Hallowe’en is coming. And for the first time since 2019 it is a Hallowe’en capable of having hijinks be plotted for it. Great! And yet…
The Lighthouse is showing The Shining and The Thing on the big screen over the Hallowe’en Bank Holiday Weekend. I am interested to see both on the big screen. Interested, but not enthused. I still find the return to normality while COVID still swirls about … unnerving. Especially as my private fear, with which I have freaked out numerous people, remains a twindemic of a nasty flu season coupled with a resurgence of COVID in a new variation that combines the original’s lethality with Omicron’s transmissibility, forcing everyone to stay indoors for yet another months-long lockdown just as a second Beast from the East descends upon us that stays for weeks not days this time round, and rolling blackouts courtesy of the energy crisis caused by Putin’s war on Ukraine plunge us all into teeth-chattering frozen hell. But I digress.
As much as I find the universal pretence that COVID is done weird, I am also wary of cinema audiences for another reason. 2016’s late night screening of Halloween at the Lighthouse. Sure, I can think of films that were pretty miserable viewing experiences for me; Crawl, The Monk; but usually that was one or two people going out of their way to be obnoxious, by social media phone scrolling and incessant loud talking over the film. 2016 was the first time I was party to an entire cinema going out of its way to be obnoxious. And feeling very old, and also very disconnected from the baffling attitude on display. Which leads me to think that by studying English at college, I was part of a bubble. One that may not exist any longer, even within that rarefied field.
I am interested in history in general, and this extends into burrowing with curiosity and sympathy into the back catalogue of cinema. But I have to admit that for many people, probably I fear the vast majority, they frankly couldn’t give a damn. (And wouldn’t get that reference to the actual most popular film ever made) The very young, very very drunk audience, mostly in party later on fancy dress costume, was hooting in derision from the get-go. At anything and everything, any detail of dialogue or costume or reality (like a 70s car) that revealed the movie as having been made in 1978. I couldn’t understand this attitude of unbridled contempt then, and still struggle with it now. Do they not think generations as yet unborn will hoot in self-same derision in 2046 at the films they hold precious now?
A degree in English meant absorbing a lot of English history by a process of osmosis. To understand the text in the context in which it was produced. A transferable skill to other mediums. Just take The Prisoner. When Patrick McGoohan arrives in The Village and finds himself being disconcertingly referred to as Number 6 he is then shown around by Number 2, preparatory to the real business of interrogation. And Number 2 is played by Guy Doleman, who was familiar to English television audiences at that moment as a Spectre agent in Thunderball and an enigmatic spymaster in Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer trilogy. Tell me Six is a spy without telling me he’s a spy.
Talking Movies 