As a writer who works from home, my lockdown life has not been so different from my previous existence. Perhaps the biggest change is that I have not gone three months without visiting a cinema since I was a child. It seems a shameful thing to admit when others have been suffering so profoundly, but I have missed those movies on the big screen. They have been my lifelong companions, and I have lamented them like vanished friends.
The relationship began for me in the long-ago Easter of 1981 with the release of Superman II. My yearning to see it was elemental: my dad was taking my older brother and I wanted everything he got. When it was broken to me that at three years old I was too young to go to the cinema, I screamed for days, thus confirming that I indeed could not yet be trusted anywhere near one.
But by the time I was five, nobody could argue that I was too young for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I climbed into my red velvet seat like it was a birthright throne. And everything was perfect, right up until the film opened with the Evil Queen interrogating her creepy mirror. I screamed until Mum agreed we could leave.
A year later we tried again with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This movie opened not with a murderous witch, but a luminous actress leading a Shanghai chorus-line, a slapstick brawl that included a murder by flaming kebab skewer, and a desperate flight over the Himalayas. By the time our heroes sat down to the Maharajah’s banquet of chilled monkey brains and eyeball soup, I was having the time of my life.
But then a boy’s heart was ripped from his chest and he was sacrificed in a pool of lava. I screwed my eyes shut and kept them like that until the house lights came up. At home I told my grandmother what I had witnessed, and asked her if it had really happened like that? Grandma furrowed her brow. Had the boy’s heart been visibly beating when it was removed, she asked? Yes, I said. And had I seen him fully submerged in the lava? Yes, again. My grandmother told me not to worry: the boy had been a professional stunt child and his parents would have been generously reimbursed for their loss.
No doubt Grandma thought I’d understand her joke, but for years thereafter I refused to cross the threshold of a cinema lest I witness another snuff movie. Instead, I watched movies at home on our new VCR. I could fast-forward through the scary parts and if it looked like they were preparing to dispatch another stunt child, I could banish the tape to the cupboard under the stairs.
At 10, I finally returned to the cinema to see Big, 1988’s seminal paean to growing up. At the start of Big, 12-year-old Josh Baskin is turned away from a roller-coaster for being too short. Dismayed, he heads to a nearby machine that features a mechanical mystic called Zoltar, drops a coin in his mouth, and wishes that he was big. The next morning, Josh wakes up to find himself trapped in the body of a thirtysomething Tom Hanks.
Big had it all – a story, hilarity, heartfelt emotion and a bucket full of bittersweets – and it seared itself into my mind. I work now as a screenwriter and every time I deliver a script I have to take a final pass to make sure I have not again unwittingly stolen something from Big.
Sometimes it goes the other way and life steals from the movies. Not long after I awoke to find myself inexplicably thirtysomething, I happened upon a Zoltar machine in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. I dropped my coin and made my wish. It soon came true, and a quarter of a century after I first saw Big, I found myself grateful anew for it.
Big had stayed with me for so long in part because it had made me – and the rest of its audience – truly feel Josh’s highs and lows. All the best movies perform this alchemy of rendering the specific universal, but even bad movies can still hit surprisingly hard if something in them speaks directly to us.
When I was Josh Baskin’s age, I changed schools, my parents divorced and I experienced a feeling I would later come to know as loneliness. One Saturday, my mum took me to a matinee of Bird on a Wire, a screwball caper in which Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn play ex-lovers reunited years after he mysteriously disappeared. As the movie reaches its zenith, Mel Gibson finally reveals the reason for his disappearance: he entered the witness protection programme to protect Goldie Hawn from the villains who would otherwise have killed her.
Bird on a Wire is a terrible movie, and my dad had left for more ordinary reasons than joining the witness protection programme, but that day Mum and I departed the cinema feeling restored. For years, I would even argue that Bird on a Wire was a better showcase of Goldie Hawn’s comic talents than Private Benjamin. If ever I argued that point to you, please consider this my apology.
Bird on a Wire marked the first time I understood a movie could be a comfort blanket, but they have remained so ever since. I am hardly unique in this, so what is it about movies that can provide us with solace in difficult times? There is a couplet in a Charles Bukowski poem that has always seemed to me as close an explanation as we might hope for:
When they start talking about the other woman
it’s time for popcorn in the dark.
That first line doesn’t hold up, of course, but the second line hints at the quiet comfort a trip to the movies can bring. There is something oddly reassuring about sitting among strangers in the dark and watching as other strangers pretend to be yet other strangers still.
When I was 26, my brother died and it felt like somebody had reached into my chest and ripped out my own beating heart. For weeks I quarantined myself at home, as if my sadness was a contagion I must not spread. The first time I left the house was when my cousin took me to see Sideways. Halfway through the movie, I realised I was not just smiling for the first time in more than a month. I was laughing.
At times of trouble now, my first instinct is to go to the movies. A couple of years ago, Mum fell seriously ill. At evening visiting, I would stay until the nurse rang the bell and then on my way home I would turn off from the city bypass at the multiplex. I never bothered to look up what was on, because the movie itself was never the point. The popcorn in the dark was the point.
As Mum recovered she wanted her own first outing to be to the movies. She lives on the remote west coast of Scotland, so her local cinema is the Screen Machine, an articulated lorry on a perpetual tour of the Highlands that unfolds into a cinema. A few days before Christmas, the Screen Machine parked up on the shinty pitch to show the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. Most of the village came out for opening night and everybody was excited to see the movie, but even more excited to see my newly recovered mother. Our whole evening was so jubilant and celebratory it felt as if there were two breakout stars of Live Aid: Freddie Mercury and also my mum. That does not happen when you stream movies at home.
But then came coronavirus. The cinemas closed their doors and I have had to seek my solace elsewhere. Here in Los Angeles, the quietest days of lockdown saw me exploring new bicycle routes on hitherto deadly streets. Often I found myself riding down a near empty Hollywood Boulevard: the tourist shops shuttered, the abandoned sidewalk stars even more absurd than usual, and only an occasional costumed superhero loitering forlornly outside the subway. They were scenes from an apocalyptic movie, of course, but as I rode I kept an eye out for something from another kind of film. Because a deserted Hollywood Boulevard during a pandemic seemed exactly the kind of end-of-the-pier place where one might happen upon a working Zoltar machine.
Even now I continue to search, and if ever I do find another one, I will aim my coin and make this wish: that the damn pandemic ends soon and that everyone who has lost a loved one finds the same break in their grief that I did the night my cousin took me to see Sideways. And then I will aim another coin and make a second wish: that our cinemas soon reopen, and we can once more sit amidst strangers and forget our problems for a couple of hours.
Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson is published by 4th Estate at £14.99. Buy it for £13.04 at guardianbookshop.com
