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From the new issue: Chris Fraser on working at a movie theater in 2008, and the songs that got stuck in his head…
“I started working for The Savoy Cinema in February 2008. I was seventeen. The Savoy was a rundown old place in Stockport, England – one of two remaining independent cinemas in the town where I grew up, and a ten-minute walk from my house. Before I started working there, my friends and I had made something of a ritual of going to see whatever they were showing each week. There was already familiarity embedded in the fraying fabric seats, last reupholstered in the late sixties: before every screening, the same album—Hank Marvin’s Marvin at the Movies—would play, apart from around Christmas, when an album of instrumental Christmas carols took its place.
2008 is a year that stands out in my mind, even six years later: it has something to do with the force of the experiences I had around that time. I had my first breakup at the end of the preceding year, my first drink shortly thereafter, and everything was racing headlong to a point where I’d be leaving my hometown for university. This is all weighty, emotional, utterly typical stuff for a teenager to be going through.
Standing in stark contrast to all this weighty, emotional, and utterly typical teenager stuff, there’s Mamma Mia!, the 2008 musical adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Dominic Cooper, Amanda Seyfried and a barking seal wearing a Pierce Brosnan skin-suit. But somehow, I remember every single beat, every single lyric, and everything I was doing around the time The Savoy started screening it. (I had just come back from a French exchange. I had started a blog. I was writing my personal statement for university applications.)
Mamma Mia! was remarkable in a lot of ways, especially in terms of the impact it had on our little suburban community. The Savoy was always on the verge of bankruptcy due to low sales, but the week Mamma Mia!came out, we packed 340 people into the first screening, and those numbers didn’t dwindle for the next fortnight. Since someone had to be on duty in the cinema itself during each screening, I have seen Mamma Mia! over a dozen times. Sometimes, I still catch myself humming “The Winner Takes It All”.
Hey! That’s me!
The March Issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room is Now Available!
Featuring new writing on A Hard Day’s Night, Amadeus, This is Spinal Tap, Almost Famous, Love Me Tender, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Be Here to Love Me, Heima, Mistaken for Strangers, and more—as well as brand new film art from Brianna Ashby, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Amanda McCleod, and Michael Hay.
Subscribe now for just $2/month or $20/year, or download our free app and get the issue today!
Hey! I’m the “and more” in this issue, stemming from my obtuse insistence that I write about not one film in particular, but about working at a decaying independent cinema for a year and cleaning up during the end credits. Go get it!
In case you missed it:
We just launched the official Bright Wall/Dark Room podcast! The first episode is now available to stream or download here (and should be up on iTunes within the week).
Episode #1 features the BW/DR Editorial Staff (Chad, Elizabeth, Michelle, Andrew, and Kara) discussing the new December issue, as well as their favorite films of 2014.
I listened to the first half of this tonight, and can recommend it based on those first 24 minutes or so. If it all goes horribly downhill in the second half, I’m sorry on behalf of the magazine. (But I doubt it does. These are very smart people.)
Excerpt from the new issue: Christopher Fraser on Monsters University:
“Now that a couple of years have passed, I wonder what sort of person I might have become had I chosen a different path through university. The scene where dozens of societies are vying for Mike’s attention is painfully familiar to me. I ended up sticking with a couple of societies devoted to hollow student activism and edited a student fiction anthology, but as it happens I found my inspiration elsewhere. Had I been a little more gutsy, I might have gotten into improv. If I drank more, I could have tolerated the long-haired headbangers. If I hadn’t fallen in love with someone who had the audacity to live three thousand miles away, I might have been on some ludicrous gap year to Kenya.
I think, once you get to college, your opportunities for really screwing up are beginning to dry up. Even if you drop out, it’s never as damning a sentence as failing high school. These alternative, parallel-universe versions of me are interesting, certainly, but no more appealing than the life I ended up living. There is a version of me who is chained to the gates of an arms manufacturer and believes he is doing God’s work. There is, almost definitely, a parallel life where I’m backpacking around North Africa, intoxicated by a dozen new experiences every day. But instead, I spent my time at university solidifying a relationship, and then moved to the USA and got married once it was over. This version of me is just as happy as the rest.”
(To read the rest of this essay, subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room for just $2/month or $20/year)
That’s me, that is!
A brand new “Back to School” issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room magazine comes out tomorrow! Featuring essays on School of Rock, An Education, Notes on Scandal, She’s All That, Wonder Boys, The Emperor’s Club, Monsters University, Whisper of the Heart, The History Boys and more…
Subscribe today and get it the minute it comes out!
I’m in this.
Excerpt from the new issue: Erica Cantoni on Lost in Translation:
“I am a person who can never not say what is in my guts, my overactive mind, my thumping chest. And here is this whole entire poised world. This Asian fairy tale told in elaborate gift-giving greetings and techno club dances, the subtleties of marital jousting and the choreography of old black-and-white movies amidst an insomniac’s midnight panic. The drunk-making mystery of friendship with just slightly too much more.
Give in to where you are. This might be my best travel advice and my greatest travel challenge. There is so much for a human being to fear. Not in hiking through Malian outback alone, not in forging the medinas and the subways and the canals. It’s the connection. Understanding how to insert yourself into the stream of human connection when there is so much potential for misstep. The rapids you misunderstand and the pace to which you are unaccustomed. The depth for which you are unprepared. And ultimately, the possibility that you will be rejected – heaved back out upon the shore.
Approaching a stranger on a train or online is not just that thing; It is everything. It is risking it all – gambling against rejection, wagering love that may spend itself down to the loneliest fibers. Risking that despite it all, knowing we may end up alone.
And that’s why you can forgive Bob and Charlotte.”
To read the rest of this essay, download the Bright Wall/Dark Room app to your iPhone or iPad for free, or subscribe online to receive immediate access to the entire issue on your computer.
If you aren’t already reading Bright Wall/Dark Room, you’re missing out.
Coming very, very soon:
A brand new issue, focusing entirely on the films of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson - get it the minute it’s available by subscribing to Bright Wall/Dark Room Magazine now!
We’re putting the finishing touches on it as we speak, and can’t wait for you to see it. As our art director, Brianna Ashby, is possibly the biggest Wes Anderson fan on the planet (yes, she’s even had theme parties), you can just imagine how much fun she had doing the artwork for some of these. Consider this cover a taste of things come!
That cover. God damn.
WIRES AND LIGHTS IN A BOX.
by Christopher Fraser
I wonder what Edward R. Murrow would have made of social media.
“Social media” is shorthand, of course, for the rapid turnover of cultural phenomena, the reduction of earth-shattering events to three second GIFs, and the hysterical obsession with actors, political gaffes and media self-commentary. And I say I wonder because, watching Good Night and Good Luck (2005) again recently—three years after my initial viewing—I was left with quite a different reaction.
Back in 2010, knee-deep in literary fiction and armed with a decidedly jaded view of the Internet as an unwelcome distraction, Murrow’s stark warning that television, as a medium, might be a corrupting influence was intoxicating to me. Contained within Good Night, and Good Luck is the sense of a turning point, with networks beginning to bow to advertisers and chase ratings rather than being led by the dogged pursuit of truth and inspiration. When things begin to fall apart, Murrow’s producer (played with surprising restraint by George Clooney, who also directs the film) murmurs “we might as well go down swinging”, but the implication is that everything that Murrow represents is already being lost.
Nostalgia for a time when newsmen fought for truth and justice—and they were, overwhelmingly, men—is hardly a new idea, and it’s executed brilliantly here. Time goes by, though, and that nostalgia becomes a bit muddied. Good Night, and Good Luck is a brilliant exposé of McCarthyism, but it revels in its own quiet scandal largely because other issues were still under the radar. The first wave of feminism was a tiny blip on the horizon. Laws against sodomy were still enforced across the United States, and would be for at least another couple of decades. Edward R. Murrow had room to breathe, because so many abhorrent laws and attitudes were treated as simple and uncomplicated. We often see the post-war era as a better time because any glimmer of righteous fury was silenced in an instant. Murrow was free to pursue Joseph McCarthy because it fit into the idea of preserving the idea of a utopian USA, rather than actively creating it.
The era that Good Night, and Good Luck portrays was one in which the family television set represented a nightly tradition, a centralised force through which people could reasonably be expected to accept what they were given. This was largely made possible by a notable lack of diverse opinions offered up by the media. There is a sequence during the film wherein the network’s reporters and producers stay up all night, following Murrow’s first unflattering report on McCarthy, to wait for the early editions of the next day’s newspapers. All but one of the responses are flattering, and while this is certainly a good thing for our protagonists within the context of the film, it makes one wonder where debate—in principle, a great tool for cultural reform—might fit in. Despite all the extremity of opinion that comes from our modern access to the internet, the wide-ranging amount of diversity and an ability to join in on national and international conversations can drive momentum, shape stories, and shine a light on topics that Murrow and his ilk would likely never consider.
Of course, for every grassroots social reformer, there’s a hundred One Direction fan bloggers. Rather than flat-out complain about every moron with a keyboard, though, there’s a growing sense that what’s really needed these days is the ability to develop more cultural filters. Everything, now, is at my fingertips; a dozen pictures of adorable cats are suddenly a lot more accessible than a daily newspaper. It’s all a question of selection, though. The thought of paring down a thousand Facebook friends to a small handful isn’t a task I should find especially daunting. Choosing to spend the day reading a novel rather than obsessively keeping up with Twitter feeds shouldn’t fill me with anxiety. Stopping the constant flow of data has become an active choice, rather than something we fall into naturally.
What we often fail to see, largely because it doesn’t come with nearly as loud a fanfare, is that important and engaging media is actually easier to find than ever these days. The problem, though, is that by democratising everyone’s creative power, there’s just as much (and arguably more) meaningless fluff, the type of media that feels like honeycomb—delicious, but disappointingly light. And since we haven’t yet learned how to effectively isolate the excellence from the nonsense, we struggle to develop culturally. In fact, there’s a resurgence of the notion that an idea like developing a discerning eye is somehow elitist, as if Buzzfeed listicles are as fulfilling and important as War and Peace. It’s hard to concentrate on illuminating, sober journalism when a harshly literal interpretation of the word “illuminating” immediately precedes it – flashing lights and captions that provoke a smirk and/or a feeling of total emptiness, luring us away from the stuff that might dare to fill us up.
I found my fiancé through the internet. Not through sifting through dating websites, or scouring Craigslist personals, but through a shared interest in an adventure game released in 1998. There was no single-mindedness in the way we got to know one another, no aggressive pursuit towards a relationship, and I say this because it was all against a backdrop of immediacy – we were a thousand miles apart, each exposed to an endless and rapidly-updated stream of (often inane) information, but somehow found a way to exist within that system and forge something meaningful out of it.
Amongst the noise, I met someone with a fascinating and unique spark, and it wasn’t the first time. Online friends and acquaintances of mine now provide insight and alternative perspectives to me from all around the world. I’ve grown to find comfort in this odd sort of familiarity – one characterised by great physical distance, but often containing just as much emotional power as the relationships I have with people that I see on a day-to-day basis. And I know I’m not alone in this.
Assuming that the Murrow represented in this film corresponds to his real-life counterpart, I have to believe that he would eventually see through all the furious chatter of online activity today and note some valuable developments, both culturally and interpersonally. People have a voice now who were previously stifled – if not maliciously, then by lack of consideration. Granted, now there are billions of wires and billions of lights, and plenty are abused with impunity. Some use the power of open and unrestricted speech to be hateful. Others see a blank page and feel the desperate urge to tell thousands what they ate for breakfast.
Good Night, and Good Luck is bookended by Edward R. Murrow’s speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association in 1958, warning against a shift towards mindless entertainment. He ends with this:
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate - and yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.
If every encounter with wires and lights was packed with power and pathos, we would be overwhelmed; screens are omnipresent in a way that Murrow likely never imagined. But moving past that, the fact that the power to create has been so aggressively democratised means that the illuminating, inspiring media he hoped for will always be around, long after every parody Twitter account has burned out in a blaze of idiocy. It is so easy to look at the media landscape today and dismiss it as petty, sensationalist, and often facile; giving billions more people a public platform will tend to do that. But reporters like Murrow are still out there. We just need a keener eye.
Illustration by Brianna Ashby. This essay originally appeared in Issue 3 of Bright Wall/Dark Room Magazine; you can subscribe to that here.
“Every day there is a choice: remain stuck in the false allure of the past or embrace the truth of the present. Who you are today is not the same as the person you were yesterday or the person you will be tomorrow. It is important—no, vital—to drink up.”
The Day After Yesterday (Sideways, 2004) by Michelle Said.
This has been a stressful week for a couple of reasons (I’ll get to them at some point), but essays like this are keeping me afloat.
ISSUE #3 OF BRIGHT WALL/DARK ROOM IS NOW AVAILABLE!
In this issue we look (mostly) at films having to do with journalism or the media in some form or another, with an occasional detour for new fare (Blue Jasmine) and an award-winning short film (Paperman). All in all, Issue #3 features nine new articles/essays from both staff and freelance writers (including Sheila O’Malley from RogerEbert.com!) and seven original illustrations from Brianna Ashby.
Click here to subscribe to BW/DR magazine directly from your iPhone or iPad. You will receive a 7 day free trial, which includes immediate access to this brand new issue, as well as full access to all previous issues. If you don’t currently own an iOS device, we are terribly sorry and promise you that we are working feverishly behind the scenes to make the magazine available on other platforms as soon as possible.
(If you’re already a subscriber, check your device, Issue #3 should already be there waiting for you!)
In case you missed it the first two times: I’m in this, but don’t let that dissuade you.
Hey, guess what?
Bright Wall/Dark Room magazine is now offering a 7 DAY FREE TRIAL subscription, which includes full access to all back issues. So, now you can see what we’ve been up to the past couple of months, entirely for free, as well as receiving Issue #3 the very minute it gets released this Tuesday. If you like what we do, simply do nothing and, at the end of your 7 day free trial, you’ll be billed $1.99 and become an official subscriber. If you don’t like it, click a button and cancel before the free trial expires.
Remember: all subscription fees go directly to keeping this magazine afloat, and allowing us to pay our writers and illustrators. Support independent magazines! Support artists and writers! And get a high-quality product for your $2, to boot.
So hey, it’s Sunday, you don’t have to be anywhere today, so why not curl up on the couch this afternoon with a great digital magazine?
(illustration above from Issue #2, by Brianna Ashby)
Now you don’t have an excuse.
BW/DR Issue #3: Preview/WatchlistThe next issue of BW/DR will be centering around journalism and the media, focusing on films that touch on that theme in at least some way (with the exception of Blue Jasmine, because we couldn’t live with ourselves, as a film magazine, if we didn’t cover the latest Woody Allen film).
And so, here are the films we’ll be wrestling with in Issue #3 of Bright Wall/Dark Room, which will be released next Tuesday:
All the President’s Men
Blue Jasmine
Good Night, and Good Luck
His Girl Friday
The King of Comedy
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (television)
Paperman (short)
Zodiac
Yes!
New date format. I’m getting used to the little changes like that. I suppose I have to.
Read/read/reading: Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 1; Up in the Air, by Walter Kirn; Drive, by James Sallis.
(Minor declaration of interest: I write sometimes for BWDR, though none of my work appears in the first or second issues.)
First off, the first issue of BWDR’s Newsstand app is everything I hoped it would be - excellently-designed, featuring illustrations like this and containing some of the best writing they’ve ever published. It’s an extremely solid start (and contains nothing like this tripe), and I can’t wait to see where it goes next. It’s a hallmark of an excellent publication when you’re a contributor who honestly doesn’t care if his work is included or not, so long as it continues to be good; that’s exactly what I felt reading this.
Up In The Air is an odd book. The film is decidedly different - the one entirely sympathetic character is missing in the novel, and the Ryan Bingham as written in prose is a lot more jaded and on edge than smooth-talking George Clooney ever could be. I’m hesitant to say too much about this - I’ll be saving it for an upcoming podcast - but I liked it a lot, despite a couple of issues with narrative voice that came up once in a while. Overall, though, Walter Kirn is a brilliant writer, and this ranks amongst the best of his work.
Drive is in-keeping with the film-oriented stuff I’ve been reading; oddly, I haven’t yet seen the film, despite the fact that it contains two huge crushes of mine, but I’m still interested nevertheless. Brooding, ultraviolent existentialism is how I got into reading in the first place.
THE AMERICAN DREAM Y’ALL.
It’s easy to think of the movie-going experience as passive – you sit down, the lights dim, and for the next hundred minutes or so someone has a direct synaptic connection to you. Whatever happens, you’re the passive receiver, and all you need to do is decide whether you like the content being piped into your brain.
A lot of films operate like this. They have ideologies, firm visual sensibilities, a grand, directorial vision, and all you need to do is sit back and take it. (This, by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Spring Breakers doesn’t work like this. It’s the first film I’ve seen where the lights came up and I felt almost euphoric – not from the preceding ninety minutes, but from the collective sigh of relief coming from every other seat.
Spring Breakers forces you to participate in it. Harmony Korine presents you with a canvas so rote that at times you’re amazed that the borderline-pornographic sequences on display are leaving you so cold. There are dozens of tits—bouncing and jiggling and covered in liquor and cocaine—but remarkably little titillation. The cinema I sat in was filled with typically brazen adolescent men, but the overwhelming atmosphere was one of discomfort. There was the feeling that all of this was a little too obvious, so by the books that it leaves space for the rest of your mind to conjure up theories about what’s really going on.
And it’s at this point where people start to hate it.
Drab and lifeless, lacking substance, even rape apologia at its worst – a lot of people have weighed in against this film, and it’s definitely possible to read it that way. The film splashes us with lurid colour, paints caricatures rather than characters, and delights in constant repetition. There are no obvious clues; despite all the neon, none of the signs read Satire This Way. There are genuinely funny moments (pink ski masks, a piano, a gangster rapper crooning Britney Spears songs), but even those moments leave you wondering what the point of it all is.
Films like this excite me, because I’m indecisive, and when I’m asked to reach out and complete the contract between the artist and the viewer, I keep changing my mind. At the moment, I think that Spring Breakers is an excellent piece of satire that depicts youthful nihilism and then takes it to horribly logical extremes; tomorrow, I might shrug it off as a stupid, needlessly exploitative and cynical vision of young people.
I’m British, which I think only adds to the confusion in this case. I actually had cause to visit New College of Florida—the primary campus location at the start of the film—back in 2009 (if you look closely, there’s a scene where their 50th Anniversary banners are flying proudly; one wonders if they regret the accidental promotion now). It’s quiet, bookish – there are only a few hundred students (I attended a university with around 15,000), and not the backdrop I’d expect for the kind of decadence on display in Spring Breakers. I met a few people during my visit, and, while they were all perfectly lovely, none of them really seemed the type to disrobe in a heartbeat, run along the boardwalk, and scream “spring break forever, bitches”.
This isn’t to say that the stereotype doesn’t exist – New College, after all, was just a filming location, and it’s reasonable to assume that a tiny, aggressively rigorous liberal arts college probably isn’t the natural habitat for nihilistic softcore misogyny. But it might be fair to say that, for Spring Breakers to really work and make you question its motives, the culture that it apes needs to be worth this level of scrutiny. Essentially, for Harmony Korine to have a point worth making about decadent twenty-somethings—desperately fornicating in the streets and committing casual acts of violence so they have the funds to keep the party going—those decadent twenty-somethings need to already exist.
From my quaint, suburban, sexually repressed vantage point, I can only wonder if they do. Girls Gone Wild and Jersey Shore might be about real people, but they can hardly be considered documentary filmmaking. I have heard horror stories about Ibiza and Magaluf – arguably Europe’s Daytona Beach – but have never witnessed it myself. There’s the real, oppressive sense that the world of Spring Breakers exists, but I’ve only ever seen it on a screen, or heard about it through an anecdote.
Maybe it should be a point of recognition that Korine came from a similar viewpoint – he never went on spring break, so maybe this is all a fever-dream, a dystopian view of what America’s youth might actually be like. I don’t usually spend my time questioning how “real” films are, but here it feels critical. I’ve never been on some wild, decadent vacation in the sun. I haven’t even been to that many house parties. But I still feel that white rapper-cum-gangsters roam the streets in Florida, and that there really are countless girls and boys writhing around hotels and beach parties for a couple of weeks a year—but without the knowledge that they’re really there, it’s hard to be sure that the whole phenomenon needs dissecting.
With all of that in mind, I keep coming back to James Franco. The female leads, despite career history, actually feel perfectly cast – all teen heartthrobs coming out of their shells, shedding clothes and inhibitions and an entire demographic in one stylish swoop. And casting Gucci Mane as a rival gangster rapper works, notably because he already is one. But Franco feels as alien as his character’s namesake. He does a commendable job, and disappears behind the silver grill of teeth and spaced-out drawl, but in a film that largely feels disturbingly close to something real, Franco treads a fine line between slipping out of view and leaping out of the screen.
That might be it, though. A fine line. Heady, disturbing satire, balanced (however improbably) against absurd comedy, never quite figuring out where it wants to sit. It reaches out and asks you to fill in the blanks, then rearranges the pieces every time you try and make contact. It’s thrilling, and infuriating. A dozen meaningless aphorisms that occasionally flicker with charge, but never long enough to allow you to really figure them out. Spring break forever, bitches.
Christopher Fraser is a science fiction writer living in the north of England. He has a website. He hopes there is more to life than bikinis and big booties.
This is a thing that I wrote.
God, does this website have to look so intimidating?
Hello, everybody. This is Chad, the guy behind this site. I am coming to all of you today, directly, because A Bright Wall in a Dark Room has arrived at a (very promising) crossroads—but if it’s to go any further, we need your help.
I was fairly brief before, so here’s why this is important to me: A Bright Wall In A Dark Room is singlehandedly one of the most interesting cultural interest things I’ve ever read, and I’ve been lucky enough to have piqued their interest on a few occasions (1, 2, 3). I once saw someone describe it as “Thought Catalog for film”, but that doesn’t even get close to covering it - each of the writers, whether they’re regular contributors or people who occasionally peek their heads in, tread a very careful line between a thoughtful, personal response and a considered treatment of the film itself. There are no top ten lists (or if there are, they’re easter eggs you’ll never find).
Chad is an excellent editor; the content is brilliant; this is an opportunity to dig deep and take that content onwards and upwards. I’ll be donating as soon as the next payslip comes in, and you should too. This is an opportunity to help bring about a film magazine that operates with an unprecedented amount of creative control, and it’s something I can’t wait to see (and maybe write for, if they’ll have me back).
THAT’S CLEARLY A WOLF.
by Christopher Fraser
I came out of the cinema grinning, just like everyone else. Then, over the course of the next six months, my view of the film changed radically, and I only noticed once it was too late.
The Cabin in the Woods is a hard movie to write about…
A thing I wrote.
““Lawrence of my labia!” a woman on the screen says. Her eyes look like the eyes of someone who is very tired but knows they should not look tired or they might let someone down. Lawrence might be let down.”
Thanks for visiting, we look forward to hearing from you.
