The Brooklyn Rail

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the inaugural edition of “Seeing in the Dark,” an annual list curated by the Film editors and featuring stories not so much about movies, but rather about the act of watching a movie and the (often dark or dimly lit) spaces in which we enjoy them. Even if you watch a movie alone, you’re still joining a community of viewers, and we want to hear about those communal cinematic experiences. We can now watch movies anywhere, any time: on our phones, in the theater, on a laptop, on the TV. I bet we’ll be able to somehow play them through sunglasses soon enough. We can view our favorite pictures with commercials or pay to have them removed; very few of us watch them on cable, edited and chopped up by endless ads. Some of us—gasp!—even play the occasional DVD. The idea of how you watch a movie is nearly as important as the movie itself; it can affect how you feel about the movie and different showing situations can change that emotional response. How we watch can be evidence of democratization or fodder for controversy. So, please join our watch party and enjoy these tales of our most memorable movie showings as well as how it connected us to loved ones and strangers alike.

Sincerely,

Laura Valenza and Edward Mendez
Film Editors

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“No. Wire. Hangers. EVERRRRRR.” Faye Dunaway’s infamously irascible line from Mommie Dearest (1981) echoes with a different energy when chanted in unison by two hundred moviegoers. In the mouths of a queer crowd, the words shed something of Joan Crawford’s proverbial vitriol and take on—like the mask of makeup that covers Dunaway’s face in the legendary scene—an air of campy merriment. Is it essentializing (and insensitive) to suggest that only a gay audience could turn a chronicle of child abuse into a laughing matter? Perhaps. But such is the nature of queer irony. And such was the irreverent alchemy of the Midnight Mass film screenings at San Francisco’s Bridge Theatre, staged by the uproarious drag queen Peaches Christ (Joshua Grannell) and various collaborators for more than a decade. Interpreted by Peaches and Heklina (another San Francisco institution until her tragic death two years ago), the short sketch “Mommie Queerest” preceded the screening of Frank Perry’s ill-fated film, drawing out even further its (unintentional) over-the-topness. “Mommie Queerest” turned the cruel swim race scene between Crawford and her long suffering daughter into a wig-teasing contest between dueling drag queens. Even now, I howl with laughter remembering Peaches’ arch condescension to her young charge, her makeup only slightly more dramatic than Dunaway’s runaway eyebrows. Yet just as delightful was the audience’s recitation (by heart) of the meatiest lines as the film ensued. Midnight Mass lives on as a podcast by Peaches and Michael Varrati, for which they send up their favorite classics. But nothing can replace the magic of that theater or its raucous chorus of queer joy—making Christina Crawford’s pain our own and laughing it out together.

—Ara H. Merjian

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A dominating TikTok trend of summer 2024 highlighted 4DX screenings of Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters (2024), featuring simulated weather, wind spouts, mist, and artificial lightning. I went to one in a nearby Regal theater in Flushing—it was a blast (sometimes literally!), and it made me really enjoy what otherwise looked like a passable blockbuster. But that’s what’s dangerous about it; it’s a theme park attraction no longer just confined to theme parks, but available directly in our everyday (somewhat affordable) cultural experiences. Further, screenings of this nature violate the creative intentions of the filmmakers, and thus dilute or obscure the very meaning of the film in question. Cultural theorists as early as the late nineteenth century have postulated on art and performance being adorned with accessories and external decor, creating a totality that destroys the act of critical thinking. The all-encompassing nature of Twisters in 4DX severed my critical faculties so that I was left with no other choice but to become enveloped, adrenalized by the roller-coaster seat movements, giddy with laughter from the wind shooting into my ears, relaxed from the light mist that oozed from the pores of my seat whenever a storm-chasing scene kicked in.

—Tyler Thier

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I’ve always loved going to a crappy movie theater. My favorite? The AMC Empire 25 in Times Square. This movie theater has been held up specifically as an exemplar of why the theatergoing experience has struggled (a Vulture piece once knocked it by name for its “sagging” screens and dim bulbs). But something about this perennially empty former Broadway playhouse with actively uncanny, Backrooms-style architecture and bizarrely scheduled showtimes feels more honest than, say, an Alamo Drafthouse. It houses the ghosts of multiplexes past, present, and future—all of whom I feel like I’ve personally met at the Empire 25. When I went to see Presence (2024) at midnight with a friend this winter, an older man in a bathrobe (the only other person in the theater) took off one of his socks and started pouring cheap brandy on his bare foot, complaining about how boring he thought the movie was turning out to be. We come to this place for magic…

—Payton McCarty-Simas

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The most amazing cinema experience I’ve had in maybe forever just happened to me last week: I watched a live stream of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre opera in a small English town. Recently, the nearly six-hour-long (with intermissions) epic screened in more than five hundred cinemas across the UK and in twenty two countries simultaneously. Organized by the Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) in London, the international spectacle worked like magic. To think that you can sit in a cinema and be in that collective experience unfolding in real-time in so many other countries across the world… How mesmerizing! Not only that, but to render this nineteenth-century, SIX-hour-long great opera cinematically during an age of instant gratification and thirty-second reels—that just defied dominant formats and standards in a way that felt incredibly satisfying (and affordable!). I’ve been replaying the evening in my mind ever since.

—Farah Abdessamad

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In 2017, attending Cannes for the first time as an intern, I somehow found myself in possession of the festival’s most talked-about ticket: a sneak peek of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. This was beyond my wildest dreams. The problem was, I’d so little planned on my dreams coming true that the nicest thing in my suitcase was a grey cardigan. Premieres at Cannes are strictly black-tie. Friends provided me with a shirt, jacket, and bowtie, but I still ran afoul of the fashion police for my pants, which I had hemmed myself, and which showed off a pair of socks so red they matched the carpet. To be let in, I had to run to Zara, where I purchased the first pair of black slacks I found and changed in a store elevator as it moved between floors. I made it back in time to be let into the very last row of the balcony. I remember how odd it was, getting all dressed up just to sit in the dark.

—Nolan Kelly

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Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle (1961) is a text of transpositions. Age, emigration, languages, and spaces—all these can dislocate the familiar. Lee Grant’s 1980 adaptation, restored in 2022, understands this well. A rare screening at Film Forum, attended by Grant and Brooke Adams, who was thirty when she played the film’s testament to youth and vitality, understood it, too. Running late, I found myself seated behind the pair. With their silhouettes superimposed, I couldn’t help but watch Adams watch herself on screen. Up ahead: that famous dimpled smile. In the crowd: a bemused cant to a silver head. In the film, Adams plays witness to her dying grandmother, a woman displaced from the radical contexts of her youth. A final sequence sees her conjure up rural Russia in downtown San Francisco. Echoes, of image and audio, abound. When the film ended, Grant, ninety-nine years old and one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s original blacklist, made her way to the front of the room. “I’ve seen it before, of course,” she said of watching her first-ever feature in the theater. “But it was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

—Jadie Stillwell

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I saw Ana Vaz’s É Noite na América [It is Night in America] (2022) at the Open City Documentary Festival in London when I attended the Open City x Another Gaze Critics Workshop in early September 2022. I was terribly jetlagged and felt myself drifting in and out of spatial awareness, as if hypnotized—or dosed. This transcendent state felt like exactly the right way to view Vaz’s trance-like, observational documentary about the encroachment of animals in Brasilia—or, rather, our own encroachment into their habitats. In Vaz’s film, there is a recurring tension between the anthropomorphic gaze and the animals who look back. We are implicitly implicated in their unwavering stare. With a mesmeric soundtrack from Vaz’s father, Guilherme Vaz, and midnight blue cityscapes that further amplified my already soporific state, Vaz’s film lingers within me (as the best dreams often do) with its themes and subjects of colonial violence, captivity, and eco-poetics.

—Hannah Bonner

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I have often heard complaints that old movies are not really scary. Yet I have personally witnessed three accounts of an audience screaming in terror at revival theatrical screenings of a certain 1975 film. Each time, the exact same scene got all of us who had smugly settled into the cushy seats, convinced we knew this movie inside and out and thought it wasn’t that frightening. The movie was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and the scene is the nighttime investigation of the abandoned boat, specifically the jump scare when the severed head falls out of the boat. Jaws screens every July at the Princeton Garden Theatre in New Jersey, where I once worked to fund my insatiable movie habit. I’d seen the movie many times; I owned a T-shirt (“Quint’s Shark Fishing”); my 2001 Toyota was named Quint (it was gray with lots of scars); I no longer boogie-boarded when down the shore for the day. The annual Garden showing is so popular, the little venue often fills both of its theatres for two simultaneous screenings. The summer I worked there, I went to see the movie, and everyone screamed so loud at the head, I couldn’t even tell if I was screaming or not. The second theater had started its showing a minute after us, so a moment later, that audience screamed so loud, we could hear them through the padded walls. Sure enough, when I caught Jaws at Metrograph in New York a few years later, the same scene terrorized the crowd. Maybe fear is relative to the times, but maybe it’s also relative to who is around us. Hopefully, most of us don’t have to scream in terror much, if ever, in our lives, so that’s a pretty special experience to share with a group of strangers in the night-like darkness of a theater, sitting around a campfire-like screen, engrossed in a scary story. Just a little chum for thought, you know, to sink your multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth into.

—Laura Valenza

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A little brother to a cheerleading sister, I was subjected to multiple screenings of Bring It On (2000) throughout my childhood. It was always a funny movie that, to me, functioned well as a high school comedy. But it is so much more than that, and then some. For lack of a better phrase, Bring It On brings it! Just last summer, the film was shown at the Frida Cinema—the only non-profit art house theater in Orange County, California, as part of the cinema’s “Slumber Party” series. I cajoled two grad school friends into partaking in the raucous, pajama-wearing showing. They had never seen the film: they had no knowledge of the Rancho Carne High School Toros, the East Compton Clovers, spirit fingers, cheerocracy. What ensued during the screening was cathartic and excessive. The splendor of the almost sold-out crowd cheering along to every comedic and musical beat was on par with an inaugural midnight (virgin) screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Everyone knew lines and sight gags that turned the film into a call and response attraction. My friends were seemingly overwhelmed by the film’s laugh-a-minute propensity. But even more astonishing than its tireless humor is Bring It On’s poignant narrative, suffused in a critique of racial appropriation while operating under the guise of a high school sports comedy. The audience at the Frida were the cheerleaders that night, spirit fingers and all. Bring It On is popular to boot: its screening is bitchin’, it’s hot, it’s everything you’re not!

—Edward Charles Mendez

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Life’s not like a movie. Trust me—I used to work at Disney World. Filling soft serve cones, frying funnel cake, fainting from time to time… There weren’t perks, just anoles and a haywire heat index. Still, did you know the last film Jim Henson made used to play on celluloid every half hour in that tourist death star? Muppet*Vision 3D (1991)—Judy and Mickey but felt and plastic—was that rare strain of fugitive ingenuity more Iwerks than Walt, not tourist trap but limbs bent less-rigid. For Henson, cheapo 3D gags meant puncturing borders of good taste and narrative shape, pranking sentiment towards anarchy rather than nostalgia. On off-days, I watched Kermit scrunch up his mouth (that most moving gesture in the rolodex of nonhuman motion) but I also watched audiences transform from commodity bodies into miscreants themselves, sweaty, giggling, gremlin. Disney shut down Muppet*Vision 3D just like they killed Kermit, but rainbows are memories. Keep believing, keep pretending!

—Frank Falisi

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Here’s the secret origin of my cinephilia. It’s late June 1989. I’m seven years old and crammed into an absolutely packed theater in Daytona Beach, Florida, throbbing with anticipation for Batman. For months, the hype machine had turned me into a merched-out ball of Batmania. I had the toys, wore Day-Glo neon Bat logo T-shirts; my cassette of Prince’s soundtrack was in heavy rotation. My young life had been building to this moment at the movies. The lights dimmed, Danny Elfman’s theme began, and I sat wide-eyed and agog as we swooped through some mysterious canyon. When it was revealed we had been inside a Bat-symbol, it was my Star Destroyer-at-the-start-of-Star Wars moment. I was a goner. This movie—all movies—had me forever after. I can’t recall if I screamed in approval, but I remember the cheers at “I’m Batman,” the gasps at Joker’s reveal, the guffaws at cheeseball Alexander Knox, the raucous energy leaving the theater. I had been to the movies before, but this, my first brush with truly big-screen spectacle, was singular. It’s an experience I’ll forever chase knowing it can never be replicated.

—Dante A. Ciampaglia