(3 of 3)
One difference between him and Kael, or any other professional reviewer, is that Murphy has earned the perspective of the average moviegoer. He paid for his ticket; he didn't have a publicist holding a "reserved" seat for him; he had to sit through a lot of crappy previews and commercials; he got his feet stomped on by yabbos on their way to the loo. He knows that, in real movie theaters, there often is something wrong with the projector. Or maybe with the print. As a Hollywood big shot recently confided to me, the quality of new movie prints varies widely, and the poorer prints go to smaller cities and second-run theaters.
In fact, Murphy would be the ideal face in the crowd, except for three movie connections: (1) He and the MST3K crew were sucked into a no-win deal with Universal on a big-screen version of the show. (2) He is sort-of related to Roger Ebert, since "Roger now looks exactly like my grandmother Grace Murphy would if you'd put her in a Land's End blazer and given her a more mannish haircut." And (3) Kevin's wife's maiden name is Jane Wagner. Didn't she used to be married to Lily Tomlin?
DINNER AND A MOVIE
You might wonder why I'm devoting a column called That Old Feeling to "one man's filmgoing odyssey" in the Kubrickian year 2001. Have I become nostalgic for 11 months ago? Not at all. But I do find it old-feeling that Murphy thought of building a book around the act of going to the movies — because, these days, movies come to you. Americans, everybody, see many more films on TV (either on broadcast and cable channels or through the VCR) than at theaters. Even the modest effort required to rent a film from a video store is being replaced by the lovely lassitude of renting movies through the mail (L.B. Mayer, meet L.L. Bean) or simply plugging an ultra-high-speed computer into a Napster-type movie download program. Soon we all can recline into the lard of our physical indolence and become the boy in the bubble, fed movies intravenously.
Murphy nicely atomizes the fall from grace of the cinematic experience: how audiences once made pilgrimages to movie palaces and cathedrals, but now drive to malls where films have no more sanctity than any other form of shopping. Theaters are warehouses in the K-marting of moviegoing. Visiting one of these "giant blockhouses stuffed with cushy, charmless high-tech screening tombs," Murphy writes, "I get the feeling I'm going into a sensory deprivation tank to take part in some sort of mass experiment."
And from the endless variety of filmed entertainment, what is offered to "us, the poor bleating ewes"? Precious little: 57 screens, nothing on. "Because of the Compulsory Films Act of 1975, known as the 'Jaws' Act, everybody must forsake variety and see the top three or four films as determined by the National Blockbuster Administration." Yet he realizes it's useless to resist the Hollywood pandemic as it spreads to the local googolplex (a word I think I coined, by the way). "I'll come here to see massive galaxy-wide blockbusters when they come out. If I'm going to be desensitized into a mindless stock animal, I may as well do it with ... ergonomic seats and magnificent THX-certified sound."
Still a resident of the Twin Cities area, Murphy visits the nearby Muller Family Theatres Lakeville 18, at the intersection of I-35 and County Road 70; doesn't quite have the romance of Hollywood and Vine, does it? Read this to be depressed (by the truth of his observation) and energized (by the snap of his writing): "From the highway the Lakeville 18 looks like a displaced airport terminal. Acres of sand-colored brick bereft of any style, with a parking lot I believe actually used to be Iowa. Inside it has eighteen theaters, one hundred yards of concession stands, and a lobby that could comfortably contain Cirque du Soleil."
We later learn that the lure of the Lakeville 18 for Murphy: it has exotic cuisine. "The buffalo jerky tastes like beef, the ostrich jerky tastes like a bland pork-tinged chicken, and the crocodile jerky tastes like your tongue." Devouring this and other carbohydraulics in a week in which he consumed only movie-theater food, Murphy felt his taste buds rebel, then shut down: "The whole of my mouth seemed coated with wood sealer."
And here we are at the book's thick-veined heart. Murphy believes that the movie consumer is someone who consumes at the movies. If movies be the love of food, he says, then on with the show. He devotes one chapter to his love of tater tots. He is enraptured to discover that, at one Australian movie house, he can take wine, in a wine glass, made of glass, to his seat (leading to a nice quote, possibly from Brecht: "A theater without beer is just a museum"). He believes in the illegal transport of popcorn across googolplex lines: "Your own smuggled food is always better, hand-picked, and enhanced by the flavor of defiance." The emotional climax of "A Year at the Movies" is his smuggling of an entire Thanksgiving dinner, with all the fixin's and a table, into a local theater. Cinephile? Gourmand? Neither word quite does Murphy justice. Go with cine-foodie.
But then Murphy is omnivorous. Here is a guy who sat in some auditorium or other every day for 12 grueling months, exposed to the whole range of movies (except for Bollywood musicals — how could he have missed that delirious treat?), from pretty good down to awful, in one of the lamest years in cinema history. And at the end he could still say: "The cinema is a miracle. Great drama, humor, sound, and spectacle, image and motion, all malleable, all portable, seen in a crowd, the world shown to the world, our modern circus, our timeless stage."
Anyone who can locate the wonder in movies after a year of watching them professionally deserves a pass on "Cinema Paradiso." If MST3K taught us anything, besides how to feel educated while laughing at stupid things, it's that one man's cheesy movie is another man's Saint Andre. What's "MASH" to "Mary" may be "Their Purple Moment" to Kevin. The important thing is to find someone, or something, to love. That's an odyssey worth taking.