76: Airplane Movies

I read a piece by Allison Claire in the Dirt newsletter this week in which the author talked about her excitement to watch a movie on a flight on an airplane screen; up until that point, she'd only ever watched movies on airplanes on her phone. I realized right at that moment that I was at least a few years older than the writer, and I felt the difference between her relationship to entertainment and my own keenly. For Claire, plane movies as a collective experience–even if that experience is catching glimpses of the movie playing a row or two ahead of you–is an anomaly.

I'm old enough to remember flying on planes that had only a couple of screens in the cabin, mounted to the bulkhead; everyone on the plane would watch the same movie at the same time, plugging their airline-issued headphones in to the jack in the seat arm in order to be able to hear. This is how I first watched National Treasure and Casino Royale, although I don't think the sound was working in my section of the plane for Casino Royale, so I was left to imagine the dialogue. (I'm sure my memory just made someone else feel old, the same way that Claire's piece about airplane movies made me feel old.)

Anyway, I was on a couple of flights this past weekend, on the kind of plane that doesn't have seat-back screens. To prepare for the trip, I'd downloaded Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher, thinking that I'd be able to power through the series. I'm bad at TV, so what better way to catch up with a miniseries than a situation where I'm confined to a single seat?

Turns out I'm still bad at TV. Wherever you go, there you are, and that includes your relationship to serialized storytelling. I need the space between episodes to chew on what I've just seen; I can't just power through episode after episode in a string. Part of me felt uncomfortable watching lurid horror in such a confined space–the series is decidedly bloody, and I kept holding my hands up on either side of my iPad to block the screen from anyone who might catch a glimpse. Even watching something on a screen in a space that small is a collective experience, and I felt self-conscious about what I was watching, even though I'm sure no one around me actually cared.

What I talked about:

Blake Howard over at One Heat Minute Productions invited me to guest on a bonus episode of One Thief Minute to talk about Michael Mann's Thief and the movie's star, James Caan.

What I'm reading:

Over on the Seeing & Believing newsletter, Kevin reviewed Killers of the Flower Moon. (I've seen the movie as well, and I'm in agreement with Kevin on this one.)

I finished American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It's a remarkable history; I came away from it appreciating Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer adaptation more than I already did, because Nolan was able to tell such a cohesive, pointed story based on such an expansive life. I also came away feeling a deeper sense of tragedy than I had from the film. Nolan's portrait of Oppenheimer is entrenched in its subject's head; Bird and Sherwin, being historians, are more interested in the full context and the players who surrounded Oppenheimer. This wider focus makes the United States' decision to use the atomic bomb all the more horrifying.