I go to the movies to relax. But sometimes I have trouble separating the things that are said in the movie, from the things I hear people saying in the audience around me.
For example, imagine lasting through almost all 238 minutes of “Gone With the Wind,” and finally arriving at the scene where Scarlett, sobbing, asks Rhett Butler the question to which the entire movie has built up.
“Oh, Rhett! Rhett, where are you going? Rhett…?”
“To hell with these two. I don’t know what anybody ever saw in her.”
“Who? Scarlett O’Hara?”
“No, the actress, Vivien Leigh.”
“I’m with you. I’m over the whole Civil War thing, anyway.”
“Frankly, my dear,” concludes Clark Gable, “I don’t give a damn.”
Sure, he doesn’t give a damn, but about what? Whatever did she ask him? I’m thinking she must have asked, “Do I look fat in this dress?”
It happened again near the end of “Casablanca.”
Bogart’s character Rick is telling Ingrid’s Ilsa that she must leave, with her Nazi-fighting-hero of a husband, Victor.
“You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going,” says Rick. “If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
“But what about us?” she asks, tearfully.
He answers, “We’ll always have —”
“A breeze on the back of my neck! I hate that! Why do they always crank the air conditioning so high in this theater?”
What? What will they always have? I think it ended in an “s” — but what? A trellis? A terrace? Syphilis? I’ll never know.
Then, there’s “The Wizard of Oz.” Dorothy follows the yellow brick road, dealing with both the Wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, but she still isn’t home. At least she’s finally back with Glinda, the good witch.
“Oh, can you help me?” asks Dorothy.
“You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas…. Now those magic slippers will take you home in two seconds!”
“Oh! Toto too?”
“Toto too!”
“Now?”
“My sister had a dog like that. Bit me every time I came to visit.” This is not Glinda, I figure out, but a woman sitting behind me.
“That’s terrible,” says her friend. “What did you do?”
“We finally had him put to sleep, after he tried to bite the baby.”
And next thing I know, Dorothy’s back in Kansas. Something involving ruby slippers, I could see that much — but whatever the magic spell was, it is forever jumbled up in my mind with somebody’s baby and a bad-tempered dog.
Yes, “It’s A Wonderful Life” — but I’ll never know why. That’s because I never understood a single thing that happened after the dance in the high school gym.
“Who puts a swimming pool under a hardwood floor?” the man in front of me said, his voice several notches above stage whisper, to his date. “That’s just a nutty thing to do. The wood swells up like a tick from the humidity and it’s never level again. I had a client with a floor like that, over a steam pipe, and we had to take the whole thing out and start over. Good thing they were loaded.” Somehow Jimmy Stewart makes it to the end with the Christmas tree, but don’t ask me how; I’m still stuck in that gym.
Not even The Force can help me with this. I remember a climactic fight scene in “The Empire Strikes Back,” between Luke Skywalker and his nemesis, Darth Vader. As I remember, they were dueling with light sabers, in some plumber’s nightmare of a location full of pipes and catwalks, when Vader decided it was the perfect time for a recruiting pitch:
“Join me and I will complete your training,” he purrs. “With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.”
“I’ll never join you!” says Luke.
So Vader switches to family chit-chat:
“Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.”
“He told me enough! It was you who killed him.”
“No,” says Vader. And then he says —
“You know, my mother never told me what happened to my father until the day of my wedding. Do you know they were never divorced, he just up and started another family? Without us? He never even left town!”
Then I am falling down a rabbit hole, with Luke. But I don’t know why. Vader obviously said something that upset him. About that other family, I’ll bet.
I enjoy the movies all right — because I just never know how they’re going to turn out!
