Great art with douchebags

So we went to two Arclight screenings of the new restoration of The Godfather a few weeks ago - part one on Saturday, part two on Sunday. Part one went by without remark, except that I had forgotten how awesome Moe Green is ("Sonofabitch! Do you know who I am? I'm Moe Greene! I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!").

Part two was a bit more unfortunate - we were seated a few rows in front of a sizable group of aging guidos who seemed to feel that the Godfather was a bit like Scarface, but longer and slower in parts. For those of you who haven't seen part two recently, it comes in at 3 hours and 45 minutes, including a 10 minute intermission, and there aren't really a huge number of "quotable" quotes aside from the obvious "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart." But these guys were clearly relating to the movie on an entirely different level than we were.

Now, full disclosure, I've never actually seen Scarface, I've only seen the amazing Jersey boys from True Life: I Have a (Jersey Shore) Summer Share watching it as a sort of pre-game ritual to get amped up prior to going clubbing (these guys really do need to their sympathetic nervous system humming prior to a night of clubbing, because they routinely fuck and fight whilst in and around clubs). My understanding of how it works is this: most guidos have seen Scarface many, many times. When they decide to watch it one more time, they aren't exactly doing close readings of the film, sussing out how audience expectations of what it means to "see" or "observe" are undermined by the antihegemonic framing of the shots blah blah blah. Rather, they're doing what I did when I watched Goonies over and over again as a little kid: they're reveling in certain scenes, certain lines, certain ideas that just strike them as amazingly cool. In the case of Goonies, at the age of 8 or 9, I particularly loved the idea of the start of a hidden tunnel being tucked below the ash grill of a fireplace; much to my parent's chagrin I actually took a hammer and chisel to the tiles of our home fireplace, just in case there was a similar situation going on there (turned out not). I watched that Betamax tape over and over until the picture started getting fuzzy.

So, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to people who watch movies over and over again, but the fact of the matter is that my tolerance for repetition has progressively diminished as I've gotten older, and it's hard not to feel that there is something a bit childish about wanting to see the same stimulus on an endless loop. Of course, I can watch movies that are all great one-liners (Big Lebowski, Kicking & Screaming) multiple times, but I max out at about once every couple of years. Not that this repetition intolerance is necessarily a good thing: I feel like the rate at which I habituate to new works of art has gotten so rapid that it's hard to keep CD's in my car that I still retain any visceral pleasure from listening to - sometimes I get so desperate that I'm stuck listening to Big Boy in the morning on my way to work (Luther Lufeye's got your phone taps on the tens!).

So, if the only sin of these guidos had been that they had seen the Godfather many times before, it probably wouldn't have bothered me. The problem was that they kept reacting to the movie in ways that were clearly an extension of previous viewings in various living rooms with various inside jokes being made. They kept laughing in parts that didn't make any sense - there's a shot of a little red car that Michael bought for his son Anthony (except that he didn't buy it, Tom Hagen bought it because Michael was too busy being Machiavellian) sitting in the snow, and they all started laughing at this shot. Now, if they had started talking or texting or something, we could have gotten them in trouble with the Arclight ushers, those purple-shirted martinets who take the enforcement of movie theater etiquette very seriously indeed. But how can you complain about people laughing at a toy car? What are you, going to force them not to do it again? They also loved Frank Pentangeli (the guy who testifies against the Corleones in front of the subcommittee) for some reason - they couldn't stop laughing at his every line. It was mystifying and really, really distracting.

By far the worst part, however, was the scene in which Kay reveals that her miscarriage was, in fact, an abortion ("It was an abortion! An abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage!"), and then Michael leaps forward and slaps the shit out of her. The guidos laughed like it was the funniest physical comedy bit they had seen since the season finale of Carlos Mencia. Which, when you think about it, is pretty fucked up. I guess their thought process was that it's awesome when people hit other people out of the blue, and it's doubly awesome when people hit people they're not supposed to hit, and since men aren't supposed to hit women this was just a big pile of awesome. At the time I found their reaction distasteful but chalked it up to these dudes being serious losers who don't spend a lot of time with women, but Adrian and Amy were both so upset that they had a hard time paying attention to the rest of the movie.

And here's the thing: I could see myself laughing at something similar in another movie. Like, say our antihero (I'm imagining it's Billy Bob Thorton) is being bothered by a fat kid with cake all over his face and instead of giving the kid a zippy one liner to shut him up he just punches the kid in the face. I might laugh at that, even though in real life I'm firmly against punching kids in the face. But that would be a different situation, because that would be a fucking comedy. The authorial intent would be for this to be a thing that is funny precisely because it's not supposed to happen in real life. I'm pretty sure that Coppola did not intend for the abortion scene to be funny in any way. But I don't typically get this worked up about violations of authorial intention, so I don't think that's the whole story.

I think a more fundamental element of this situation is that I don't like sharing my aesthetic experience with people whose taste is fundamentally different than my own. I have no problem with the fact that there are people who enjoy films like Epic Movie (okay, I'm a little worried that it debuted at number one at the box office), but I don't want to have to be around those people when I'm trying to enjoy a good movie. If I go see Live Free or Die Hard (which, speaking of, featured a Bruce-Willis-beating-of-a-lady that I didn't particularly object to) I have the expectation that I'm not entirely on home turf, so I try to play by their rules - a little yelling at the screen is okay in certain scenes (but hey, asshole who was checking text messages when Bruce Willis was crashing his fucking car into a fucking helicopter: what the fuck are you looking for in a movie?). But when I'm there to watch a movie that is one of the greatest movies ever made, art-house rules are on. No talking to the screen, no laughing unless it's a joke or it's making you so uncomfortable that you have to laugh, and just, I don't know, try to appreciate it on a deeper level, you dipshit.

But that's the thing that was so frustrating and weird about the situation: I was there to watch the art-house movie that I loved, they were there to watch the hilarious action-comedy that they also truly loved, and it was the same goddamn movie. How do you resolve this situation? Who's movie was it? De gustibus non etc. It reminds me of the early years of the Simpsons, when literally every mook in the country thought that Bart was the funniest character ever with his shorts-related catchphrases, but at the same time there was this absolute genius happening in the background and it seemed like only you and your friends were noticing this. My dad, whose taste in television runs towards broad English comedies, always hated the Simpsons with a passion because he never got past that initial impression that it was somehow of a piece with it's lead in - Married: With Children. He thought they were both just shows about stupid people doing stupid things, and he never bothered to see if there was anything else going on. He was also hilariously bothered by the fact that the Simpsons were colored yellow. I had no response to this criticism.

So, while I may have advanced past the toddler developmental stage where watching the same movie over and over again seems delightful, I've somehow managed to get stuck in an adolescent stage where my identity is still defined in large part by the books that I read, the movies I watch, and the music I listen to. And when I feel people that I judge to be fundamentally different and inferior encroaching upon my territory, my first inclination is to freak out and label them poseurs and dilettantes. Which is to say, I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you do. At this juncture it is worth noting that Adrian truly does appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than any of us do, and has been doing so for some time, so step off if you were considering fronting (watching that video I'm left wondering if maybe all along Adrian only likes me because, like Beaker, I am a red-headed accident-prone scientist who tends to communicate monosyllabically?). In any event, I can recognize that this feeling of being threatened by assholes liking the same stuff that I like is a bit immature, but I simply can't shake it. Especially not if they're sitting behind me in a movie theater (why are they always sitting behind me?). I do appreciate the Godfather on a much deeper level than they do! I notice every time there's an orange! I stop breathing when there's a doorframe between Michael and Kay! I could probably remember a good five minute spiel from my time at Oberlin on the relationship between the Godfather, classical mythology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis!

So, here is why those guys were douchebags: men hitting women isn't funny, it's terrible. In certain contexts maybe it can be less terrible, but this movie isn't one of those contexts. I know this because Francis Ford Coppola is standing in line behind us and he'd like to tell you that this movie is deadly fucking serious and not funny, and frankly you're an asshole. Also, Marty Scorcese is here and he doesn't want to talk to you about a time share because he thinks you hate women. So suck it.