Every Saturday afternoon, we went to the movies, a double feature at the Carroll Theater on the corner of Utica Avenue and Crown Street in Brooklyn. Carroll Street was one block farther up the avenue, so why the theater was called the Carroll rather than the Crown I never understood.
We went sometime after lunch, whenever the mood struck and regardless of what was playing—comedy, drama, mystery, horror. Indeed, we had no idea what would be playing, unless we’d passed the Carroll a day or two before and noticed the colorful placards in their glass cases, with photos of the stars. It never occurred to us to look up the times either movie would begin: the notion of theaters making their schedules available to the viewing public was quite beyond us at the age of ten, or eleven, or twelve. Going to the movies meant drifting in somewhere in the middle of the first feature, then suspending its scenes in memory during the rest of the show—two hours or more—until the afternoon came full circle as the images began looking familiar.
We were herded into the Carroll’s shadowy depths by the matron, a stocky, tubular woman dressed in a white uniform like a nurse, who seated us in the children’s section, off to the side, so we wouldn’t disturb the adults, of whom there were very few on a Saturday afternoon. Nonetheless the matron kept strict watch, striding up and down the aisles, hushing whisperers with stern warnings. Though we mocked her among ourselves, the matron was an object of fear because she could get us thrown out of the movie and then what would we do with the rest of our Saturday afternoon?
Our nonchalant readiness to accept whatever was in progress on the screen might sound like sweet bygone naïveté, evoking nostalgia for the simple life: no checking the time, reserving tickets, waiting in line . . . I tended to regard it as such, until I discussed it with my astute friend Alice, also from Brooklyn, who pointed out that on the contrary, starting the movie in the middle had a distinctly postmodern cast, an omen of hypertext, even: we were dealing with the given information in fragments with no context, or only a slowly clarifying context.
I thought this over and saw that Alice was right. Not only did we have to locate ourselves midplot, seeking a foothold in a zone of utter ignorance. We had to invent, by intuition, who the characters were and surmise their histories. We didn’t know if the figures on the screen were friends or foes, lovers or married, and we didn’t know who was bad and who was good. If someone was murdered, we didn’t know if he deserved to be murdered and we should be happy, or if he was an innocent victim and we should be sorry. If characters kissed, we didn’t know if it was their first kiss or their last. We didn’t even know if we were close to the beginning, or in the middle, or near the end.
Far from producing unease, the condition of not knowing was thrilling. Until we gained some inkling of the goings-on, the plot was wide open, a vast expanse of potentiality, gradually narrowing as the possibilities sorted themselves out, some evaporating, others looming large, until an intentional pattern emerged.
When the movie was over, so many tantalizing questions remained: how did the whole imbroglio evolve, who was the sinister old man who turned up near the end, what treachery had taken place in that august mansion? Why was everyone bent on keeping the lovers apart? Who was the dead man everyone kept talking about? Was there anyone else we had not yet met?
It was a long time before our curiosity could be appeased. In the interval came the Disney cartoons, then a new installment of Superman—resuming whatever peril we’d left him in last week—and Movietone News, with its perennial opening footage of skiers executing stupendous leaps down the Alps, followed by highlights of current events. After the coming attractions, which we promptly forgot, we watched the second movie in the ordinary way, from beginning to end. At last, the original movie, to be summoned from memory. Now we had to reshape all the premises we’d worked so hard to formulate. So those two were not really friends at all, but rivals for the estate, pretending goodwill. So the murder we’d seen was the ultimate in a string of gruesome murders. So that man was the renegade father, that woman the long-lost daughter.
As we reassembled the plot, superimposing the actual story against the one we’d constructed from insufficient data, things began fitting together reassuringly. The movies of my childhood, a more stable, trusting era, were linear, their plots meant to be comprehended. A reliable directorial hand would guide us through the landscape. And yet the effort of reassembly, I see now, was very much like watching today’s movies, so many of which are built of fragments scattered in a jumbled time frame. Arriving in the middle transformed those simple movies of the past into postmodern films. We were, in a sense, being prepared for the future, for movies that replicate, unwittingly, our experience of arriving in the middle.
The curious thing is that although I loved figuring out the movie and revising my assumptions, I don’t love current movies with their short, baffling scenes, deconstructed mosaics that must be rebuilt on the spot—or more likely, in discussions afterwards, over coffee or standing on the sidewalk. There are always a few pieces I can’t find a place for. Today’s moviemakers are teases rather than benevolent guides; they mean to obfuscate; they set us down in the center of a labyrinthine design and abandon us. I’m quite aware that the change reflects a cultural shift: we’re no longer as certain of anything as we once were, and naturally movies reflect that instability and ambiguity. But that awareness doesn’t change my feelings: outside, I may have to live in chaos and bafflement, but inside the movie house, I long for an orderly world restored.
Predictably, on those Saturday afternoons, a sense of déjà vu would insinuate itself. A scene would look familiar, then another and another. We shifted restlessly in our seats, nudging each other, provoking the matron’s fierce glance. Someone would murmur, I think this is where we came in.
Now and then one of us wasn’t quite sure, couldn’t quite recall, so we’d wait a bit until she said, Oh, right, I remember. Okay, I guess this is where we came in. Or someone else might urge, Let’s just stay till the cops find him hiding in the bushes, or till the mother realizes it’s her long-lost child—I want to see that again. And so we waited until everyone was satisfied and ready to leave—unless the movie was so entrancing that we stayed, by consensus, to see the second half all over again.
We didn’t worry about making noise as we shuffled out; the matron’s power no longer mattered. Once we hit daylight, blinking in the dazzle of late-afternoon sun, we had so much to discuss—weaving the segments together, patching them with remembered details, collaborating to achieve a design entirely congruent to the original movie meant to be seen from start to finish. Far from mere passive observers, we became moviemakers ourselves.