacation to realise what was going on – I’d got used to pretending, and I suppose when I went off to university, I forgot that I could stop. Didn’t realise, for a while, that there might be something in not pretending any longer.
I’ve always had best friends, since as far back as I can remember, and they’ve always been female. We’ve always done everything together, and I’ve always wanted to spend all of my time with them, and share everything with them. Anna was just like that – when it came time to choose housemates for next year, we picked each other and then set about finding a few people who’d come in with us; we went looking for each other as soon as we got in from lectures, we went to breakfast together, we rang each other during the day, and on weekends when we went home. The boys joked about us being joined at the hip, and everyone assumed that in inviting one of us along they were inviting the other one as well. I think they knew before we did – our hall-mates weren’t stupid.
I could go on about what happened, in great and probably mind-numbing (not for me, obviously) detail, but I won’t. I like things that are just mine, and this is one of them. Suffice it to say that it’s funny, the places you have sudden moments of revelation, and it’s even funnier the number of mine that have taken place in cinemas, because we’d actually made the effort to go off campus and into the city, to the real cinema there. We were supposed to meet the guys afterwards and go ice-skating, but that never happened. They’d refused to come with us, even when we argued that the film was about football. Even when we told them that the original script had the two main characters in a lesbian relationship. Even when we told them one of the main characters was played by Keira Knightley.
Which, as it turned out, was all for the best, at least for me and Anna.
And now? Ask any student, they’ll tell you that student loans don’t go far enough, and that there’s only so many hours you can fit into a vacation job without killing yourself. Also, that shared houses for eight aren’t cheap, particularly if you’re sharing with six computer science students, who run up best-left-unopened electricity bills.
All of which is a long way of saying, second year rolled round, we moved off campus and into a house with the lads, and Anna and I went off and got part-time jobs.
Leamington, as it turns out, doesn’t have a multiplex cinema. The one they do have, the Apollo, has been around since the 1950s, and hasn’t been what you’d call extensively refurbished in that time. It’s old and a little battered, with red velvet seats and thick blue curtains covering the two screens. The ushers and usherettes wear black trousers, black shoes – not trainers, under any circumstances – and smart white shirts, with little name tags. We have pen lights for showing late comers to their seats and we always go home with our pockets full of torn off cinema tickets from checking them, because the cinema doesn’t even run to single hold punches.
The two screening rooms are tiny and too hot, no matter what time of year it is. Even when a film’s being shown, they’re not completely dark, full of flickering shadows from the projection equipment.
Anna and I have a door each, opposite each other, and when the lights are dimmed and everyone’s involved in a film we’ve already seen half a dozen times and could probably recite on request, it’s light enough that we can smile at each other, and sometimes even catch the promises the other one is mouthing.
We started our relationship in a place like this, of shadows and darkness and flickering light. There’s nowhere more appropriate for it to be carrying on.
