Thursday, 4/17/03: But Not For You?

(Read the review of the AFI Silver Theatre here.)

Depending on how you view things, though, there might be a downside here. Great cinema of the past is pretty much an upper-middle-class preoccupation, as far as I can tell, while fun cinema of the present is marketed more towards lower-income people. There will be some crossover from inquiring minds who love both high and low culture, as there is now, and the planned AFI Silver showings of “The Godfather” Part I and II would seem to hold some popular appeal. But that and bromides to the universal power of cinema aside, you would have to expect, absent countervailing evidence, that most of the people who have avoided the invigorating rowdiness of AMC City Place 10 will continue to avoid it, and most of the people who will crowd into AMC to experience “Bulletproof Monk” will probably not be going to see Abbas Kirostami’s “10” when it shows in a couple weeks.

I started an essay a couple months ago about why I felt uncomfortable in a lobby full of affluent white folks in Bethesda’s Landmark Row cinema, despite the general societal expectation that I should feel comfortable around people who are so similar to myself. (Though I am less affluent than at least some of them; I had a good transcription from that cinemagoing experience of a conversation some dude who identified himself as a judge was having about his T-Mobile plan. “You can dial home direct from some small town in the south of France!” he said to his skeptical companion. That is what I have always dreamed of being able to do with my nonexistent cell phone.) I have always felt more at home at AMC, where the majority of my fellow patrons are enthusiastic and want to enjoy themselves in the theater (sometimes a little too boisterously, but anyway). That essay got a little confused and eventually a lot derailed on my lingering class-warfare impulses and my general desire to be different from people around me. But the feeling that inspired the effort was still real.

On the other hand, I felt perfectly at home at the AFI Silver on Saturday. There was excitement in the air, to be sure, and that may change over time; more people may start coming over from Bethesda and dampen that down with their ironic detachment and such. But the movies AFI will be showing are the movies that I have been dying to see on the big screen; I don’t think I get even a tenth of the real movie-watching experience when I see flicks on DVD, alone, in my apartment, and I’ll watch almost any bad movie on a big screen over the majority of good movies on my tiny one (as my movie reviewing career proves). And a lot of people, like me, will want to be in that theater as much as they can; after I involuntarily said, upon taking my seat, “I want to live here, I want to get married here,” a beautiful young blonde (with companion) turned around and, after chuckling, said “We had the same idea.”

County government money helped to raise up the AFI Silver from out of the Silver Theatre’s former decrepitude. Unless we experience a cinemagoing miracle, the AFI Silver is not going to serve many of the people who live here, even though it’s available to serve them. Given that this theater is an indubitable treasure, I don’t oppose the funding in this specific case, but we have to make sure we pay attention to who gentrification is serving in Silver Spring, and if necessary twist it to make sure it serves everybody, not just people who already have money to spend on the finer things.

(P.S. The first line of this lil’ essay was originally, “To pick up on one of the threads in this review, another thing the Silver Theatre didn’t have in 1938 was Negroes.” This was because there were no black people at the show I went to on Saturday, and in fact most of the clientele at City Place that I don’t think will migrate to AFI is black. However, my experience indicates that this is more a money thing than a race thing; there are a lot of black people around here who enjoy classic cinema, the vast majority of whom are middle-class. It is just as easy to engage in stereotyping when you are trying to piously consider the overlooked as when you just wish to ignore the reality of everything around you. This has no direct bearing on Silver Spring, but it bears noting.)

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