Reignite that spark
I’ve recently started listening to a podcast called Films To Be Buried With with Brett Goldstein, and it’s made me think about my connection to cinema and television.
The basic premise of the podcast is essentially Desert Island Discs, except the discs are DVDs; and each film that the guest selects answers one of 12 questions, like:
What’s the first film you ever saw?
What’s the scariest film you ever saw?
What’s the sexiest film you ever saw?
What’s the film that made you laugh the most?
What film is generally panned by everyone, but you can’t help but adore?
That’s the general gist of it. It’s a bloody interesting podcast, and the guests have awesomely varied tastes, with fascinating reasons for their choices. At least once an episode I’ve had to google a movie and add it to my “ooh, I should watch that one day” list. Also, the responses to ‘sexiest film’ are hilarious; I’ve heard listed Top Gun Maverick, A Knight’s Tale, and Starship Troopers, amongst others.
When I was a kid we didn’t tend to go to the cinema a lot. It was expensive, and we didn’t have a great deal of spare cash. I definitely remember us going to the Bentley Drive-In cinema at least once, on Albany Highway, next to the Pizza Hut restaurant we used to very occasionally visit. This was back in the days of dine-in Pizza Hut restaurants, and I remember when we would go and eat there, I’d sit at the table looking out the window at what was on the big screen across the road. When we actually attended the Drive-In, I was still pretty young – well under 10 at least. I remember Mum and Dad watching the movie from the front seats, my sister and I sort of watching from the back seat, but more likely I was entertaining myself, and probably falling asleep not too far into the movie.
Back in 2002 I bailed on public library work and went to university to upgrade to librarianship qualifications. I was living off the generosity of my Mum and the government Austudy allowance during my first semester, and after I worked out that I was unlikely to completely fuck up at university, I leaned into my mild film nerdery and got a job working at Starland Video in Beaconsfield, one of the few remaining independent video stores in Perth. I know I drafted at least two uni essays on the back of old overdue video phone sheets during slow shifts. Vale Starland, you are missed.
Starland specialised in festival and sci fi and had constructed some amazing shop decorations for the video release of so many movies; indeed, the entrance to the store was a life-sized Stargate that they’d created. The store thrived on a sense of humour; I remember one staffer regularly made very small but genius artistic license alterations to the covers of video cassettes. Behind the counter we had Nerf bow and arrows, that now I think of it, probably dated back to the days of the Braveheart video release and if they’d remained in their original packaging, probably very collectible Star Trek figurines. Captain Kirk and Dr Spock were normally posed in quite compromising positions.
Honestly, the sci fi section was the stuff of dreams for people. We had every single sci fi TV series you could be possibly interested in. And those were never overdue long; it was like every customer respected the effort the store put into content acquisition, and refused to potentially disrupt any one else’s access.
The adult section was a mirror tiled room that originally had a blonde wigged mannequin wearing a white Marilyn Monroe dress standing just inside. When someone walked near the room a sensor would switch a red light on outside, regular lights on inside, and a fan would gently blow the mannequin’s dress up, like the classic photo of Monroe above a subway grate. Except at some point, someone on staff had decided to protest the insinuation of Monroe as prostitute and swapped the mannequin out with a fibreglass lifesize model of the robot from The Day The Earth Stood Still, so when kids got bold and walked up to the adult section room, a robot in a flowing white dress would scare the shit out of them and they’d usually run off. If they didn’t run off, you’d just watch them on the CCTV until they got close then yell at them with the deepest voice that you could muster and then they’d leg it. I wasn’t a huge fan of loaning out the adult films, but I loathed checking them back in more. You always wanted to don gloves. And they were never rewound.
Each staff member had a recommendation shelf; you could recommend ten films for people to watch and give reasons as to why. I always recommended people see All the President’s Men and then follow it up with the 1999 comedy Dick with Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst. It blew me away that I was sat tense and stressed watching All the President’s Men, concerned about the safety of Woodward and Bernstein, even though I was watching a movie that was based on a book that I’d already read, one that Woodward and Bernstein had both written when the Nixon Presidency was nearly over. Then the absurd joy of having people trust me and watch Dick as a follow-on because the entire film was shot as a delightful homage to All the President’s Men. I am pretty sure I also recommended the mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous. And probably Hairspray by John Waters, and Goldfinger.
Inevitably we were encouraged to take home movies, both new releases and old, along with advance screener videos, where there were two movies on the same cassette, usually so diametrically opposed in genre that it was jarring. K-19 The Widowmaker, followed by Sorority Boys. You’d finish a closing shift, and need to wind down afterwards, so you’d take a movie home to watch, finally getting to bed at midnight.
We were allowed to screen anything in store, as long as it was rated PG or lower. You would be horrified at what has been rated PG. So many of the early Bond movies were rated PG, and they ought to have been M 15+ at least. I remember nostalgically popping on Goldeneye and then having to sprint across the store to switch it off when Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp started shagging the Ship Captain, squeezing him to death with her thighs. Pixar was a far safer choice.
Music allowed to be played instore was dictated by the rule “play whatever you wouldn’t mind your grandmother hearing”. Which in retrospect was risky, because the shop was run by fairly progressive staff, and I’m certain at least two of them had a grandmother who moshed, and would have been front and centre at a Rage Against The Machine show.
Starland was how I finally ended up reading Lord of the Rings. I’d attempted to read The Hobbit countless times but was utterly bored to tears each time. I knew The Hobbit proceeded LOTR, so I thought I’d have to read it to understand LOTR. Finally, one day during my shift I had a copy of Fellowship of the Ring returned that wasn’t automatically reserved for another person, so I set it aside and decided if by the end of my shift no one had asked if there was a copy available, I’d borrow the video and watch it.
The next day I was down the cinema to see The Two Towers, and before I headed home, I dropped into Kmart to buy $10 paperback copies of Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and Return of the King.
I own all three LOTR movies in their extended edition DVDs. I still haven’t read the entirety of The Hobbit by the way.
Nowadays I’m crap at getting to the cinema, and I’m almost worse at picking a movie to watch on a streaming service. I do that endless drag through a menu line and paralysed with indecision end up resorting to a movie I’ve already seen. I don’t know if it’s because I know precisely how long my attention span is that day – and most days it tops out at about 37 minutes – or whether it’s because I know what I need to feel and want to rely on something that I’ve already seen to provide that feeling.
There are entire genres of film I tend to skip; there’s a few reasons why, but one of them is I don’t have enough down time to see everything I want to watch and read everything that I want to read. I have a list of movies that I want to watch at some point, and some were added to the list seven years ago and are still unseen. My DVD collection has a few discs that haven’t even had the cellophane removed. It’s OK, my Kobo eReader also has a sizeable collection of unread books that if stacked in paper form would be faintly embarrassing in size.
(Yes, I have access to a few streaming services, but I still buy DVDs. Sometimes the movies leave all the screening services, and unless you have a copy on DVD, or have that moral flexibility to illegally download it you’ll never get to watch it again).
The genre skipping dates back years though. I can count on one hand how many true horror movies I’ve seen, and even some intense thrillers get me a bit on edge. I can watch for days drama or comedy or espionage or a gentle mass murder slaughter set in a quaint English village but don’t give me a jump scare, unless it’s something like Shaun of the Dead.
I am fairly sure that when I was young enough to register what was on the television, Mum and Dad had the classic talk with me; telling me that quite often, what I would see on the TV screen wasn’t real. Unless it was the news, or on the ABC, it was probably fiction, a story, and that I shouldn’t be worried about what I was seeing. I should understand that any of those feelings I was experiencing – fear, worry, sadness, or joy – were valid, the storytelling I was experiencing them through was not real.
Unfortunately, I didn’t extrapolate this knowledge when Grandma took my sister and I to see a movie for the first time at a cinema, and apparently Grandma didn’t mention a thing either.
I would have been four years of age.
E. Fucking. T.
Apparently I lost my shit when Drew Barrymore, a seven year old blonde haired child, similar looking, but a little bit older than me, walked into the garage to find a brown alien standing there.
My only memory of that cinema visit is a single image, like a photograph in my brain. I am in the aisle of the cinema, the house lights are dim. I can see the right hand edge of the movie screen and the heavy velvet curtains alongside. My view is slightly blocked by something – an arm or hand I’m not sure. I don’t remember any sound.
Mum said I had nightmares for years. I remember a shadow cast through a window at our house, it came from a street light shining through a tree next to the laundry door. In the shadow was a shape at the bottom of the window that four year old me saw as the head of E.T. Five year old me probably saw it as E.T. too. Maybe even six year old me. I could still envisage it when we moved from that house when I was 13. It no longer scared me, but I could still see it.
I think that first visit to the cinema might have slightly scarred me for life. After the E.T. fiasco I suspect Mum and Dad both avoided showing me anything that might have been scary to a child, and who could blame them, having had to deal with that trauma? I was probably one of the few kids who having never seen it, discerned the plot of Star Wars : A New Hope partly via watching Spaceballs. I wasn’t coddled, I definitely saw movies beyond my age group: I was almost definitely one of the few kids in my school who could recite whole screeds of The Blues Brothers before I reached double figures.
(By the way, I ended up seeing Star Wars : A New Hope for the first time, not on video, but at the cinema for a 25th anniversary screening).
I learned the lesson young, to avoid movies and TV shows that were potentially scary. I was a voracious reader; heck at the age of nine or ten I remember buying from the local newsagent a collection of novellas by Stephen King; Different Seasons. We had seen Stand By Me on video, and I remember seeing in the credits that it was based on a story by Stephen King called The Body. It was the third story in that novella collection, and I think I read that first. The Great Gretna Pie Eat scene was as good on paper as it was on screen. The first story in that collection was Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and we all know how good that was on screen. The second story was Apt Pupil, and I wasn’t a fan, but that too ended up as a movie. I still hope for the fourth story in the collection, The Breathing Method, to be made into a movie – I want to see how they do the ending.
But even though I’d read one Stephen King book I knew that I wasn’t prepared to read some of the others – I vividly remember seeing a copy of It on a neighbour’s bookshelf, pulling it out to see a picture of a clown looking up through a storm drain grate on the cover, and instantly knowing that this book was not for me. I know that E.T. is probably a delightful movie, but I don’t think I’ve seen it. I know I’ve seen bits when it has been on TV, in little snippets. I remember being at a neighbour’s house when I was a bit older. They put on E.T. and I think I bailed and went home. I knew I wasn’t prepared to go through that again.
The same for selecting a movie to watch; if I have a choice I’ll often go to the softer option. I did get braver as I got older, but I also got strategic. I borrowed Scream 2 from Starland – I had a Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing going, so I was watching a lot of the back catalogue of Sarah Michelle Gellar – and I watched it at two in the afternoon, and with the curtains open.
I don’t think I’ll ever seek out the properly scary movies. I suspect there’s a certain amount of self-preservation in that. I recognised this when I went to start watching the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d seen the first season as it broadcast on SBS, and even bought the DVD.
Come May the following year, the second season started broadcasting. I’d had to miss the first two episodes, so I watched it on catch-up. Midway through the second episode of the second season I realised I couldn’t continue to watch. It hurt my heart too much. And then it twigged; when I’d watched the first season, I was on anti-depressants. I had literally only just finished weaning myself off them the week prior to watching the second season. At that point in my life I needed neurochemical support to deal with the idea of Gilead. I ended up reading show recaps of each episode, because I was still invested in the story, but I couldn’t deal with that immersion.
Listening to the podcast has kind of reignited that joy in cinema that I felt at Starland. It was a formative time in my life; I was at uni discovering my confidence, that I wasn’t utterly useless at education, and Starland helped encourage me to discover my creative spark too.