Photo by Sarah MacDonald
I sat in a movie theatre for the first time in, oh, I don’t know, four or five years. It was like slipping on an old winter glove, warm and familiar. I had my much too big iced tea, my far too many Twizzlers, still in my kitchen cabinet; seats that enveloped my whole body, saying, “stay awhile, don’t think about what’s out there.” And I didn’t. Not for more than two hours.
I had been running late to meet Jenn at Varsity because the transit in my new neighbourhood is all over the place. Really though, if I’m honest, the exhaustion and tension of the move caught up to me, and Dan and I fought because I wanted something somewhere else in the apartment but we need this, that, and perhaps the other to get it to where I want this place to be. I’m not happy with my external world being so messy. I have no patience. So, I said something haughty and stupid, and then hurried anyway—walking down the alleyway from my building to the main street, missing the first bus to the subway station, walking a bit further to kill time until the next one came. I was sweaty, sure my pink eyeshadow began to run.
Barbie is fun in the way that it reminds you how stupid and funny Ryan Gosling was on Breaker High. That quiet singer and writer of Dead Man’s Bones singing Matchbox 20 for what seemed like ten minutes straight. I thought about how, if I were still the kind of hot take writer I needed to be at Noisey, what I would write about this for traffic to the site. I thought of my friends in my group chat, doing Caribana stuff, music stuff, whatever you do in Regina-stuff, and what tethers us together still, this comedy and affection for one another and the world around us.
I think we would have written about how “Wonderwall” would have been a better choice, as obvious as it may seem, because so many of us had been forced to listen to the most average of men play it and we had to pretend they did a good job.
Barbie’s message, while I guess important, and certainly so in a mainstream way, and certainly so for Greta Gerwig, felt very 2014. Like the blogs we read on Jezebel or the manifestos on Facebook or Twitter before you could thread. Like Beyoncé putting FEMINIST on stage. I’m deep into Ellen Willis’ longread, “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution,” wondering about how we’ve been saying the same things to each other privately or publicly for decades and decades; posturing feminism, fighting for feminism, and bemoaning feminism and gender and all of the other topics that shoot out or collide with such a vast idea.
But, now, in 2023, is when CNN runs a piece about what the patriarchy is. (The call is coming from inside the house.) Not just that, Mattel was a key producer, and in my time working with *cough* brands and B2B *cough*, I know that getting such a sign off from a brand with their name on it has to be beneficial to them. Even if it means making something exceptionally meta and finger-pointing, Mattel still gains so much. A brand isn’t a person until the executive behind it has a say.
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I didn’t want to write this much about Barbie so I won’t any longer. I did like it, for what it’s worth, and I’ll move on.
I haven’t been good at movies for a very long time. I still haven’t watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. I haven’t watched Gone Girl. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Dune. I feel deeply uncomfortable about Oppenheimer as a portrait of a “genius” when that “genius’s” work killed people in Japan and New Mexico. But I have been good at watching Hollywood classics—the sort of films from the ripe era of film star contracts, loaning actors out to different studios, those studios owning movie theatre chains. A different, while similar, sort of capitalist, profiting structure.
I’ve watched 35 movies this year, the majority of which have been between 1927 and 1974. I loved Rear Window and Marnie, despite all of the ways Alfred Hitchcock was gross. I found myself craving Humphrey Bogart films so I devoured In a Lonely Place, The Roaring Twenties (unintentionally funny, in my opinion), The Maltese Falcon, and High Sierra. I loved Bogie and John Huston, as wildly weird drunks as they were. Then I wanted to know more about Bogie and Lauren Bacall. I think Dark Passage is their best film together. I didn’t start with To Have and Have Not (but got there eventually.) Key Largo is second best, followed by The Big Sleep. There’s something about Dark Passage that I enjoyed above all the others, that kept my attention unlike the other Bogie and Bacall hits. They were married by then, but because it was my first film of theirs together, I felt a chemistry that I can only describe as new, sizzling—like they were still being introduced to each other. That the first third or so of the film begins with a first-person perspective of Bogart’s prison breaking Vincent until he gets plastic surgery to change his face was really fascinating to me. It’s not revolutionary, it was just captivating.
My all-time favourite watch this year, outside of the studio system, and in the era when independent filmmakers began their rise, was Klute. I’ll never again know the feeling of watching Klute again for the very first time. I love Jane Fonda, I loved this movie, I loved every scene featuring her Bree Daniels in therapy—how candid and painfully relatable Bree could be, about dressing up and performing.
I find myself more in my body when I watch movies during this vast expanse from the past. I don’t want to critique them; see how they are placed within the larger culture (which I’m admittedly doing now) or make meaning out of them. They just are. They existed then as products and stories for sale; they exist now as time capsules for narratives of American life that may or may not have been true. That’s the thing with stories. You never know what’s going to be real or not; true or massaged; fleshed out, polished.
I don’t look at my phone when I watch these movies. I don’t scroll, don’t really text, just watch the movie the way the movie ought to be watched.
I take a photo of the film titles for Instagram, and then see the engagement of those who like what I’m watching and support it. There’s something comfortable and sweet about this kind of content. “Here I am watching films that are 70 plus years old and you’re along for the ride.”
I’ve leaned a lot on the noir genre for this film fix of mine, fascinated by the ways women are portrayed as femme fatales, and how gruff the men are in their big trenchcoats. How many cigarettes are dragged on in a scene. How delicate each woman looks placing a cigarette to her lips, her eyes drooping just so that you can’t help but be enchanted. It’s a good trick developed by men, mimicked by women. I guess I’m thinking about Barbie now.
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In moments of big change, I get desperately nostalgic. Perhaps these movies saved me from such dwelling, I’m not sure, because the nostalgia is for a time I don’t particularly want to exist again but enjoy being part of for an hour and forty minutes. On the last night in our previous apartment, I slept maybe four hours. All of July I was so wound up over finding an apartment, preparing to move from an apartment, and settle into a new one. The eczema in my fingernails is so out of control because of the stress. I have lotion and low dose steroid creams everywhere, now turning to apple cider vinegar for relief.
We moved east, and I feel happier here, I think, but the dust hasn’t settled from all of the anxiety I’ve held onto since June. Maybe since May. Since thinking about what’s next, who to be, how to be, and where to go.
But that last night at the Bloor apartment I grieved. I felt the very real pain of what I had worked so hard for leaving me. The place I felt so at home in, even a little too at home, because of how much I tucked myself away in that space. It was perfect. Or close to perfect for renting.
Classic Hollywood held those big feelings for a minute. Those disappointments. The emotions in such movies are just bigger, grander. The drama. (I’m picturing Norma Desmond’s face in Sunset Boulevard—another all-time favourite of mine now.) Yet, you must confront change, those feelings, and not on a screen. I tried hard to ignore them and just got to work. You know, planning, list-making, measuring, ordering, boxing and unboxing, decorating, nesting.
Now, I’m watching the rain nourish my plants in a way I couldn’t in my previous place. There’s a glimmer of something like contentment. I’ve left my house every day during this first week and went back to the movies. There’s another glimmer of something like contentment, not hiding, not being afraid of what’s next despite absolutely not knowing what that looks like or is. I’m still watching these films (next is The Bad and the Beautiful) for me, for learning and absorbing, for entertainment.
I’m sitting on the edge looking out and right now I don’t know what’s ahead.
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(For the record, and it absolutely must be said: Citizen Kane sucks so hard.)
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This essay is brilliant. Having grown up watching these old movies, some of them on late night TV as a teen, Sarah has captured the allure and the fascination these films commanded in their avid audiences.
I can't use words like Sarah can, but she touched my heart when she wrote that she didn't text or scroll. She just watched, engrossed in the story and the characters. Laughed about Citizen Kane. I agree! Weaving her own story of grief as she left her apt. made these film forays even more significant and relatable. So well written. Thanks, Sarah!