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We did 15 minutes on Revenge of the Sith on this week’s members-only episode of Across the Movie Aisle. If you’re not a member—and if you’re reading this, you aren’t—sign up now to give it a listen.
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I am, generally, a stickler for the rules of movie theater etiquette. People should stay off their phones, stop their chattering, and focus on the screen. But on Wednesday night at the AMC NorthPark in Dallas, I went to a movie theater hoping to hear someone speak.
Kevin Smith was in town, touring the 25th anniversary rerelease of Dogma and doing a Q&A session afterwards. As a longtime fan of Smith—Mallrats and Chasing Amy were formative events in my moviegoing youth—I’ve long wanted to attend an event such as this one. As anyone who has listened to one of the commentary tracks on his film’s home video releases or who has watched one of his An Evening with Kevin Smith films will happily tell you, the man is a born raconteur. He can jabber at length about nearly anything. Or nothing. Sometimes both.
The Dogma screening was no exception; he took questions for nearly 80 minutes after the film ended on topics ranging from the protests surrounding the film (there were fewer this time around) to his relationship with Alan Rickman (a genuinely touching friendship between two artists with great respect for each other). It was a funny, profane, and occasionally profound discussion, with some neat little newsy tidbits thrown in. (One of them being that Smith recently had a budget meeting for his long-planned feature Moose Jaws, which he describes as “Jaws but with a moose instead of a shark.” They had to decide how many shots needed computer-generated moose and how many would need practical moose. Needless to say, the audience was thrilled.)
The Q&A is what the audience paid $50 a ticket for, of course, and it was great. But equally fun was the screening itself: a raucous, rowdy affair, with lots of cheering and lots of laughter. There were cosplayers (fans of the film would recognize the Silent Bob-style trench coats, the two Buddy Christs, and the one Holy Bartender). This was not your typical screening—nearly everyone had already seen the movie, naturally—and if it had been my first time watching the movie I might have been annoyed. But this was less a movie night than a party, a gathering of the View Askew faithful. “This is my idea of church,” the once-but-no-longer-faithful Smith said by way of kicking things off. If it were a religious service, it would take place in a revival tent with a charismatic preacher at the pulpit.
Richard Rushfield earlier this week offered up a dichotomy in the world of mainstream moviegoing, the shift from “franchise” to “FOMO” (“fear of missing out”). I don’t think this breakdown is entirely correct—the reason the Marvel Cinematic Universe was so successful for so long is that there was a genuine FOMO when it came to getting hit with spoilers or missing post-credits scenes connecting the various mini-franchises under the MCU umbrella—but it’s certainly directionally correct, and the Dogma anniversary show is a pretty perfect example of this paradigm.
This sort of thing isn’t easy to replicate; not every screening is going to feature a beloved indie filmmaker holding forth in front of his cult. But the energy felt familiar. It was like the energy I felt before seeing Sinners on 70mm IMAX at a packed Tuesday morning showing, the crowd buzzing with excitement and ready to tell the characters on the screen precisely what to do by yelling at them as if they can hear. Or like seeing Interstellarin the same format at the same theater five months earlier, another mid-morning showing that folks took off work to attend, traveling huge distances to experience something you simply can’t get at home. Or like the 20th anniversary screenings of Revenge of the Sith, audiences filled with folks waving lightsabers. Or like being in a theater full of middle school kids screaming “Chicken Jockey” on the opening weekend of Minecraft.
Again, I have slightly mixed feelings about all this; I probably prefer the reverence of the Interstellar crowd to the raucousness of the Sinners set, but these are also very different movies with very different goals aimed at very different audiences. Calibrating your expectations is at least part of the moviegoing experience, and giving yourself over to the energy of the crowd can be a key part of that.
Make sure to check out this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood; I talked to Jeremy Workman about his documentary, Secret Mall Apartment, which is making the theatrical rounds now. If it’s playing near you, I hope you consider checking it out: It’s a surprisingly moving look at artists having some fun with the changes gentrification has brought to their Rhode Island town.
