Movies Happen in the Dark – A Tribute to Cinemas

Samuli Knuuti

The author is an Espoo-based writer and editor whose soulscape is a blend of the forests of Olari and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. His debut novel, "Patterns the Streets Don't Know They're Making," was published in 2025.

He turned north on Sixth Avenue, knowing that the movie theater would be almost empty, with only three or four solitary souls present. Moviegoers were souls when there were only a few of them. – They remained solitary upon leaving the theater, not exchanging a word or even a glance, unlike souls witnessing something else, such as an accident or a natural disaster.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Leo Zhelezniak. He is the protagonist of Don DeLillo's short story "The Starveling" (2011), a middle-aged man living with his ex-wife Flory, who spends his weekdays moving from one movie theater to another watching films. Flory asks Leo if he wants to see movies or if he just wants to be at the movies. Leo doesn't know.

Flory also asks Leo why he doesn't stay home and watch movies. There are over three hundred cable channels available. Leo wouldn't have to rush from one movie to another, get wet in the rain, get stuck on the subway, and he could eat his meals at a table. Everything would be easier, Leo replies, it would be easier to go to work, it would be easier to die. But he is not looking for ease.

Although Flory and Leo are divorced, they still have sex, which DeLillo describes as melancholic.

For a long time, Leo kept a record of the films he watched, but he stopped because the notebooks had become the reason for what he did. What he did was go to the movies. The notebooks were starting to replace the movies. The movies didn't need his notes. The movies just needed him to be there.

When I was a child, movie theaters were wondrous places. There, on the big screen, I saw things I had never seen before. I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I saw Superman II, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. If I couldn't find a friend, my father would drive me alone to the theater in Helsinki and pick me up after the movie. What would I have needed a friend for on that trip anyway?

Now, almost 50 years later, I still mostly go to the movies alone. Like Leo, I realize that the wrong companion can undermine a movie scene by scene, snort by snort. I only go to the movies with people who know what they're getting into. I am not responsible for their entertainment, nor are they for mine.

Although I, like other film enthusiasts my age, have "seen it all," so to speak, movie theaters are still wondrous places. I realized long ago, like film historian David Thomson, that the most miraculous special effect of all is a beautiful face changing its mind on screen. Like in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, when Naomi Watts's young, hopeful actress breaks into a smile upon arriving at Los Angeles airport.

I like all kinds of movies, but I only want to watch both art house and superhero films in a movie theater. However, I also have my limits. Last Boxing Day, having nothing else to do, I went to the IMAX theater in Itäkeskus to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash, because I had never seen any Avatar in a theater before. As a solitary visitor, I found a seat in an almost ideal viewing spot amidst the crowd in the nearly full theater. When the movie started, it looked miraculous – as if I, too, were on Pandora, among all those space Smurfs! The experience was completely different from the 3D movies I had seen before. But after fifteen minutes, the novelty of the experience had worn off, and there were still three hours of terribly bad movie ahead.

I don't think I've ever felt so lonely. Leo would surely have left the theater, but I can't bring myself to do that.

Avatar: Fire and Ash cheated, I thought. It invested in the miracle of three-dimensionality but at the same time forgot what a miracle a movie can be. Avatar was trinkets, junk.

Movie theaters are also romantic places, as every movie is some kind of impossible promise. At least every good movie is.

In DeLillo's short story, Leo Zhelezniak starts to see a young woman more and more often at the same matinee screenings as himself. The woman is almost anorexically thin, which is why Leo thinks of her as "the starveling" (hence the title of the story).

Leo develops a kind of obsession with the woman, more theoretical than erotic, and begins to follow her. After one screening, he can't control himself and follows the woman into the ladies' room, where he delivers a rambling monologue about the movies he has seen. The woman is terrified and flees the ladies' room. Leo first collapses to his knees, but then he gathers himself and returns to his ex-wife. How else could the story end?

The world was up there, framed, on the screen, cut and edited and tied in a tight bundle, and they were here, where they belonged, in the insulated darkness, existing as what they were, existing safely.

Movies happen in the dark. This seemed like a strange truth that he was only now realizing.

Italicized excerpts are from Don DeLillo's short story "The Starveling," translated by the author.

 

Illustration: Taru Liikanen