If you go to the cinema this weekend to watch Jurassic World in 3D, you’ll see a message pop up on screen beforehand. It instructs you to put on your specs and tells you why the tech is so exciting: “Watch a movie. Or be part of one.” To which the answer should of course be: “I’ll just watch it, thanks. I’m not an actor, I’m not a director, and I’m not being paid.”
But that’s now incorrect. Looking at art is no longer enough. The combined forces of gamification, infantilisation and radical self-regard mean that people want to be, at least, immersed; at best, front and centre. We demand a piece of the action. Even when it’s in a movie like Jurassic World, which specifically cautions against getting too close.
This impulse is driving people to put on homemade stormtrooper outfits or shaggy onesies and make their way to Secret Cinema’s Star Wars event, in which you get to watch the film in a room that looks a bit like the Death Star, surrounded by crowds who are also dressed up: some of them paid; others who, like you, have shelled out £78 for a ticket.
That’s also why I went to Secret Cinema’s Back to the Future event last summer – the logical extension of a childhood spent wearing a lab coat in the hope that someone would mistake me for Doc Brown. Hill Valley circa 1955 had been meticulously recreated in the shadow of Stratford’s Westfield shopping centre. There was a band tooting out songs from the movie, even some farmyard animals (plus hand sanitiser) in reference to an early scene.
As the film played, actors in costume silently mimicked key moments in front of the picture, like a pointless signing-service, and enthusiastic audience members yelled out key lines a couple of seconds before they were said on screen. The thing I liked best, other than the movie itself, was the ban on selfies (mobiles entirely, in fact). Had they been allowed, you’d worry the whole thing might combust in the white-heat of millennial vanity.
Commuting to work today, I saw on the tube a poster for The Sunrise, a new Victoria Hislop novel set in Cyprus. “This summer you could visit a beautiful island,” it reads, “or you can truly understand one.” A big claim for a slim book. And a depressing implication: you’re unlikely to be able to spare the time or the money to read this beach read on an actual beach. That aside, it seems a sane aspiration. Sometimes your own experience may not be the most interesting thing in the room.
Jurassic Office
One of the many cheery things in Jurassic World is the way John Williams’s stirring theme tune is sampled for a ringtone. Excerpts from the score were the highlight of a concert last week celebrating the best in British (a term loosely applied) movie music at the Royal Festival Hall to mark the centenary of the UK’s film distributors’ association. Early this morning a colleague played it out loud from a computer. and it has cast an adventurous spell over the day: even minor meetings have felt epically important, every coffee run freighted with danger. So successful was it that we will be starting each day the same way for the foreseeable, with a vote among staff for the choice of theme tune. Up tomorrow: Psycho.
Mind over manor
The National Gardens Scheme open days are a fine idea. Yet there can be something a bit bleak about watching people stagger quietly round the grounds of a manor house, as I did last weekend, feudally feigning being fine with duff crumble and a lack of loos. This was a venue, we were often reminded, whose chilly undercroft and massive marquee in the garden could be hired for weddings. Some photos of happy couples showed them posing in front of the out-of-bounds house or the algae-choked lake.
I’ve never quite understood the appeal of vaguely playing squire for a day, and paying for it quite so royally. But perhaps inside all of us, some deeper than others, there’s a wannabe aristo?
