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  She continued: “Last year we were playing Oregon Trail and eating cupcakes on people’s birthdays. And now . . . all of this.”

  She pointed at the halls, a bewildered look in her eye.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get what you mean.”

  She looked at me, waiting for more.

  “I mean. It’s even worse than everyone said. It’s like Battle Royale or something,” I said.

  She had been nodding, but now she stopped.

  “What’s Battle Royale?”

  “Oh, it’s this film by Kinji Fukasaku about these kids who have to fight to death for the Japanese government. Early on, someone gets a knife to the head for whispering. It’s intense.”

  Her face was unreadable. She seemed to really look at me then. She took in my skinny legs and too-tight gym shirt. My haircut that looked accidental at best.

  “How are you going to make it, Ethan?” she asked.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to ask that question yet. And being asked directly shook me to the very moorings of my soul.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really have a strategy or anything.”

  She thought for a minute, and I could see her wondering if she should mention the next thing at all.

  “Listen,” she said finally, “this might be your thing. It might not. But my mom’s signing me up for acting classes on Saturdays at the Community Playhouse. It seems pretty cool. They have real costumes and everything. But so far, we don’t have any boys for the plays. I mean, I’m down for playing a boy if I have to, but I’d like an element of realism if possible. Anyway . . .”

  I stared at her.

  “You think I should join?” I asked inanely.

  “Well . . . if it’s your thing.”

  “I don’t know what my thing is,” I said. “I might not have a thing.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s sad.”

  I looked at her. Her eyes were already looking past me.

  “Listen,” she said. “Come if you want, or you know . . . don’t.”

  Then she walked off toward the cafeteria, and I never saw her in gym class again. Later, I found out she faked a back problem. But I did see her at the Playhouse, which would miraculously bring us closer together for a short time before pushing us as far apart as we could possibly get.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #76

  META-FILM

  A film about a film. Or a film that acknowledges it’s a film.

  You know, something self-aware where characters break the fourth wall to talk to the viewer directly (what a terrible idea, right?).

  Think Ferris Bueller giving you advice about faking sick or Amélie talking about how she likes to watch people’s faces in a darkened theater.

  “That’s so meta!”

  I’ve heard Lucas say from time to time, usually with a satisfied smile on his face, as if he alone has caught the reference.

  “Is it?” I’ve been known to say back, “is it really so meta?”

  5

  Let’s pause here for a quick thought experiment.

  I want you to think about how much you used to go to the movies. Like when you were a kid. Or maybe just five years ago. How many times a week? A month?

  I’ll wait a minute. . . .

  Done?

  Okay, now think about how much you go these days.

  If you’re like most people, it’s probably less. Don’t worry. I’m not judging you. Well . . . actually, I am kind of judging you, but I also get it. The times, they are a changing and stuff. There are streaming services. And illegal sites. And TVs are equipped with super-duper surround sound and HD and they’re curved and made of magic liquid pixels or something. So, why would you go and pay fifteen bucks—less at the Green Street, but still—to sit with a bunch of coughing strangers fiddling on their phones watching something you could pirate off the Internet for free?

  And if you were going to go to the movies for once, why would you come to our un-air-conditioned, one screen theater, with sticky seats and the perpetual smell of cigarette smoke in the wallpaper, to watch a movie by an obscure director that probably came out at least fifteen years ago, and maybe no one even saw then? Why would you take two hours of your life, hours that could be spent in any manner of other ways and subject yourself to Lucas’s pretentious sneer, or Griffin’s stoned indifference, or my obvious desperation?

  You wouldn’t. I get it. You just wouldn’t.

  But here’s why maybe you should:

  To avoid being super average and boring.

  I’ll explain.

  Basically, I think it’s easy to go through life just doing the same things everyone else does.

  Hey, have you seen the popular show everyone’s watching?

  Yes, as a matter of fact I have. Because I crave social acceptance.

  But have you seen the latest one-hundred-million-dollar movie based on a comic book franchise?

  Yes, of course. It is my duty as a citizen to my corporate lords.

  But here’s the thing . . . if you only see the same movies that everyone else does, if you only watch the same shows and read the same books, and listen to the same music that everyone else does, then you’re only ever going to have the same ideas as everyone else. You’re only going to see the world the way everyone else does. And sure there’s a reason people like those things. They’re entertaining and “fun.” But they’re also probably made to appeal to every single person on earth, and so they’re also kind of bland and familiar and unchallenging. The Arby’s of cultural offerings.

  Do you feel like beating me up yet?

  It’s okay. I feel like beating me up sometimes.

  But before you completely tune me out, let me paint a different picture. Just briefly. Let’s say, for the sake of my thought experiment, that you come to the Green Street instead. Let’s say you come to a showing of Rubber, a movie by the French director Quentin Dupieux. Rubber is a movie about a car tire that comes to life and develops powers of telekinesis, which it uses to blow up people’s heads.

  Wanna see it?

  Sure you do! It’s kind of a house favorite around the Green Street, and Randy once got pissed at us when he found out it was the Midnight Movie two Saturdays in a row. But anyway, I don’t want to claim that watching this tire (who is named Robert by the way. How awesome is that?) explode a dude’s head at a gas station is necessarily going to change your life. But you might be surprised.

  For instance, there’s this scene where the tire is rolling through the desert and comes across a bunch of guys burning huge piles of car tires. Like one after the next. And the tire just stands there watching it all, taking it in. And when I first watched this moment, I had been laughing through the movie up to this point. Because, I mean, it’s a movie about a tire! And the tire murders a rabbit! But, when I saw this part, I started to feel something else. My eyes blurred and I realized I was crying. It was tire genocide, and the director, this guy Dupieux, had made me care about the humanity of a rubber tire. And how often does that happen in your life? How often do you get startled out of your everyday worries and break down and cry over a tire?

  Probably not often, right?

  Probably you’re going to go through your whole life without having that experience. But maybe you should have it. Maybe you should come to a tiny decaying movie theater and cry with the weirdos. Maybe then the Green Street would not be on the verge of turning into a Retail/Residential space. A Retail/Residential space where college kids who are too spoiled to live in the regular dorms can eat a gourmet sushi burrito before taking the elevator up to their penthouse suites to smoke artisanal marijuana and play video games on a projection TV.

  I swear I’m not bitter.

  And I know I’m not going to change all of contemporary culture overnight. And I’m pro
bably not going to take down mass media or capitalism anytime soon. Frankly, that sounds like a lot of work, and I could never even be bothered to learn trigonometry at anything more than a C level.

  What I needed to help me out of this current crisis was a more realistic plan.

  What I needed was to see the Oracle.

  6

  The Oracle could be found at all times in the projection booth of the Green Street Cinema. Rumor had it she only left to buy fermented probiotic beverages. Her name is Angela, but everybody calls her Anjo. If I had to guess, I would say she’s thirty. But it’s a tough call. Her eyes look super bright behind her signature cat’s-eye glasses, but when she takes her hair out of its thick braid she looks much older all of a sudden.

  I was told when I was first hired at the Green Street that she spent most of her twenties getting paid to do medical studies. She moved into hospitals and tried new pharmaceuticals to see if they had side effects. Some of them did. Some of them didn’t. Does she still have side effects? I don’t know. But there is definitely something a little glazed about her. Her pupils have never quite un-dilated from her years of prescriptions. She also happens to be one of the most genuine people I know. And one of the smartest.

  Sadly, I didn’t see her much. She liked to hide in the booth, and I never pretended to be her boss. I gave her a list of the film prints we needed for the month, and she tracked them down and had them sent to the theater. All I ever saw were the invoices. Then, right on time every day, she would fire up the projector and show the films without any trouble. When we were done with them, she’d ship them back. She was reliable. She’d been there since the early days, and part of me felt like she always would be.

  I walked up the old stairs to her booth, holding a Green Goddess salad from the restaurant down the street, which I knew to be her special occasion dinner, a small offering for her counsel. When I reached the door and knocked, it only took a second before she pulled it open and put a finger to her lips. She waved me in, and I tiptoed into the dim room, which she had spent years turning into her own personal lady cave.

  There was a mini-refrigerator and an old microwave. There were some extra clothes in stacked cardboard boxes. And in the corner, there was her shrine to Steve McQueen, the handsome sixties leading man, nicknamed the “King of Cool.” On the poster hanging above a single burning prayer candle, he wore aviator shades, with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, suspended there for all of eternity.

  Anjo took the salad from my hands without comment. I opened my mouth to say something about burning candles and flammable film stock, but she frowned at me.

  “Shhhhhhh,” she said. “This is the most beautiful part.”

  She directed my attention to the rectangular peephole where the light of the projector flickered toward the screen below. As I got closer, I heard the flutter of Vicky, the house projector (a Victoria 35mm), as the film spooled through. On the screen below, there was a silent film playing. We’d been doing mostly Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton on Saturday afternoons lately. The old scratchy prints were really beautiful and you could always count on a few old-timers to wander in with their grandchildren.

  In this one, Buster Keaton played a cameraman, trying to impress a woman who works for the News Reels at MGM. Sweet Lou provided the meandering score on her organ, her bifocals reflecting the warm light of the screen. The film was at the part where Buster has just been chewed out for loading his film wrong and losing his footage. Then the woman he loves comes out to give him a pep talk in the hall. He tries to hide behind his camera, but she leans around and puts a hand on his shoulder. The title card comes up with the dialogue.

  “Don’t be discouraged. No one would ever amount to anything, if he didn’t try.”

  The woman shows him how to use the camera, and when he turns around they almost kiss. Sweet Lou’s organ playing reached a crescendo, only to fall off when the kiss didn’t happen. Then the actors just stand there in the dazzling light of the old black-and-white film.

  I looked over at Anjo. She had taken off her glasses, and I could see the light from the projector strobing in her wide pupils. When the scene ended, she wiped a tear away and plopped down on a beat-up futon she had scavenged from the dorm Dumpsters on move-out day.

  “It’s a tragedy,” she said in her soft, calm voice, opening the to-go container that held her salad.

  “What is?”

  “Once sound came to the movies, nobody cared about him anymore. He was stuck making cheesy low-budget stuff. He disappeared in the name of progress.”

  She forked a bite of salad in her mouth, and stared into space.

  “Anjo, I have to tell you something,” I said.

  A desk lamp shone on her face from a nearby table.

  “I already know about the eviction,” she said.

  My mouth fell open.

  “How?”

  She closed her eyes and pressed her palms together beneath her chin.

  “The Oracle hears all,” she said.

  I felt myself blushing. I had no idea she knew about her nickname.

  “How long before the hour of our fate, fearless leader?” she said.

  I sighed.

  “The end of the month.”

  She clucked her tongue and took a long breath.

  “It’s a big debt, Ethan,” she said.

  Anjo was the only one who still called me by my given name. She’d worked here when I used to come with my dad, when I was just a volunteer. She used to see me, down below her perch, sitting next to my dad, trying to make sense of experimental Swedish cinema. She had admired Dad, like everyone else who knew him. Which is probably why she let me come up here to chat.

  “I don’t suppose you have any amazing ideas,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I get it. This salad wasn’t free.”

  In the theater below, a smattering of laughs rang out. Keaton must have taken a pratfall. Anjo got up from her chair and opened the door to her mini-fridge. She pulled out a jar of strange green juice and poured a little in a plastic cup.

  “Here,” she said. “Drink this down, boss-man.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Absinthe,” she said.

  I held it farther away from myself.

  “Relax. It’s wheatgrass juice.” She smiled. “Cleanses the liver.”

  I took a hesitant sip. It tasted like lawn clippings. Anjo started to talk.

  “In the nineteen thirties, Buster was at his lowest. He had just been fired by MGM. His wife had divorced him and he couldn’t even see his sons. His kind of humor was out of style. Everybody wanted screwball comedies, with fast-talking wise guys. Like I said, the only movies he made were low budget, B-grade things where he was forced to become a kind of caricature of himself, rehashing old gags. But here’s the thing: If you watch the movies, you can still see flashes of brilliance. Even though he’s been backed into a corner by studio bosses, and forced to humiliate himself in bad movies, the innocence and optimism is still there. Even though he probably felt defeated, they couldn’t rob him of his spark. They couldn’t completely break him.”

  I looked down into my shot of wheatgrass.

  “Bottoms up,” she said, and touched my hand.

  I drank it and for a moment I felt a little better. Like I’d downed a magic potion. But soon enough, the feeling started to dissipate.

  “So, what does that mean for the theater?” I asked.

  Anjo walked to the projector and a made a few small adjustments. Her glasses slipped down her nose, and she nudged them back up with a thumb.

  “The Oracle has spoken,” she said.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #3

  CLOSE-UP

  Okay, everybody knows this one.

  But I’m still going to talk about it because I like how honest
a close-up is.

  There are all kinds of theories about what they’re supposed to do. Show heightened emotion. Capture details. Make us bond with a character.

  But can’t we all just admit that part of the reason we go to the movies is to look at nice faces. And not just any nice faces. Enormous nice faces taking up the whole screen, looking down at us like gods.

  7

  Everything changed when Raina was discovered.

  And I know what you’re thinking: Is anyone really “discovered” anymore? Is that still a thing? Short answer: yes. But it didn’t happen in Minnesota.

  Raina had begged her mom for years to take her to New York to see some Broadway musicals. At some point, Trinity finally relented. So Raina was standing outside a theater, wearing a dress with cats on it, when a nondescript middle-aged man walked up to her and gave her a card. Her mom was inside at the will-call window, trying to get them last- minute seats to Cabaret, and so Raina was all alone.

  The way she described it to me was that it should have been really creepy. She was in eighth grade. She was a late-bloomer, and not necessarily a knockout by most people’s standards. But there she was, her dark blond hair in two long braids, wearing her mom’s oversize sunglasses and a cat dress. And the man stopped in front of her and smiled.

  “I never do this,” he said.

  And Raina, who had seen her beautiful mother harassed by strange men on too many occasions said, “Then don’t do it.”

  Instead of walking away, though, the guy just laughed.

  “Where did you get that dress?” he asked.

  Again, he was talking to an eighth grader. Which is definitely kind of skeevy. But it was broad daylight, and he wasn’t leering at her. He just seemed curious. So Raina took a chance and told the truth.

  “Walmart,” she said.

  She looked down at herself. The dress was yellow and sleeveless with a print of cats wearing glasses on it. She had worn it because they were supposed to see Cats today, which she knew was a little corny and childish, but it also struck her as kind of perfect. How often do you get to wear cats to Cats? Her mom, however, had messed something up online and there were no seats for them. So, it was to be Cabaret instead. Still, she wasn’t going to change her clothes at that point. She was committed to the cat dress.