Airplane Movies: A Rumination

I always like to draw a distinction between weirdos and eccentrics. Weirdos are mysterious and boring. They lead lives in contradiction to universal impulse; they are unsettling, but worth only limited consideration. You’re not supposed to say such things, of course. Every liberal-minded young person was once, however, a fourth grader. It is in such a capacity, then, that I make my pronouncements. I was reared as an eccentric. Our tastes run parallel, rather than orthogonal, to those of the general public. We believe in the cultivation of taste and the power of sublimation. I am good at reading subtitles, at discussing Freud, at pretending never to have heard of Taylor Swift. These are, in their way, valuable skills. I know perfectly well how to lead life in a pastiche of middle-aged masculinity. Somehow, though, that’s not entirely satisfying. Enter the airplane movie.

I was kind of allowed to watch television as a child. Until the age of five, I saw nothing but Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and foreign-langauge cartoons. I now speak no language other than English, for what it’s worth. The rules loosened over the years, but gaping maws of blindness remained in my cultural sensibility. It was like this, then, that the airplane movie attained such importance in my life. On the airplane, there existed no reign other than that of silence and irregular urination. We could drink soda and watch movies; I always associated Biscoff-induced nausea with furtive independence. I never slept. Instead, I plumbed the depths of Delta’s offerings. I have seen many great movies on the ground but airplane cinema looms large in my imagination. It alone taught me to experience without judgment, to experience entirely in thrall to an alien sense of being. It also taught me a great deal about the normal enterprise of life.

Let me tell you what I have seen on airplanes. I watched Bridget Jones, Notting Hill, Pride and Prejudice, Before Sunrise, Pretty Woman, Pretty in Pink, The Devil Wears Prada, and Crazy Rich Asians on airplanes. Any sense of contemporary femininity that I possess belongs to the airplane. Moonstruck, American Fiction, and The Princess Bride were favorites. I really hated The Notebook. I began Call Me By Your Name without realizing exactly what it was. I had to cover my father’s eyes anytime he glanced innocently at the screen. By the time this happened, I could pass for normal. I usually kept words like cathexis out of ordinary banter; the Oedipus complex was no longer my standard explanation. Insofar as I became a fairly average specimen of contemporary taste, the airplane movie was entirely responsible. My private mechanism of selection had much to do with a vague sense of inadequacy; I would swipe until I encountered something I thought I should know. There are worse things than shame. It has made me an autodidact, she who becomes herself in the whirring aridity of the airplane. I always imagined that watching a movie on a plane was rather like being dead. The total passivity, the undeniable completion of the experience–the chill that you feel, as though you lie in the cool dirt, with gentle worms for company. Of course, the airplane is cleaned regularly. Still, I like my comparison.

It was on a long flight this spring, though, that I really became aware of the airplane movie as central to my life. I was in the mood for epiphany and for ginger ale, though I recall only the former as a part of that flight. I chose something silly: a new movie, Anyone But You. Sydney Sweeney was, I knew, germane to contemporary life. It was possibly the worst movie that I have ever seen. The tidiness of the narrative was matched only by its improbability. Predictable sexual chemistry could not alleviate pathetic homogeneity, though I did appreciate the Sydney harbor scene. The movie had no power to thrill or to edify, none of the Coca-Cola glamor promised by AMC advertisements. I briefly doubted the glory of airplane cinema; perhaps, I thought, Netflix and a couch had more to offer. But then came the harbor scene–and that song. It was a bad song. But I was thrilled. For months, I had heard snatches of it here and there. “Release your inhibition” –yeah, right. We do not contain multitudes. Inhibition is an external force, not an internal one. The line made no sense. 

I remembered none of that as I watched a drenched Glen Powell. I finally recognized the freaking song. I was delighted to have phrased my recognition in such prosaic terms. In the privacy of my psyche, I did not confine myself to “freaking.” Let it be known far and wide that I had, over the course of several months, learned to curse in my head. The profane narrative was fluent, if still silent. Like the airplane movie, this inelegant development felt not like a curse but like a benediction of the highest order. Emotion freed of its pseudo-intellectual trappings, self-actualization arriving through the abandonment of self. Reader, I have learned to write and to think with abandon, how to give myself over to the taste of crowds. I will watch anything on an airplane. We live our lives in thrall to the moment. We worry about mass media, popular tastes, the obliteration of self –how to find a specific container for being. Real life, I say, is something like an airplane. Motion appears, stillness prevails. The self fades away and, awash in fellow feeling, we begin to see. Observation yields an order and a pleasure of its own. You watch the airplane movie and release the moment. It comes back to you, changed, but of its own volition. Or something like that. Maybe this eccentric just enjoys watching movies. She is certain, though, that on the dingy airplane, that liminal zone of imagination, she will never feel alone.