Volume 4, Issue 34: Hints

"Adjust your eyes to the light, let them roll with pride."

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Tuesday night, after a very full day of shuffling the kids to school, plowing through my morning run, writing several stories about baseball, working on edits on the new book (which is now officially out May 16, 2023 and even has an Amazon pre-order page, even if it, uh, doesn’t have an official title yet), picking the kids back up from school and recording a podcast about Georgia football, I went to go see a movie.

I regularly have to see movies for the Grierson & Leitch podcast, and while I’ll confess it is sometimes a bit of a grind to get to every major movie coming out every week—what with everything else I have going on and, for that matter, the fact that I do not write many movie reviews anymore, outside the occasional Vulture list—it is always, always worth it. It’s worth it because that podcast is an excuse to get to talk to my oldest friend for two hours every week (and have a terrific time doing it), and it’s worth it because we’ve developed a listenership that’s so dedicated they’ve started making charts and graphs out of our reviews and letter grades, documenting a practice that Grierson and I have been doing since we were 15 years old.

But mostly it’s worth it because it makes sure I get out to see movies. It’s not so easy anymore, as you know. It’s always a little bizarre to me that the average consumer is more willing to commit to an eight-hour television show than a two-hour movie, but I do get it: Consumer trends have been encouraging people to stay home for years, a trend the pandemic only accelerated. (Even our trendy new sports seem to embrace moving as little as possible. Is just playing normal tennis that inherently difficult?) Writing and talking about movies, at this point, can feel like being an advocate for a fading art form, like encouraging people not to throw away their old typewriters.

This is not what movies are though, not at all. Movies are not nutrition, some higher noble cause, or at least they shouldn’t be. Movies are escape, but they are also a portal. They transport you to another place, allowing you to live in a world entirely different than your own for two hours, one where we can experience life outside of our own personal borders and limitations. The best movies make you forget who you are, what you are doing, all those worries that grab a hold of you and pull you down. Roger Ebert once wrote that “the movies are a machine that generates empathy.” They are a way to see through other humans’ eyes, a way to leave yourself for a couple of uninterrupted hours, a way to be someone else, somewhere else. The home experience, with the constant hum and temptation of your phone or your refrigerator or your bed, reminds you how grounded and constrained you are as simply yourself. The movies let you fly.

But they are something else too. They allow you to connect. They can make you less alone.

That Tuesday night, after the shuttling and the writing and the podcast, I went to see a 9:30 screening at the University 16 Cinemas of the film Barbarian. This is awfully late on a school night to see a movie, but the way the schedule worked out, it was the only time all week I’d have the opportunity to fit it in for the podcast. Typically, when you see movies at 9:30 on a Tuesday night, the theater is not crowded, and this was no exception. More people were there than I was expecting, all told: Four. There was a couple, college students, there on a date, and then two guys in their mid-20s who were already passing their vape pens back and forth as the previews rolled. And there was me, in the center seat of the second row, as always.

Barbarian, which has been a pleasant surprise at the box office so far, is a horror movie, but that’s a little bit of an oversimplification. Generally speaking, I try to do my best to provide as little information about a movie as possible when I’m describe it to people, not so much because of “spoilers” but because I want them to experience the movie the way the movie is intended to be experienced: As a movie itself, a singular object, independent (or as independent as possible) from whatever context you might bring into the theater with you. It’s difficult enough for a movie to tell the story it’s trying to tell without also having to overcome what entirely arbitrary expectations could come with it from an individual viewer. This is why Grierson doesn’t even watch movie trailers. You want to come in as fresh as you can.

So I will simply tell you this: Barbarian is freaking crazy. I knew nothing about what I was in for heading in, other than that it was a horror movie and that it had received better-than-one-might-have-expected reviews, and thus everything that happened in the movie—and a lot happens!—took me by complete and total surprise. A large part of the film’s appeal is how entirely out of nowhere each of its twists and turns seem to come, and how gleefully it then reverses to explain how we got here and what this might all possibly mean. There are several legitimately what-in-the-effing-eff? moments in the film, and I’ll confess to finding each of them a delight. It is exciting to watch a filmmaker—in this case Zach Cregger, better known, up to this point, as one of the founding members of The Whitest Kids U’ Know, alongside the late Trevor Moore—having a ball making a movie, painting themselves into corners, crawling their way out, in absolute control of the audience and loving every minute of it. The shocks of the film are clever and orchestrated for maximum impact. The whole thing is nuts, but in a deeply satisfying way. It is the definition of a WTF movie.

And my little crowd of five ate it up. Five strangers, alone in a dark room in a building adjacent to a Poke Bar and a Dick’s Sporting Goods at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, having a collective experience—doing it together. Behind me, at one particularly surprising moment, I heard the woman screech, her date yelp and then both of them collapse into cackles of relief. The two guys vape guys took turns yelling things like “Holy shit!” and “What in the goddamned hell??!!!” And all five of us were riveted to the screen. We were all having these moments individually. But there were also times when we found ourselves, myself included, looking around at the other people in the theater, making eye contact, as if to say, “Are you seeing this shit?”

After the movie was over, we all sort of staggered out of the theater and into the lobby. It was 11:45 at this point, past my bedtime, if, I suspected, not past theirs. As I began to take a left toward the bathroom, I saw one of the guys with the vape pen. He walked up to me—literally walked up to me, like we had known each other our entire lives—grasped my hand and gave me a bear hug.

“Ha ha, what the fuck was that, bro?” he said, laughing, slapping me on the back. “That was some crazy-ass shit!” His friend joined in. “I ain’t never seen a movie like that, what the hell?” he said. “Wild as f—k.” The couple on the date had just been about to walk out to their car, but when they saw us, they turned around.

They were both laughing too. “Can you believe that?” the woman said. “Did you guys know it was going to be like that? I thought it was just another scary movie!”

And then, right there in the lobby, as the remaining movie theater staff tapped their feet and waited for us to leave, we stood and we talked about the movie. The five of us, five people who had never met and are highly unlikely ever to again, just talked. We were in that lobby for 15, 20 minutes, just recapping what we just saw—what we just experienced. Can you believe when this happened? What was that all about? Oh, man, I almost lost it at that one part. It got to be almost midnight. But none of us wanted to leave. We weren’t ready to go back to the real world yet. We weren’t ready to return.

This is what we miss when we just stream our Ted Lasso and Yellowstone, perfectly fine shows, sure, and then just roll over and go back to sleep. To have an experience you engage with, not just by yourself, but with others. I can watch Severence and you can watch Severence, and we are watching the same (excellent) show … but we are having different experiences. To sit in a theater with someone—a friend, a lover, a colleague, a stranger—and know that you have just shared something with someone, that you were transported elsewhere, together, for a couple of hours, it’s different. It’s special. To watch a television show at home, even a great one, is to stay where you are and therefore define the contours of everything that happens. To go to the movies is to be taken on a journey, one that you travel both alone and with others. The five of us were talking about the movie in that lobby. But what we were really talking about was what just happened to us in there. And we were the only five people who understood that.

Eventually, we did all go out to our cars. But we all walked out together, and we all shook hands goodbye, like we were old friends who had a wonderful night together and were now sending each other back into the scary, complicated, exhausting real world. (One of them actually said to me, “great to see you, man,” as if we’d known each other for years.) None of us even told each other our names. But that’s something that we all did together. I was so grateful for it. It’s something only the movies can do. We all connected that night. We all felt a little less alone. And isn’t that why we do anything?

So go see Barbarian. Or Confess, Fletch. (Which is good!) Or The Woman King. Or Memoria. Or Top Gun: Maverick. Or, heck, go see the re-release of Avatar when it comes out next week. You’ll go somewhere else for a while, someplace different. And you might just make some friends along the way.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Dodgers Better Win It All This Year, MLB.com. It doesn’t really matter what you did in the regular season, not anymore.

2. The Martha’s Vineyard Stunt Proved the Opposite of What Ron DeSantis Wanted It Too, Medium. Seriously, though, what an asshole.

3. There Are Too Much Sports For People To Watch the World Cup This November, New York. There are too many sports. Please eliminate four. I am not a crackpot.

4. The Best Players Never To Reach the Postseason, MLB.com. Lots of Phillies and Mets on this list.

5. What Happens If Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke Lose? Medium. I think that might be the end of each of them as serious political actors, no?

6. The Thirty: Something For Each Fanbase to Be Excited About Down the Stretch, MLB.com. The Cardinals had too many to list.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week, ironically enough, Grierson’s in Toronto.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I actually fretted about the pitching a little bit.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we previewed the Georgia-South Carolina game and recapped the Georgia-Samford game.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“What Would a Ukraine Victory Look Like?” Benjamin Hart, New York. Ben is my editor at New York, so I’m obviously biased, but he’s been doing a series of incredibly smart interviews in recent weeks that I find increasingly must-read. Here’s another good one.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Atlantic City,” Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen is playing in Atlanta in February and I’m trying to get my parents tickets—good LORD those prices—but I’ve been listening to a lot of Springsteen lately. His most underappreciated album might be “Devils & Dust,” but my favorite album is definitely “Nebraska.” This is the only song, as far as I can tell, he regularly plays off this album, but all told, I think sad, forlorn-on-the-Western-plains Springsteen is my favorite Springsteen.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Brother Vs. Brother … with Grandfather looking on. It must be fall baseball season.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Best,
Will