Saturday, 8/7/04: The Crackle of the Celluloid

So the new Downtown Silver Spring is almost all open. It's typical theme-park urbanism, clean and inviting and predictable. The "Main Street USA" that Disney plops in the middle of a sea of asphalt to satisfy the latent peripatetic cravings of our auto-insulated populace sets the standard for faux-organic gaucheness, and this doesn't even come near to matching it, due to the ready availability of actual organically developed (if less clean and inviting) neighborhoods just a block or two away.

And people like it. I don't see fewer people on the streets in the other neighborhoods, but many more people visit good ol' Ellsworth Drive now that it's shed its unofficial title of Beeper County USA and now that the construction is all finished, with the only thing left to do being to stock the Borders. Seeing people milling about with ice cream cones on a balmy summer evening always brings a smile to my face, even if I wish some of that cream was from York Castle rather than the umpteenth branch of that cozy conglomerate subsidiary Ben & Jerry's. It's nice to have home furnishing stores and a men's clothing store with products I might actually want to purchase. It's nice to have a place designated for just sitting with a light meal and a cool beverage to while away the lazy summer hours.

It may or may not be nice to have a new 20-screen movie theater in addition to the AFI Silver's three rep screens and the incumbent 10-screener, AMC City Place. I tried to go see "Spider-Man 2" at the Consolidated (the theater's name is the Majestic, but it looks a lot more like the name of the company that owns it than the name with which Consolidated blessed it), but the line to get tickets looked like the line to get into Space Mountain, and the self-service credit-card machine line was just as forbidding. I knew that AMC had a showing ten minutes later, so I went over and paid my $5.50—student discount! Continental wanted $8.50. I convinced myself all those people were suckers.

"Spider-Man 2" was showing on one of City Place's smaller screens, diluting the action experience. Because the movie has been out for a while and CP never seems to pay attention to these things, there were a few inexplicable audio glitches, which good luck getting your money back on. And the audience was full to bursting with almost all the worst types of City Place patrons:

• Screaming babies at action films
• Young men bent on intimidation who repeatedly slam their feet against or on top of the seats in front of them
• People offering unsolicited advice on the choices the film's characters make
• Parents toting seven children (probably not all theirs) who come in 30 minutes after the film starts and who have to tell their children loudly not to talk because the movie is going on

The only people who didn't show up were the obviously intoxicated people laughing at everything, whether laughter is the appropriate response or not; I suspect they were at "The Village," judging from how people at AMC City Place behaved at "Signs."

So I sat there annoyed at the incredibly shitty viewing experience I was having. Then it hit me: All this will go, soon, as people desert in droves for the sterile, stadium-seated, well-scrubbed, high-priced-so-it-must-be-worth-it Consolidated. All the flaws of City Place—this is my theater. I remember well when it opened, and movies were within a walk rather than a drive. I remember seeing "Speed" there and being turned on to what an action movie could do. I remember all the late-night shows that got out at 3:00 in the morning, and walking back in the bitter cold of a winter night excited by the film I'd just seen. I remember seeing "Lethal Weapon 4" in a theater so packed with people ready to have fun that it was impossible to critique the film, and being drawn into a discussion of classic cars with a stranger next to me. I remember the woman at the concession counter who made an extra effort to get me to smile one time. I remember my excitement when they installed the self-serve fake butter dispensers.

Maybe some of these memories are stupid, but they're mine. Consolidated is clean, inviting and predictable; my life and AMC City Place have been a little more messy. And watching a movie about a superhero who debates whether to give up on his life as a masked man, I thought for a little while as the baby screamed about how capitalism doesn't give us a choice: If something's not as good, it's gone. (Unless the gummint steps in, and I don't think AMC qualifies as a public good by any stretch of the imagination.) "Creative destruction," Joseph Schumpeter called it. I know that AMC City Place will need to respond by upgrading their service to compete with Consolidated, and if they don't, they'll fail. That will be all for the best. It still makes me incredibly sad.

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