My Movie Theater: Rax King

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

Rax King on going to the fancy chain.

My father always loved going to the movies—any movie, it didn’t matter which. The film playing was less important than simply gazing up at that massive screen in a meditative fugue, ruining our dinners with candy. What other families did at church or synagogue, we did at the movies. He was a connoisseur of theaters, and was happy to drive miles out of his way to sample new ones that were said to have especially fresh popcorn or soft seats. But his favorite theater and mine was the Landmark at Bethesda Row in Bethesda, Maryland.

The first Landmarks were founded some fifty years ago as repertory theaters, later pivoting to first-run foreign and independent films as they expanded. But my father and I had no idea that our beloved Bethesda Row location was part of a chain. At the chain theaters we knew, you couldn’t turn around without a conveniently eye-level sign demanding that you Add A Hot Dog For Only $3! or Join Our Rewards Program NOW! By those standards, the Landmark couldn’t be a chain. It was so…European.

Take the pre-preview commercials. In a Regal or AMC, most of those ads were of the “rugged man speeding in a $40,000 pickup truck” type, but the Landmark Bethesda Row was notorious (in my house) for its Stella Artois commercials. Lord but we hated those fucking commercials! In our least favorite, a glassblower makes a goblet, and then a continental-sounding voiceover intones, “If this much care goes into the chalice…imagine what goes into the beer.” 

“Did that man just say ‘chalice’ to me?” my dad whispered.

“Worse,” I whispered back. “You paid to hear him say ‘chalice’ to you.”

Rarefied as the atmosphere was, tickets at the Landmark were cheaper than at its neighborhood competitors. They did insist on serving glasses of beer and Toblerones rather than corn dogs, but they had popcorn, too, invariably fresher and better than what the Regal down the street was serving. And it was topped with real butter. At the Landmark, my father and I developed a snobbery towards lesser theaters’ “golden topping.” We’d guzzled down gallons of the stuff happily enough before, but now that we knew such glorious alternatives to it were available, we resented it, defined ourselves in opposition to it. We were a real butter family, dammit. We watched Italian films with subtitles, not Disney dreck, and we ate the world’s finest popcorn while we did it.

Certain problems arose when you were a real butter family. Because the Landmark was pretty much the only game in town for foreign and indie films for many years, its primetime showings were often sold out days in advance. This was no good for us, since our usual method of deciding on a movie was for my father to say “hey, wanna go see a movie?” ten minutes before a showing was scheduled to begin. We’d head for the ticket counter, only to find out that the seven o’clock showing of “Well-Reviewed Documentary We Wanted To See” was sold out, as was the nine o’clock, and in fact the only option with any available seats was “Three Hour Art Film Directed By A German Heroin Addict.” We preferred the coke fiends’ movies; they, at least, had a little momentum to them. Many a time we grudgingly bought tickets for these heroin-induced films, only to both fall into a deep, snoring slumber within minutes of the opening credits.

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Still, I credit the Bethesda Row Landmark for being the first place to make me really think about why I did or did not like a film. When I went to see the same movies as everyone else I knew, bowing to the pressure of juggernauts like Mulan and Shrek, it was hard for me to develop ideas of my own about them. I’d attend such showings in big, excitable groups of classmates, and my opinions would be formed for me before the movie was even over, based on the energy I felt from the peers I wanted to impress. This wasn’t an inherent flaw of the movies in question—to this day, I dearly love them both—but it did speak to a problem of mass culture. It’s hard to decide what, exactly, you liked about a film when such a big part of the answer to that question is that it’s fun to participate in a moment. Mulan was “Mulan,” but it was also McDonald’s tie-ins and Halloween costumes and all other kinds of noise.

At the Landmark, where the films on offer rarely attracted such masses, there was nobody to like a movie for me. I hadn’t dipped my chicken nuggets into any sauces based on it, and no songs from its soundtrack would play on Radio Disney. If I was turned off at the end of a film, I needed to ask myself why, or discuss it with my father; maybe we’d agree, maybe not; sometimes he defended what he liked, sometimes I did. At the Landmark, movies could be thrilling or dull, ugly or lovely—and it was down to us to decide which films were which, in conversations that often continued well into the night. But no matter what, we knew we’d end up back at the Landmark next weekend, filling little cups with butter so we could repeatedly doctor up our popcorn without having to leave our seats.

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