The Last Word On Nothing

This weekend, I took my five-year-old daughter to her first movie in the theater, the new Cinderella. We got popcorn and Whoppers and great seats. The lights dropped, the previews and Frozen short ran, and then the film began, plunging us into another world. Two hours later, we were both hungover.

This new Cinderella plays it straight and traditional, with just tiny tweaks to make the story make sense in a more feminist world. (The film explains that Cinderella feels a duty to her ancestral home to make it comprehensible for 21^st century viewers that she wouldn’t just bolt from her wicked stepmother’s ménage). It is gorgeous and straightforward and everyone is ravishing and having a wonderful time.

I have always loved going to the movies—I and millions of other people, for whom the periodic pilgrimage into the dark is an intensely pleasurable ritual. I worked at a two-screen theater in Seattle in high school, and always felt that, in my dark tie and black skirt, tearing tickets and taking latecomers to their seat with a discreet flashlight, I was a kind of acolyte to a global religion. In the dark, we shed ourselves and bathe in alternative universes, using our species’ capacity for empathy to inhabit wholly other—and often more glamorous—lives.

This experience, like many other transcendent experiences, comes with a price, though: a depressive feeling as one walks out from the theater and reenters one’s own pedestrian reality. But the cinema hangover—inversely to the alcohol hangover—fades with age. As we become older, less imaginative, and more resigned to the prosaic compass of our own daily grind, we feel the contrast between our lives and celluloid (or, rather, digital) lives less keenly.

But this week, the hangover returned. Maybe it was seeing the film through my daughter’s eyes; maybe it was that I hadn’t been to the movies in far too long; or maybe it was just that director Kenneth Branagh and his team know how to put on a big fat fairytale without any jarring knowing winks to jolt one back to reality.

As I walked outside of the matinee into the blinding but dull light of a small town movie theater parking lot, I felt the old bleak, washed-out feeling return. I didn’t say anything to my daughter, but when we got home, she first dashed about raving about the film and then tried, with increasing desperation, to replicate its deeply gorgeous costumes, by designer Sandy Powell. As her safety pins, scarves and hoop skirts made of cardboard failed to bring back the magic of the film, she wept and wept and wept.

I tried to explain to my husband why she was crying, even as I googled Cate Blanchett’s green ball gown so I could do a little internal sobbing myself.

However, the cinema hangover is nothing so simple as envy of lovely frocks, CGI palaces, or the youthful pleasures of falling in love, though these all do play a part. One can experience this feeling walking out of a realistic drama, a tearjerker, even a comedy. I am inclined to believe that the men and women chiefly to blame for the leaden feeling of the sidewalk outside the theater (especially after matinees—the direct sunlight is a killer) are art directors and editors. Because no matter how sad or “realistic” the film, you can bet that it will be more visually beautiful and better paced than our own lives.

The feeling of walking out of a film is to walk into a slower, clunkier, uglier, less visually unified, and much more poorly plotted world. And that crush is most intense when you are young enough to believe that with just the right application of scotch tape and scarves (or, in ten years,  lip gloss and wine cooler) you too can be a heroine who can ride horses bareback, out-goods anyone in the kingdom, and—no big—become a queen in a wedding gown that took 550 hours to make. Later, when you are older and happier with your own life (and more socialist), so you don’t want to be a queen or wear big puffy gowns, the hangover fades.

But the day that audiences don’t feel any hangover at all as they walk out of the theater is the day that “going to the movies” will disappear forever. That lurch into our own lives is the evidence that we left them in the first place, and the reason that in 2015, the movie theater is still a global temple.

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Emma Marris is a freelance writer specializing in science and the environment, and a repeat LWON guest.  Her book on the future of conservation and the death of the Big Pristine is called Rambunctious Garden.

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Emma’s daughter, disgruntled would-be princess – Emma Marris.

Movie theater sidewalk, sometimes the saddest place on earth; the young Emma worked at this theater in Seattle – Visitor7, Wikimedia