Yesterday afternoon, my dad and I met a friend of mine from college at an art-house/repertory movie theater to see The Master, in 70mm to boot. My dad and I arrived early, and while we were waiting beside the box office, we overheard a woman stressing over her ticket purchase. My dad whispered to me that she was taking so long to make up her mind about which format to see the film in—70 or 35mm—that she’d probably still be there when we came out of the movie. I could have sworn that he said she was weird, too, but he denies this. Whatever. I was thinking it at the time. A little later on, after the three of us had selected our seats, all the way in the back, she appeared again, now fretting over where she should sit at a 70mm film screening. Truth be told, the screen wasn’t very big, given the size of the auditorium. Someone else told her that she should just sit wherever she would normally feel comfortable. Yeah, she’s weird alright. And that wasn’t the last we saw of her.
After the movie, we grabbed dinner at a Persian eatery nearby. When we sat down, who should appear but the weirdo lady from The Master? (Man, I wish I’d tried to write this in the form of Tig Notaro’s funny bit about continually bumping into… Taylor Dane.) She leaned across her table and asked, “Were you at The Master?”
“Oh yeah,” one—or all—of us said.
“I couldn’t stand it. I walked out. It was so obvious and trite.”
Intrigued, I inquired, “Why did you want to see it?” To which she replied, “Because everyone’s been saying it’s a great movie!” I realized then that that was the wrong question to ask her. I thought it up because I had observed how seemingly difficult it was just for her to choose a format and a seat. In other words, she looked out of her element there anyway. I also wondered how much she knew about the film beforehand, and whether or not that tainted her impression of it to such an extent that she used those empty words (“obvious” and “trite”). Instead, what I should have prodded her about was her choice of words to describe the film. No one in my party enjoyed watching the film, but I found it intellectually stimulating, latching onto an allegory early on and testing it throughout, scene by scene, as if it were a hypothesis that is the key to understanding a central theme (what is human nature?).
Despite the tone with which I am now relating our encounter, I assure you that our conversation was indeed friendly. Even exciting. It’s been a very long time since I exchanged perspectives and opinions with a complete stranger about a film we’d only just seen—together but separate. We even got nostalgic, as we all remembered River Phoenix, who may or may not have been a finer actor than his little brother. “We’ll never know,” I said, “because he didn’t reach his fullest potential.”
But I still wanted to know more about her visceral reaction to The Master. I asked her at what point she left the theater. It then became apparent she had left at least twice, maybe even three times, always whenever Joaquin Phoenix’s character attacked another man for being critical of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s titular (cult) leader. My father, friend, and I all thought, If you couldn’t stand it, then why did you keep coming back? But of course we didn’t ask. We weren’t the rude ones in this situation.
The details governing the rest of our interaction with this weird lady are a little fuzzy. At several points, she disappeared and then suddenly returned. (My friend brilliantly quipped that she goes in and out of conversations the same way she goes in and out of movies.) She told us she was waiting to go back to the same movie-house to see Josef von Sternberg’s silent gangster classic Underworld from 1927. “I just hope I like it, that it’s not boring.” Having seen it, I administered a survey of questions in order to help her predict whether or not she’ll likely to enjoy it. Have you seen a silent film before? A silent gangster picture? In the end, I determined that she would be fine. Besides, it’s a shorter film by far, and it goes by at a much faster clip. Plus, there was going to be live musical accompaniment.
When it came time for her to leave, my dad said, “Bye. It was nice talking with you.” (How sweet!) She barely acknowledged him. I had wanted to say, “Enjoy the movie!” but I stopped. Clearly she was not on the same wavelength; she had absolutely no social graces, and I didn’t want to engage her further. Through the course of our approximately five-minute-long conversation, she had only come down to earth sporadically.
But I do wonder what she thought of Underworld.
The Rumination Refinery 