Let’s pause here for a quick thought experiment.
I want you to think about how much you used to go to the movies. Like when you were a kid. Or maybe just five years ago. How many times a week? A month?
I’ll wait a minute. . . .
Done?
Okay, now think about how much you go these days.
If you’re like most people, it’s probably less. Don’t worry. I’m not judging you. Well . . . actually, I am kind of judging you, but I also get it. The times, they are a changing and stuff. There are streaming services. And illegal sites. And TVs are equipped with super-duper surround sound and HD and they’re curved and made of magic liquid pixels or something. So, why would you go and pay fifteen bucks—less at the Green Street, but still—to sit with a bunch of coughing strangers fiddling on their phones watching something you could pirate off the Internet for free?
And if you were going to go to the movies for once, why would you come to our un-air-conditioned, one screen theater, with sticky seats and the perpetual smell of cigarette smoke in the wallpaper, to watch a movie by an obscure director that probably came out at least fifteen years ago, and maybe no one even saw then? Why would you take two hours of your life, hours that could be spent in any manner of other ways and subject yourself to Lucas’s pretentious sneer, or Griffin’s stoned indifference, or my obvious desperation?
You wouldn’t. I get it. You just wouldn’t.
But here’s why maybe you should:
To avoid being super average and boring.
I’ll explain.
Basically, I think it’s easy to go through life just doing the same things everyone else does.
Hey, have you seen the popular show everyone’s watching?
Yes, as a matter of fact I have. Because I crave social acceptance.
But have you seen the latest one-hundred-million-dollar movie based on a comic book franchise?
Yes, of course. It is my duty as a citizen to my corporate lords.
But here’s the thing . . . if you only see the same movies that everyone else does, if you only watch the same shows and read the same books, and listen to the same music that everyone else does, then you’re only ever going to have the same ideas as everyone else. You’re only going to see the world the way everyone else does. And sure there’s a reason people like those things. They’re entertaining and “fun.” But they’re also probably made to appeal to every single person on earth, and so they’re also kind of bland and familiar and unchallenging. The Arby’s of cultural offerings.
Do you feel like beating me up yet?
It’s okay. I feel like beating me up sometimes.
But before you completely tune me out, let me paint a different picture. Just briefly. Let’s say, for the sake of my thought experiment, that you come to the Green Street instead. Let’s say you come to a showing of Rubber, a movie by the French director Quentin Dupieux. Rubber is a movie about a car tire that comes to life and develops powers of telekinesis, which it uses to blow up people’s heads.
Wanna see it?
Sure you do! It’s kind of a house favorite around the Green Street, and Randy once got pissed at us when he found out it was the Midnight Movie two Saturdays in a row. But anyway, I don’t want to claim that watching this tire (who is named Robert by the way. How awesome is that?) explode a dude’s head at a gas station is necessarily going to change your life. But you might be surprised.
For instance, there’s this scene where the tire is rolling through the desert and comes across a bunch of guys burning huge piles of car tires. Like one after the next. And the tire just stands there watching it all, taking it in. And when I first watched this moment, I had been laughing through the movie up to this point. Because, I mean, it’s a movie about a tire! And the tire murders a rabbit! But, when I saw this part, I started to feel something else. My eyes blurred and I realized I was crying. It was tire genocide, and the director, this guy Dupieux, had made me care about the humanity of a rubber tire. And how often does that happen in your life? How often do you get startled out of your everyday worries and break down and cry over a tire?
Probably not often, right?
Probably you’re going to go through your whole life without having that experience. But maybe you should have it. Maybe you should come to a tiny decaying movie theater and cry with the weirdos. Maybe then the Green Street would not be on the verge of turning into a Retail/Residential space. A Retail/Residential space where college kids who are too spoiled to live in the regular dorms can eat a gourmet sushi burrito before taking the elevator up to their penthouse suites to smoke artisanal marijuana and play video games on a projection TV.
I swear I’m not bitter.
And I know I’m not going to change all of contemporary culture overnight. And I’m probably not going to take down mass media or capitalism anytime soon. Frankly, that sounds like a lot of work, and I could never even be bothered to learn trigonometry at anything more than a C level.
What I needed to help me out of this current crisis was a more realistic plan.
What I needed was to see the Oracle.