Life Goes to the Movies Read Online Free Page A

buzzer sound. “Wrong again. The dream of every red-blooded American boy is to make movies.”
    We were crossing City Island Bridge. We’d just wrapped up Buster Gets Axed, my fifth Dwaine movie, about a short order cook suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder who suffers a flashback when a customer orders a runny egg on his breakfast sandwich.
    “Forget Methodist, forget Baptist, forget Lutheran, Episcopal and Congregational and even Seventh-Day Adventist,” Dwaine said.
“Movies—they’re are the only valid form of divine sacrament left to us in this culture, the only church worth going to
anymore.”
    It’s dusk. To our left the sun sinks like a burning ocean liner into the waters of Eastchester Bay. To our left the lights of Manhattan twinkle
in bluish-gray crepuscular light, a Whistler nocturne. Dwaine walks slightly ahead of us, making me wonder if that’s what born leaders do, walk
slightly ahead of everyone else, if that’s what makes them born leaders.
    “When people go to the movies, it’s like a form of prayer,” Dwaine asserts. “The theater’s the cathedral, the
screen’s the altar, the colors flickering across it are the modern equivalent of stained glass windows. In medieval times that’s how the
church told Bible stories, through stained glass.”
    “What are the people praying for?”
    “They’re praying that in an hour and fifteen minutes or however long the movie is when the lights come back up and they leave the theater,
they’ll still be in a movie. The streets, houses and buildings will look real, but they won’t be; they’ll be made of plaster and
plywood.” In the dim air above us gulls wheel and shriek, their squawks blending with Huff’s locomotive chuffs as he labors alongside us in
three-piece suit and Burberry trench coat. Through the bridge’s steel mesh dead fish and brine smells rise.
    “What about all the people in the streets?” Venus asks.
    “Extras,” Dwaine submits.
    “All of them?”
    “All of them.”
    “And the sky and the trees?” says Huff, puffing.
    “One big rear-screen projector fake.”
    “And the sun burning in the sky?” I say.
    “A crane-mounted Musco light. The thing is,” Dwaine continues, not really wanting or needing to be interrupted, “for the average
moviegoer, the whole point is to escape from reality, because reality is unbearable. So they run off to the only place they can afford to run off to,
which is the movies, which is why no one ever gets anywhere or learns anything. Which, by the way, is exactly how the church works, how it’s
always worked. People keep going and nothing ever changes, which as far as the church is concerned is a good thing, since if people were to really
change, if they were to actually find anything like salvation, the church would go out of business, wouldn’t it?”
    “You’ve got a point there,” says Huff.
    A foghorn moans. A boat whistle toots. The brine smell grows stronger as the tide ebbs (or does whatever tides do).
    “Salvation may be good for something,” says Dwaine, “but it doesn’t make the world go ’round. Anyhow nobody really wants
to be saved. They want to be lost. That’s why they go to the movies: to lose themselves in some totally made-up bullshit that has nothing,
absolutely nothing, to do with real life.
    “Ah,” Dwaine adds wistfully, “but supposing—supposing the movie wasabout something real?Supposing it was convincing?—so convincing it could change a person’s whole life? Consider the possibilities! Instead what have we got? Mindless
corny bullshit! Flagrant wish fulfillment. Sentimental escapism. Full-length, big-budget car commercials! The world’s most powerful artistic
medium being used as a pacifier!”
    “It’s a shame,” says Venus.
    “It is! It’s a crying shame! But we Proto Realists are going to change all that, aren’t we?” He puts his arms around me and
Venus (Huff being way too big to hug). “We’re the four greatest filmmakers