Chris Palazzolo finally gets to go to the pictures!

It’s rare that I see movies at the cinema these days, which is odd because I live a twenty minute walk away from the Hoyts cinemas at the Carousel Shopping Centre. Never in my life have cinemas been so accessible to me. However a combination of curmugeonly middle age and the demands of young children means I just can’t be bothered making the time to see some portentious franchise that’s just going to bore me. If I’m going to go through the difficult logistical exercise of ensuring my house is orderly and kids are fed and ready for bed (thus taking the pressure off my wife who is a full-time accountant) so I can spare a couple of hours to myself, then the movie has to be worth it – it has to be grown-up, and it has to be original (the vagueness of these criteria should give the reader an indication of just how fussy I am).

The other night I went to see Robert Zemeckis’s WW2 melodrama Allied. I didn’t have high expectations of this movie, but then I knew very little about it because I generally don’t take much notice of reviews. Nonetheless as I walked to the shopping centre I felt those lovely belly flutters that I’ve always associated with going to see a movie. On entering the shopping centre at 9pm (session time 9.15) that excitement was compounded by an uncanny sense of anachronism, of being in a space so familiar to me (I’m at this shopping centre almost every day for groceries) but after most of it is closed. Only the concourse, and the cafes and restaurants in that concourse, that lead to the cinemas upstairs, is open. The dusk of all those closed shops presses on this fluorescent lit concourse as if the shopping centre is asleep and the twenty cinemas upstairs are its dreaming cortex.

I felt nervous as I bought my ticket. I can’t explain why, but to make the feeling more acute I bought a coffee. I waited outside the cinema while two bored young ushers swept the popcorn and coke cups from the seats and aisles. Only one other couple was waiting with me. Having worked in video shops for 15 years I can attest to the peculiar light the glamour of cinema sheds on the shabby commercial reality of its retail arms; it both heightens the shabbiness while at the same time thralling it with a charge of its glamour (more than a few times over those years I was stopped on the street by customers who recognised me without recognising me asking me if I was on television. ‘No, I’m the video shop guy,’ I’d inform them). I’m always conscious, particularly in these (now not so) new suburban cinema megaplexes of the creaking beams and boards under the worn red carpet of the entrance passage, the fading and grubby seats (which are still very comfy), and the stale smells of the day’s patrons. But I’m a still a sucker for that big screen. If the film is good I’ll think about nothing else for the next two hours.

Allied was great. Of course the historian in me picked out all sorts of errors – were the Germans area bombing British cities on the scale depicted in the movie at that stage of the war (1943)? I don’t think they were. Would Ultra (British Intelligence) have helped the French Resistance with a high profile assassination when they knew what German reprisals were like? I don’t think they would’ve. The cultural theorist in me wondered whether movies like this help us to remember the Second World War or contribute to its forgetting? Do they just hasten the process of turning Nazis into simulacra locked away permanently from our times by their loving recreation of Nazi iconography of the 1930s and 40s? And is it an ontological void that Baudrillard says opens up beneath the simulacra, because that which is simulated no longer exists, only its simulation exists? And that into this void steps some young Western intellectuals who now do Nazi salutes on the web as a kind of situationist political tool, because the reality of Nazism, the DNA of Nazism, slavery and extermination for all peoples who are not white Aryans, is itself just part of the simulation? I couldn’t answer these questions. I’m just a househusband who doesn’t know about any of these big things, except that I love a good weepie. I shed a tear at the end. Any film that can make me react like that is a great film.

 – Chris Palazzolo

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Teasing Threads is Chris Palazzolo, novelist and poet, editor at Regime Books in Perth, radio host on 6EBA FM North Perth, and was, until recently, manager of one of the last video shops in the world. His novel, Scene and Circles, is available from https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/449419