My Movie Theater: Erica Berry

My Movie Theater is a new series from Dirt x MUBI in which our favorite writers pay tribute to their hometown theaters. 🍿

Erica Berry on losing yourself to the screen.

His senior year of high school, a friend went to see Casino Royale at the movie theater in a suburban mall. Somewhere in the sugar-addled hours of darkness, the boundary between my friend and 007 collapsed. As he left the theater, passing a row of stores shutting down for the day, he walked by one of the descending metal grates that separates the merchandise from the mall. Without pause, he jumped to the ground and rolled beneath the gate. Suddenly sealed inside the store—friends hunched with laughter, mall security jogging his way—the boundary between him and Bond reappeared. My friend was shocked by what his body had done. When the officers asked why he had done it, he explained that the movie had compelled him. They told him never to return, but that was it. The following week, when he bashfully recounted the story at school, I felt a tinge of crush. I have always been prone to people who let themselves be overcome by art. 

I like this anecdote because it reminds me that going to the movies is not just the story of you and the film, it’s the story of you re-entering the world afterward. As teenagers, we are less tied to our story of self. Back then, every house party held the possibility of re-invention. Movie theaters—the harbors between lived and onscreen life—became training grounds for us to practice who we might become, not just in the dark of the seats, but after we left them. 

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Once, ducking into a gold-sconced bathroom midway through a Natalie Portman movie, I was surprised to see my own teen face in the mirror. I felt a flare of disappointment at first, but it was chased by the conviction that some of her elegance had, surely, seeped into me over the last hour. Shaking my hands dry, I narrowed my eyes at my reflection. Could I be moving through the world with her poise? The feeling faded by the time I got home, but my memory of it lingered. 

At the start of the pandemic, I moved back to my hometown of Portland, Oregon. It felt like a city that could sustain me as I slid into my 30s. Because I no longer felt like making out in graveyards, sewing mini-skirts from vintage pillowcases, or smoking clove cigarettes from the window of someone’s parents’ Volvo, I did not feel in danger of clutching at my bygone adolescence. The majority of my high school friends were gone. Only once, at a party, has a Californian referred to me as a ‘townie.’ 

A few years into my return, I got asked on a date to the art house movie theater a mile from my parents’ house. I no longer lived within walking distance, and part of me hesitated to mix my new life with the old. But Cinema 21 is a perfect theater: independently run, with red curtains and a penchant for documentaries, and a row of glass shakers so you can decide between cinnamon-sugar or nutritional yeast for your popcorn. One of my most memorable visits there was at the end of the Portlandia era, when I’d walked there with my sister for a James Franco matinee on a rare white Christmas. We’d gotten tipsy on $6 local pints in our seats, then stumbled into the now-shuttered nearby dive bar for ‘artisanal’ key-lime-pie Jello shots. Hunched over a dark table, we debated the circumstances around which an acquaintance had, allegedly, hooked up with Franco. I share this anecdote because, on my date years later, the memory was in the seat beside me. 

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