This article explores how movie characters interact with cinema in various ways, from seeking escapism and romance to encountering symbolic metaphors about the future of film.
More than a few movie characters went to the movies this year. It’s fun to consider why they watch what they do—what the filmmakers are trying to signal. Some characters go for a quick turn-on, like László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who, early on in Brady Corbet’s immigrant drama, “The Brutalist,” seeks refuge from a cold, lonely night in a Philadelphia porn theatre. William Lee (Daniel Craig), the lusty protagonist of Luca Guadagnino’s William S.
Burroughs adaptation, “Queer,” is a man of more rarefied cinematic tastes; he takes a date to see Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950), hoping, of course, that a few hours in the dark will offer a preview of coming attractions. But the scene has a deeper layer of meaning: in Cocteau’s dreamlike masterpiece, we see a warped mirror to Lee’s own soon-to-be-thwarted longing. What picture does Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse, go to see in Payal Kapadia’s lovely Mumbai-set drama, “All We Imagine as Light”? It’s unclear, but it scarcely matters; if you have ever gone to the movies to escape your own loneliness—to vanish, for a few hours, into the solace of a crowd—you might recognize the happy-sad glimmer in Prabha’s eyes. Sometimes, even a tornado goes to the movies: in the hit summer blockbuster “Twisters”—whose director, Lee Isaac Chung, is, full disclosure, a friend—a huge storm blows into a small Oklahoma town, laying waste to the local theatre and carrying off a couple of ill-fated audience members. When I first saw that sequence, I gasped—and then chuckled a little. The image of a theatre screen, torn asunder by a computer-generated storm, made for a remarkably blunt metaphor for the death of cinema—an inevitability, according to various movie-industry doomsayers. It’s easy to sink into existential gloom about the movies, to succumb to anxieties about diminished box-office returns, dwindling theatrical-release windows, and the increasingly fickleness of the post-pandemic audienc
Movies Cinema Film Characters Escapism Existentialism
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