silent initiations
dispatch from 'home for break'
Hello! I haven’t sent one of these out in a while. In the time since you’ve heard from me, I wrote an essay about living in the middle of nowhere (being published elsewhere) and promptly ran out of material because I just continued to live in the middle of nowhere and had no new thoughts. But I was just home for a month (!!) and thought about things besides ‘finals’ and ‘oh my God what am I supposed to do with myself right now.’
Of course, breaks are weird–all college kids know it. There’s a real feeling of in between-ness: in between childhood and adulthood, in between ‘I’m comfortable being tipsy around my parents’ and ‘This is a strong drink, Mom, I’m not sure I’m prepared to hang like this.’ All college kids can really ask over winter breaks is to find that happy medium between regression and rebellion and that no one will use the stationary bike now in their bedroom while they’re still sleeping.
I’m from New York City (have I ever mentioned that?), and I feel a very strong identity as a New Yorker, but it can be hard to find community in New York. If you’re looking for some kind of Cheers fantasy bar where everybody knows your name, you’re bound to be disappointed. But you just have to change your expectations about what a community is and you’ll find that New York is full of communities, subtle and unspoken, where initiations come in the form of half-smiles and microscopic head nods.
There was a period in high school where I bought a coffee from the same cart every morning. Eventually, the man making the coffee could spot me from across the street and have my order ready by the time I stepped up to the counter. I have some of the most supportive and loving parents in the world, but let me tell you that I have never felt so accepted and loved as by the man who ran this coffee cart. The first time my coffee was waiting for me when I stepped up to the counter, I spilled it on the way home because I had such a bounce in my step.
Now home for break, I find myself a card carrying member (if we carried cards) of a very exclusive New York community–the center of the venn-diagram that is ‘the pretentious’ and ‘the unemployed’. It’s at Film Forum, a theater that plays foreign and old movies, where I first found my people: ivy league trust fund babies who never quite got their act together, men whose midlife crises included buying blazers with elbow pads and flat top caps as if a gentle Sherlock Holmes cosplay will distract them from their feeling of aimless doom, and–the most common members of our little community–pensioners taking advantage of of the senior/student discount trying to relive the pastimes of their youth and who, like me, truly have nothing better to do at noon on a Thursday than to go see whatever’s playing.
I’m not sure that the little gremlins that are indie liberal arts students on break (like me) are taking full advantage of Film Forum. We’re lucky to live in a time when going to see a movie is a highbrow cultural activity. In the 1800s, people would tell their kids that reading novels was rotting their brains, then it was movies and radio, then TV, and now TikTok. And each of these activities seem more intellectual than the last–so now going to see a film carries some intellectual cache. And if the movie itself isn’t captivating to you, I can tell you that the patrons of Film Forum are so sparse and so old that an interaction with anyone between the ages of 18 and 30 at the theater in the middle of the day on a weekday, no matter what, begs the question, “are we about to kiss right now?” And that’s a pretty fun interaction that you can only find in a few rare places (and at the Trader Joes checkout).
Unsure if you’ll fit in? If the silent initiations of Film Forum are feeling a little intimidating to you, allow me to let you in on some of the norms we all just happen to know to follow.
We stay for the credits. We sit and watch the names roll by the screen, usually not even in English, with undeserving attention. Why? I don’t know. Do you have something better to do? You’re cramming in a quick 3 hour Japanese film in between meetings? Also the theater is still dark and if you’re working with a walker, you need to wait for the lights to go up.
The theater will play a ‘turn off your phone’ message after the lights go down. In all my time going to Film Forum, I have never seen anyone take out their phone during this allotted time because we all thought to turn them off before this point. I guess you shouldn’t have to be reminded? Probably best to turn your phone off on the subway ride over. Or maybe don’t bring it? I’ve never seen anyone at Film Forum being anything less than kind, but I worry that you may be pulled out of the theater by one of those Apollo canes if your phone rings during the movie.
Don’t talk during the previews—UNLESS you have a super gossipy story, in which case, please speak loud enough for all of us to hear because the previews are pretty boring and if the story is good, we won’t shush you.
Besides some unspoken rules of the cinema, the pretentious unemployed frequenters of Film Forum are a pretty welcoming bunch. A more exclusive subsection of the pretentious unemployed is the New York City birdwatchers. Walk with too heavy a gate between a birder and an owl and they’ll take the telephoto lens off their camera to strike you over the head. Once, my brother was walking the dog in Central Park and found himself the subject of a birder’s rage because he wasn’t paying attention and our dog apparently scared off a bird. Both him and the dog eventually had to walk away, tails between legs.
But if you walk aimlessly through New York parks (as I do) with wide eyes and cheeks pink with winter (as I have), a New York birder may eventually meet your eye and point with their elbow to alert you to the falcon or jay or whatever they’re excited about. You then get the ultimate bonding joy of standing next to a stranger, squinting your eyes and pretending to recognize the kind of bird shaped smudge 80 feet away before mouthing “wow,” giving a half-smile and a microscopic nod and walking away.
I don’t know shit about birds (or foreign films or coffee carts), but it feels good to be let in.