Art in its Own Terms #6: Reel Politik
On Nathan Gelgud's comic strip love letter to indie movie theater jobs and fomenting revolution
Reel Politik (Drawn & Quarterly) by Nathan Gelgud
Nathan Gelgud’s book of daily comic strips, Reel Politik, starts out as a tribute to old-time movie houses and ends up a trans-galactic revolutionary saga. In between there are many anecdotes that prove his full membership in film dork sub-culture. I’ve done my time in the same dark rooms, so Gelgud’s book is right up my alley. The turn to radical left-wing utopian fantasy doesn’t always fly but is done with enough tongue-in-cheek to make it bearable. In the end I couldn’t tell how seriously to take that part of the episodic narrative. I suppose it depends on one’s own inclination or history. My history means that adoring mentions of Mao et al make me break out in hives; yours may make you swell with fellow-feeling for your comrades. Come for the cinema worship and take the rest with a bucket of (popcorn) salt.
Gelgud’s cast of characters is a sitcom array but imbued with enough specificity not to be shopworn. A nerdy, idealistic film obsessive moves to the big city and gets a job managing an old theater that quickly becomes his whole life. His employees include a young woman who’s too cool for school and, of course, the object of all her coworkers’ lust and/or envy. There’s also a duck, who may be the purest acolyte of the art of cinema, whenever he’s not obsessing over his inadequacies or professing love to his coworker. There is also a woman who starts out as a theater-goer outraged by a juvenile prank played by the ticket girl, who morphs into the leader of their absurd revolution.
The film theater setting is what resonated most. I worked at a fraying movie palace during the onset of the home-video era. My time there changed the direction of my life by exposing me to people and art that I would have never discovered on my own. Even as Gelgud’s ragtag crew spends inordinate amounts of time cutting on one another for liking this or not knowing that, their collective love for a dying art form makes a bond they did not find at home or in school. For a certain kind of outcast a movie theater gig is a lifeline.
These vignettes are present-day, with references to contemporary cinema and political events, but they take place at a crisis-point for movies as a relevant artistic and commercial expression not dissimilar to the one in the 80s back when I was slinging corn. Back then the existential threat was the videocassette rather than the pocket screen but the aftermath of each iteration of encroaching technological advance leaves the medium in an ever more precarious state. Back then, the new possibility of watching movies at home made a revival house obsolete. The Coolidge Corner Movie House in Brookline, Massachusetts ran themed double-features every day of the week throughout my childhood. One night might be Kurosawa, while another would be French New Wave or Eastern-European animation. By the time I was in high school, even before getting a job there, the programming had pivoted to mostly first-run arts and foreign fare, with the occasional focused series of retro titles. The Coolidge ran what Loews or General Cinemas or Cineplex Odeon wouldn’t—sometimes, it would be crumbs; other times, neglected gems.
The state of film-watching today is difficult to sum up. Are the two-three-hour portions of the bottomless Marvel pot doled out to multiplexes really movies in the old sense? Aren’t the limited and unlimited series on streamers just overstuffed, empty-calorie films stretched from two to twelve hours to meet market demand? A recent talk I had with Chicago Film Society staffer Rebecca Lyon details a vibrant movie-going culture here in Chicago. But this is a very niche scene. The kind echoed in cities across America (and, I imagine, elsewhere). On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I went to a screening of Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema. Before the lights went down, an awkwardly sincere young person walked in front of the screen and introduced the film, followed by stern warnings to refrain from cellphone use. After that, there was a Looney Tunes cartoon and then the feature. It could have been a scene from Gelgud’s strip or countless Chicago Film Society screenings. There’s a small but fiercely dedicated cadre devoted to keeping the art form alive but to the larger culture it’s less than a drop in the bucket. Does that matter? Is it a problem? The vehicles and structures for telling stories have changed continuously since the caves were illustrated with bison and stick-figure hunters; why do a few of us cling so hard to this one form of it?
What Gelgud nails in his strips is the feeling of edgy, competitive camaraderie that ferments in places like indie movie theaters. Here, a group of inward, picked-on, tormented young people can find a respite and sense of community unavailable to them elsewhere. Similarly, the continued adulation for movies—preferably shown in analog formats—has continued to nourish a small subset of the populace in every city I’ve lived in over the past forty-plus years. I wouldn’t know whether this specialized audience has grown in any significant way over that time, but my guess is that it has remained more or less constant despite several existential changes in the production and distribution of this art form.
The second major theme of Gelgud’s book—the theater staff’s takeover of their workplace following a sight-reading of Marxist principles—is tougher for me to square. I have no love for capitalism and firmly believe there must be some better way to make a society go, but having spent my first seven years in what was putatively a workers’ paradise built on communist principles, I can’t easily daydream that this is the solution. I can well understand, though, that to someone like Gelgud, who, I assume, was raised in the US, such a fantasy is at least worth indulging in.
To his credit, Gelgud undercuts much of the strident sloganeering of his ragtag revolutionaries; the requisition of the Criterion Closet van for use as a free socialist mobile library is an endearing touch. They spout canned Marxist platitudes ad absurdum, then follow these dicta to their inevitable conclusions, causing confusion and bemusement in would-be movie-goers and others not in on their scheme. It’s kind of a silly premise that four people who live almost entirely in their heads would put their money where their mouths are in such a literal way, but given the current state of this country, it’s a tempting daydream. I couldn’t say how far down this path Gelgud is himself and it probably doesn’t matter; this is fiction after all, isn’t it?
I don’t think that a team of film dorks will lead us out of the present quagmire but have no better path to propose, so, at the very least, I’m with their impulse to fight back. If only they could stop being outraged that every passer-by on the street doesn’t know who Jean-Luc Godard is.