The Wet Parts of the Face

Sometimes, watching a movie while insufficiently awake, random, inept idiocies will pop into my forethought: “They’re not socially distancing!” while looking at a crowd scene in a twenties slapstick short. “He shouldn’t stand so close to them when he’s talking,” during a three-handed dialogue crush in a Warners precode. It’s become second nature (which is no nature at all), this omnipresent anxiety about proximity. How will it feel when (I assume there’s going to be a “when”) I get back into the cinema.

Giant faces, horrifically close, a moonscape of pores. Eyes and mouth glistening, liquid, threatening. I know they’re not real. Still. Trains leaving stations. I only saw one close-up I felt I could reach out and touch, Ben Kingsley near the end of Scorsese’s Hugo, a triumph of 3D trompe l'oeil. But I once walked up to the screen during the end credits of Coraline and experienced animated terriers flying around me. I had Sherlock Juniored myself into the movie, or nearly. I might be afraid to try it now.

On my first trip to the cinema, aged maybe three, I’m told I cried because I hadn’t known the lights would dim. Maybe I fantasize about a cinema newly scary, overwhelming, out of nostalgia for that terror. It’s been a long time since I was truly scared at the cinema.

Really, the thing to be afraid of is not up there on the screen, it’s the microscopic droplets on the breath of the audience. But to get into a film you have to sort of forget the audience, though there’s also a pleasure of becoming one with it. But that kind of pleasure seems unimaginable now. Commingling one’s consciousness with the crowd? Infection through the collective unconscious, no mask could protect you. 

by David Cairns