Hiding in the Movie Theater
In the film Almost Famous, the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman plays legendary rock and roll critic Leslie “Lester” Conway Bangs. Hoffman as Bangs has one of the great movie lines of all time.
Call it currency or current or electricity or flow or exchange or connection, between humans it also means exposure. Fold your arms over your chest. Now open them wide. It’s very simple. You are now open for business. You are open for friendship. You are also wide open for a punch.
Take Almost Famous, for example. This is one of director Cameron Crowe’s best films because it’s autobiographical. “Write what you know” is the old lesson. The main character of Almost Famous, William Miller, is an aspiring rock-and-roll journalist in the early 1970s that gets his first assignment for Rolling Stone magazine at the precious age of sixteen. This is how Cameron Crowe became almost famous in reality.
Miller is young, slight, and naïve. He is awkward and terribly uncool. Most people aren’t so honest when they illustrate themselves in an anecdote. Good storytellers come by such honesty because they understand heroes.
From David and his slingshot to The Hobbit and his ring, most heroes are the underdog. When it comes to the superheroes, we couldn’t connect with Achilles without his heel or with Superman without his Kryptonite. My favorite childhood hero was Indiana Jones who said, “I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go.” Harrison Ford made a career out of heroes whose confidence was all show.
Sent into the grungy glamorous world of groupies and golden gods, Crowe’s Miller also improvises on the fly. Like Crowe and Bangs, Miller’s ability to expose the vulnerability of the cool characters is what we find valuable. Shy and curious types make everyone else open up. Sherlock had his Watson. Gatsby had his Nick Carraway. Every great character has its author.
Our human ability to know ourselves—not as the hero on the pedestal, but as the frightened yet courageous creature that dares to imagine in the face of the cold universe—depends on the connection of the uncool. Listen to Bangs advice to Miller on how to write his Rolling Stone article:
“Be honest, and unmerciful.”
Crowe followed this advice when he left his first gig and improvised a second one in 1979. At the age of 22 and under a Simon and Schuster contract, fresh-faced Crowe posed as a high school student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. The book concept would become source material for his screenplay, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Crowe infiltrated a high school, the most vulnerable place on Earth, to meet teenagers, get close to them, and get their stories. That’s good investigative journalism. It’s also a punch in the gut. One of the real students, Andy Rathbone—inspiration for the film’s shy and awkward main character Mark “Rat” Ratner—filed a lawsuit against Crowe he eventually dropped.
He must have recognized he was the loser. Which is why he was the hero.
Connection addresses the most human part of us. We do not say we connected with something unless the experience of the plug in the outlet is electrical. We were turned on.
I saw Almost Famous in a theater, not on a device. As an awkward teenager, I projected films at an old playhouse sliced into a multiplex. The front house had the original stage and curtain and grandeur of its day. Underneath the projection booth, behind the last row of seats, sat a low wall topped with padded leather.
My elbows left impressions in that leather. The mostly automated projection process let me sneak downstairs for forty minutes at a time. After watching our top of the marquee title five or six times, I would watch the audience react. When they gasped or cheered or screamed at the screen, I was turned on.
What goes on in the dark of a movie theater is not all that different from what goes on in the dark of our bedrooms. People cry out or just cry. Sometimes the strongest individuals sit there as if watching a tidal wave coming to take their last breath. Then there are the people actually treating the theater like a bedroom.
We behave in movie theaters like we do in church confessionals, hospitals, or in court. For a moment, we are exposed. We identify with the awkward high school kid we once were. We open our arms wide and get punched in the gut.
Then the lights come up and we are instantly talking. We analyze and critique the hell out of movies. We spot and share gaffes and plot holes as our way to deal with the real connections that happened moments before.
“Thumbs down” is the incantation that lifts the spell. “That Goldie-Hawn’s-daughter, she was wonderful.” This is how we come back to the real world and leave our real selves back there with the popcorn on the floor. Our opinions and reviews give us a feeling of power over the things against which we are powerless.
Connecting is about feeling that powerlessness. Civilization is movie reviews.