While I said that LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM is my favorite of the series I, somewhat intentionally, neglected to mention that LIFE IS STRANGE: TRUE COLORS (TRUE COLORS from here on forward) is the one I identify with most.
TRUE COLORS centers around Alex, a twenty-something who reunites with Gabe, her big brother, in the fictional town of Haven Springs, Oregon. Their mother died of cancer when they were teens, their father abandoned them shortly after, then her brother was locked up in juvie for carjacking, and Alex was scuttled from foster home to home, essentially until now.
(I’ll note that there’s a spoiler below, but it literally happens in the first chapter and it is a major part of Alex’s journey, and really not spoiler-y! But go forth, play it, then come back if you’re squeamish!)
Of course, LIFE IS STRANGE being LIFE IS STRANGE, her brother is killed under specious conditions.
Also, LIFE IS STRANGE being LIFE IS STRANGE, it’s revealed that Alex has superpowers: she’s an full-blown empath who can literally see how people are feeling, hurting, and intense emotions cause her to lash out.
All my life I’ve been called out as someone overly sensitive, someone overly emotional, someone too observant, and when I am emotionally overwhelmed, I too explode.
So, yeah. This hits a bit too close to home for me. When I described the game to my wife, she explicitly asked: “Are you sure you should be playing this?” and I replied “No! I definitely should not!” but proceeded to do so anyway, and proceeded to cry through the bulk of the first third of the game, and I’m a better person for doing so. For as much as the game underscores the trials and tribulations of being emotionally oversensitive, it also extolls them. Alex is not only finding the truth out about the death of her brother, but finding what she wants out of life.
It also serves as one of the best renditions of a rural town’s Main Street I’ve ever played. I’ve previously harped on how the LIFE IS STRANGE series mirrors my time growing up in Vermont and TRUE COLORS is the absolute pinnacle of that. Haven feels like I’m wandering through Church Street — downtown Burlington, Vermont — even down to the indie record store. (Shout out to Pure Pop!) The only thing missing are the gravy fries from Nectar’s.
(I’ll also note that TRUE COLORS features the following exchange: “Greatest Northwest band of all time? Go.” “Sleater-Kinney, if you were wondering.” and Sleater-Kinney is only one of my favorite bands ever, so thanks game for validating that you are solely for me.)
I’d be remiss to neglect to mention the glow-up imparted on TRUE COLORS. While the prior LIFE IS STRANGE games had striking visual character designs, TRUE COLORS is absolutely gorgeous, all rounded features, glossy and fluid animations, and even better: it imparts a sense of tactility that was lacking in the prior games. It’s not just that characters touch each other, it’s that they rub and wear and scrape against works around them. This is a world well-crafted.
This post contains mentions of familial death and psychological dissociation.
The LIFE IS STRANGE games are not what I would call a ‘fun time’ — practically every post I’ve made about the series has content warnings — but LIFE IS STRANGE 2 is especially tough. It opens with a mostly idyllic Hispanic family: two sons, one pre-teen — Daniel — one firmly a teenager — Sean — and a father. Their mother is mostly unknown to them, but the three of them have a happy life.
At least, until Daniel makes the mistake of playing zombie in their front yard.
Matters escalate. Police get involved. Their father is shot by a policeman. Daniel reacts impulsively, self-protectively, and sends out a kinetic blast, killing the policeman.
Sean grabs Daniel and they go on the run, leaving behind his teen love because he knows there’s no better option.
It may sound twisted, but my favorite part of LIFE IS STRANGE 2 simply consists of Sean and Daniel endlessly walking through the Pacific Northwest, solely because — despite the fact that I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest — it feels like I lived part of this game. As I’ve mentioned in prior LIFE IS STRANGE posts: New England is not the Pacific Northwest. (Duh.) However, they’re basically kissing cousins. Very similar landscapes and remote culture. Tall trees, lush and vibrant greenery, and folks existing peacefully on the fringes of society.
There have been times in my life where I’ve been stranded, when I had no money and I had no one I felt I could confide in (although, truth be told, I did and probably should have) and so … I’d just walk hours on end, sometimes even overnight, through New England roads which are sparsely populated but the trees …make you feel protected. Insulated. Even though the woods also are home to predators, it felt …natural.
LIFE IS STRANGE 2 is a game centered around desertion and opt-ing out of society, because sometimes, that is absolutely necessary. As you venture through the game, you meet up with folks who are off-the-grid, including one face you might not expect from LIFE IS STRANGE 1. Whereas the prior games were all born of suburban trauma and feeling penned in, LIFE IS STRANGE 2 is a wild road trip adventure.
I’ll note that LIFE IS STRANGE 2 also features a small moment regarding an older journalist — a transient, basically — who helps them out in a time of need, and that’s it, and he drives off. Again, it’s small, but it makes an impact.
It sketches out how the world is different for so many people, and that there are so many different ways to live in it, which is essentially what LIFE IS STRANGE 2 is about.
LIFE IS STRANGE 2: THE AWESOME ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN SPIRIT (forward known as CAPTAIN SPIRIT) is a bit of an anomaly in the LIFE IS STRANGE series in that it’s centered around a very young boy but also: it was a free ‘demo’ for LIFE IS STRANGE 2 released prior to the game, and is only barely tangentially related to LIFE IS STRANGE 2.
Those caveats aside, CAPTAIN SPIRIT is still very much a LIFE IS STRANGE game: it is absolutely fixated on trauma and loss, escapism and the hope of overcoming what hell you’re living in, even if it means believing in superpowers.
In this case, it’s about yet another Pacific Northwestern person, a young boy named Chris Eriksen. He’s fashioned an alter-ego known as CAPTAIN SPIRIT in the days since his mother died in a car accident; an accident that his alcoholic father he lives with still blames him for.
(Obviously, this is the flip-side of the coin of LIFE IS STRANGE 1 and Chloe’s father’s death.)
It’s a very slight, but sensitive portrayal of a youth who isn’t quite cognizant of the turmoil around him, nor the turmoil he’ll have to work out in therapy in the future, but I found it to be a very sweet and heartfelt story, even though there’s very little gameplay.
It’s worth noting that there are a few iffy bugs with it and LIFE IS STRANGE 2 that can cause issues. I had to delete and re-install both in order to deal with ‘em.
This game contains details of familial death. To prevent spoilers, I side-step mentioning those details.
If you’ve been following along with the prior posts: LIFE IS STRANGE: FAREWELL (FAREWELL, going forward) is a very short prequel to LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM (BEFORE THE STORM, going forward), which is the prequel to LIFE IS STRANGE.
In other words: you get to see Max and Chloe as very early youths, just as Max is about to leave for Seattle and just when Chloe’s life turns to shit.
BEFORE THE STORM was far smaller-scale than LIFE IS STRANGE, and FAREWELL is even more intimate. It details one of Max’s last days with Chloe before she moves to Seattle. She hasn’t told Chloe yet — she’s afraid of ruining the mood and just wants to hang out with her best friend and riff on the good times; all of their pirate games and treasure maps and blowing up shit and languid lounging sleepy days, hanging around Chloe’s room, occasionally popping out for a stack of her mother’s pancakes.
One of the most remarkable features of LIFE IS STRANGE is its indulgence in reminiscing and introspection. Each and every installment features a number of places to sit or lay down on and mull over feelings and revel in memories. For the majority of FAREWELL, it’s Max laying alongside Chloe on her bed as they idly listen to music, the breeze flowing through the windows, as she recounts her feelings about her best friend to herself. The camera cuts to specific areas of Chloe’s room, occasionally glimsping the outside, even after Max has completed her inner monologue.
It’s techniques such as that which makes LIFE IS STRANGE a game instead of an interactive novel. You can exit out of these vignettes at any point in time. Hell, you don’t even need to enact them. However, when you do it enriches the characters and the world that they inhabit.
FAREWELL is quietly brutal, with a gut-punch of an ending but, for a short period of time, you get to live in the idyllic world of their youth and see them simply having fun and enjoying life. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself opting out of works that unnecessarily put their characters through unrelenting traumatic circumstances and, while LIFE IS STRANGE most certainly does that — I realize it’s basic narrative necessity — it also finds time and space to give them joyful experiences, and I will miss them.
“Even when we’re apart, we’re still Max and Chloe.”
When dealing with teen-centric dramas, too many works have their point-of-view centered around the naive shy one who is drawn into the orbit of the nefarious, corrupting burr on society. The initial five chapters of LIFE IS STRANGE certainly took that approach; Max is the POV character, a smart, upright, mostly meek and non-rebellious person who just wants to pursue her art but is drawn back into the orbit of her prior best-friend Chloe, a fried drop-out, and calamity ensues, literally brewing a storm that entangles everyone.
Rewind a bit.
LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM (BEFORE THE STORM from here on out) examines the other side of the coin by placing the focus on Chloe and how she (poorly) navigates life after Max moves from Arcadia Bay to Seattle with her family and — in more ways than one — writes Chloe out of her life for five years. In the meantime, Chloe — utterly floundering due to the sudden death of her father and the departure of her best friend — falls apart. She finds herself rudderless during a dark time at Blackwood Academy, Arcadia Bay’s school for gifted burgeoning artists and scientists.
Then Blackwood’s star student, a picture-perfect young woman named Rachel Amber, takes Chloe by her hand, saves her from a terribly shitty situation at a dirtbag club night, and everything changes; they become inseparable. They also get entangled in a lot of shit for, well, being out-spoken and for standing up for themselves, and if you’ve played the initial game you know where that gets them.
However, this game is about shining a spotlight on the time Chloe and Rachel had together, about them finding each other, trusting each other, and figuring out the world and what they want.
While you can play BEFORE THE STORM as straight, that’s not the Chloe I know; my Chloe is queer as hell and gives no shits, so that’s the tact I took, and the game doesn’t disappoint if you go down that route. It feels poignant in the way that few games do.
BEFORE THE STORM is far smaller-scale than the first game in more ways than one. It’s focused on characters and fleshing out the events that lead to the tragedy (or tragedies) of LIFE IS STRANGE. Chloe doesn’t have superpowers; she has barbed quips and a Sharpie. You just spend three episodes living through Chloe’s often-banal life.
Yet, it’s my favorite of the series. (At least, so far.) It’s not a love story per se, but it is a romance of sorts between two people who aren’t exactly good for each other, but they ultimately find themselves drawn to each other, then find the same frequency, and they ride that for as long as they can. Also, Chloe’s general trajectory is something I certainly relate to in many ways. (I was a real shitheel of a teen. Gave my parents a lot of grief. Lived a duplicitous life. Not that anyone asked, but we’re on better terms now.)
BEFORE THE STORM also features my favorite bonus episode — which has become a staple of the series — and rewinds even further back: LIFE IS STRANGE: FAREWELL. However, I’ll table that for tomorrow.
“Don’t be surprised if one day, I’m just out of here.”
This game contains depictions of abduction, abuse, familial death and suicide. To prevent spoilers, I side-step mentioning most of those details, but not all.
LIFE IS STRANGE is an interactive narrative-forward videogame from French developer DONTNOD (now known as Don’t Nod). The game will be eight years old around the time of publishing this post. In other words, a tad more than a full teenage generation, which is fitting for a work that focuses so much on the time between being a youth and being considered an adult. It’s a game that zeroes in on how every choice — and the results of your choices — feel amplified, how the choices ripple through your life, and how you may learn to regret or embrace it. It’s also a game about highlighting traumatic incidents you’ve lived through and whether you are willing to confront them or push them aside. Often, the choice is up to you, but also intractable.
LIFE IS STRANGE takes place in the sleepy town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, a fictional burg that was once fine waters for fisherman, at least before an old-money family by the name of the Prescotts strip-mined the area. While doing so, they buy out the long-standing local elite school for gifted artists and scientists: Blackwell Academy. (It’s worth noting that Blackwell is a rather loaded name, given Shirley Jackson’s WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE.)
You play as Maxine Caulfield, an aspiring photographer who goes by the shorthand ‘Max’. Max previously lived in Arcadia Bay, spending most of her free time with best friend and science nerd Chloe Price, at least until Max’s family moved to Seattle when Max was was an early teen. Unfortunately, right around the same day Max moved to Seattle, Chloe’s father died in a car accident.
Max attended the funeral, left town, and never contacted Chloe the entire time she lived near the spire.
Five years later, Max is back in Arcadia Bay to attend classes at Blackwell taught by her favorite living photographer: Mark Jefferson. In the meantime, Chloe has dropped out of Blackwell, having become a quintessential burnout punk — all dyed hair and anger issues — but is also desperately in search for one Rachel Amber, a gregarious all-star Blackwell student, and the person that helped prop Chloe up after Max had left. Rachel has been missing for six months and, while her family and police assume she’s just jaunted off to Los Angeles to act or model, Chloe knows better, and plasters the town with MISSING flyers.
Inexplicably, Max becomes imbued with the ability to rewind time, which allows her to save her prior best friend from being shot in a Blackwell bathroom — despite not even recognizing Chloe, thanks to five years of passage, as well as her newly shorn and cyan-colored hair.
Matters escalate in a very neo-noir/VERONICA MARS sort of way that includes all sorts of teen high school drama, drugs, men taking terrible advantage of their positions and power, you have a number of romance options and oh, Arcadia Bay might be totalled by an F6 tornado that only Max can foresee, and very few folks believe her.
In other words, this is perfect teenage fodder: small decisions result in huge consequences, emotions are perpetually heightened, your protagonist is gifted and has superpowers, and everyone is thirsty.
While LIFE IS STRANGE is an interactive narrative work, it manages its gameplay elements better than similar story-first games: the time-rewind feature is perfectly honed for a game where the result of choices ripple, and the interface for newly discovered dialogue branches is far better than anything BioWare has come up with. The visual design is artfully simple while also being striking with its colorful hues and stylized environments — especially notable is how it portrays Oregon, all lush leaves and wind streaked. While it’s not my home state of Vermont, it evokes that same rustic, rural feeling.
However, the real appeal here is in the character work: Max is a shy, restrained nerd and surrounded herself by similar folks. Chloe is a problem in search of a solution, a frustrated youth who lashes out unpredictably and still lives with her mother who works at the local diner. When Max and Chloe reunite, the game crystalizes; if you were lucky enough to have a best-friend as a teen, especially if you two were weirdo misfits, this game will almost certainly hit amazingly close-to-home. If you weren’t, it’s such an earnest and honest and emotional depiction that you’ll still feel their bond, their strife, their push-and-pull.
I know a lot of folks feel like the game cribs from TWIN PEAKS. It’s literally spelled out on Chloe’s license plate, and it mimics a lot of the ‘small town with secrets’ vibe. However — thematically — I don’t feel it, even though it does indulge in abused/dead girl tropes. The game is about survival and confronting circumstances, as opposed to innocence lost, unheard pain and senseless death. Does it dovetail with TWIN PEAKS? Yes. But no one here is actually Laura Palmer, the crux of a town.
I first played LIFE IS STRANGE way back in 2015, as the episodes were slowly doled out. As such, I forgot a lot over time, but certain scenes you do not forget. To be blunt: the ending? Spoiler alert: there is no good ending, although you’re still forced to choose one.
It’s rare that I replay games. I often say it’s a time thing, but more often than not it’s about retaining my initial experience of the game, how I felt about the characters and environments and conflicts and obstacles and victories. Also, most videogames are narratively linear, even if they pretend they aren’t, and most videogame stories suck. Sure, you occasionally have a SILENT HILL 2 that upends everything, but more often than not, it’s just banal. And that’s fine and I find fun in it!
I did replay LIFE IS STRANGE a few weeks ago. (I’ll note that I haven’t played the remastered version.) The entire game came back to me as I advanced chapter-by-chapter, not unlike how memories would unfold for Max. I remembered the choices I made. I remembered the choices I wish I hadn’t been forced to make.
I made a few different choices this time around, but mostly skewed to trying to be a good friend like I did the first time. This time around, I did kiss Chloe, but then felt bad because they’re really only always going to be friends and Max — well, my Max — is pretty straight and it just felt weird and awkward, and the game plays it out that way. This isn’t a story about queer awakening — it’s a story about friendship.
However: that’s exactly why this game, this series exists: it recreates the awkwardness of becoming an young adult, and the culmination of everything and everyone that influences it, as well as everyone who supports — or exploits — you along the way.
Emotionally, it is a lot, and in more than a few ways I don’t love how the game ladles on momentous decisions as it didn’t need to push so hard. However, upon replaying, I slowly and sadly came to realize that this one game is firmly focused on reconciling losing close friendships and ties.
It’s a game I wish I had as a teen, but I’m so happy that it exists now, and so ecstatic to see what it inspires in the generations to come.
Welcome to LIFE IS STRANGE week. If you aren’t familiar with the DONTNOD videogame series, they’re choice-based narrative games where the decisions you make matter more than they ever did in your MASS EFFECTs, and they’re all centered around the traumas endured while navigating one’s tumultuous teen years.
It is worth noting that all of these games deal rather frankly with a range of unsavory and traumatic actions and conditions, such as abduction, abuse, familial death, suicidal thoughts, and more. I’ll be assigning content warnings to each post but, if you’re sensitive to such matters — believe me, I am and I probably shouldn’t even be replaying these games right now — you may want to skip these entries.
If you want a primer, I’ve created a YouTube playlist:
The first post will be for LIFE IS STRANGE (2015) on Feb 20th! In the meantime, you can take bets on which is my fav.
UPDATE
Since the week is over, here’s a list of each post!
Me, to myself: “Wait, seriously? I’ve never written anything about San Junipero?”
Me, checks my archives. “Nope.”
Me: “Seriously? Never?!”
Me: “Apart from bending everyone’s ear about it and repeatedly watching it with your wife, nope, but it’s Valentine’s Day and you already wrote about HARLEY QUINN so hey, you be you.”
Obviously, the show BLACK MIRROR has become shorthand for dystopian anthology nightmare fuel, and rightly so. It’s intentionally subversive in all of the well-meaning ways, but also usually in very off-putting ways. The show literally kicked off with the prime minister fucking a pig, which ended up being more truth than fiction somehow.
However, San Junipero is something different, and something I’ve desperately missed with speculative fiction. I’m old enough to feel terribly beaten down by the world for so many goddamn reasons. I often just want a few creature comforts. I’ve had too much of the unrelenting misery porn of the past 15+ years of what passes as ‘high-concept melodrama’. At least THE SOPRANOS had its moments of levity as opposed to say, the nihilism of THE WALKING DEAD. (At least THE LAST OF US has a lot of dad jokes, but those are all penned by fathers inserting words into daughter figures so …yeah.)
San Junipero delivers all of the goods: it’s a very sweet meet-cute, it’s an adorable and safe and welcoming queer story, and it’s a sweeping romance that goes through ages that also manages to be wildly sci-fi.
It has everything and delivers it in under a goddamn hour and it is amazing, but it’s also astounding because it’s literally the story of someone finding a safe space, and finding accepting (and sometimes loving) arms.
I’ve written briefly about this before, but I cannot underscore it enough: find a space where you feel comfortable. Surround yourself by folks who don’t judge you, folks you can talk to. Find a loving partner that accepts you. If you can, move somewhere that is explicitly know for being accepting.
San Junipero espouses all of that and does so in a vividly entertaining way! It’s all about misfits reaching out, helping each other, moving on, but also being in the same orbit, and it scarily mirrors parts of my club-centric youth.
It is a surprisingly hopeful and non-traumatizing depiction of a long-lasting relationship, and the goddamn episode makes me glow every time I watch it. It’s emblematic of just wanting the best for your protagonists, your favs, those you muse over, and also yourself, and they get a proper and heartfelt ending.
It is legitimately one of my favorite pieces of media in years, and again, I can’t believe I haven’t penned hundreds of words about it already, but here we are.
OH! And goddamn, the needle drops! Best use of “Heaven is a Place on Earth” ever. Just watch it already. I’ll shut up now.
My apologies in advance for posting yet again about HARLEY QUINN but I will never, ever shut up about this show.
It is not only a paragon of comedic entertainment, with a joke-per-minute count that puts ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT to shame, it features some of the most thrilling and cartoonishly squeamish scenes that would make Sam Raimi jealous, it dives head-first into some of the thorniest depictions of trauma — seriously, the first season’s Bensonhurst should be on every screenwriting syllabus — and it has one of the best penned romances of television time. (Suck it, Jim & Pam.)
And it does all of this under the umbrella of the scattershot DC universe somehow.
I’ll note that the show has radically changed over its three seasons: the first season was fundamentally about Harley separating herself from the abuse of the Joker and finding a supportive network. The second season was about her finding herself and reconciling her history. The third kind of blew up her support network, but also (finally) found her living her best queer life with her love Poison Ivy.
That’s a lot for a show to tear off, much less do well, and manage to do so in gut-busting way.
A bit of a sidenote: I think a lot of people get a tad too hung up over ‘being Harley’ or ‘being Ivy’, in the stupid way everyone in the 90s felt the need to label themselves as a Seinfeld or Sex and the City character. (I still don’t understand why anyone would want to self-identify with those hateful people, but it’s not for me to judge. Well, maybe a little, unless you’re a Samantha because she’s the best.)
What I love about the series — and what makes this special so very special — is that the characters are far more complicated than base archetypes. I can’t help but identify with both. I’m the filthy over-eager people-pleaser that Harley is, but I am also frequently misanthropic and want to do nothing but watch my stories and retreat from the world because I also hate everyone and everything. (Nothing personal!)
However, they make it work. They’re loving, but also have to be constantly mindful of each other’s needs.
That’s one of the great things about this show: it’s one of the first non-John Waters works I’ve seen that celebrates horniness, even against a culture that actively tries to beat it down. (Pun intended.) This episode is wall-to-wall horny in a celebratory way, in the way that I wish sex was more popularly portrayed. It’s mostly about Harley buying drugs to give Ivy the best orgasm of her life — which leads to one of the best lines of the show:
“Oh you can’t possibly be mad at me gettin’ ya off too good. That is not a thing!”
Even us damaged folk want to get our freak on, and this show helps to normalize that.
And then there’s Bane! Kaiju Bane, fucking every building he sees because he took some bad drugs! Literally laying waste to the world, and it’s hilarious.
This show is bonkers, but also manages to be one of the most grounded works out there. I’m so tired of seeing poorly-penned 20-something relationships in media, and HARLEY QUINN gives us something meaningful and substantive, while also being narratively interesting!
I’d like to note that Alan Sepinwall is also extolling the show’s virtues (or, err, lack there of?) so I’m not alone:
Cripes, I didn’t even get to mention all of the WHEN HARRY MET SALLY riffs. Also: ETRIGAN and his rhymes?! And their V-Day hairdos! Just watch the damn ep — it speaks for itself!
Taking a rare timeout to get on a different sort of soapbox today:
Look, I realize I’m in the minority when it comes to movie viewing and theatrical outings. I actively — often solo — pursue indie theaters in the name of art versus a collective outing to fall asleep during the latest Marvel film. Also: I hate middle seats and sitting around people, especially in megaplexes. I have long legs — long enough that if someone needs to pass me by, I have to stand up; the sideway scrunch doesn’t cut it — so I routinely sit in one of the most unpopular seats in the house.
That said: AMC’s decision to move towards tiered prices for seats is a disheartening and damaging one, one that signals that they’re tilting towards Ticketmaster. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if, within a year or two, we start to see them boost their own ticket hub to auction off ‘sold out’ seats for tentpole releases. (I still don’t understand how Ticketmaster owning and funneling tickets off to StubHub is legal.)
Movie theaters will never die — you will always have misfits operating a creaky projector in whatever abode they can finagle — however, it is about damn time that theaters as monopolies die. What many folks forget about American capitalism is that Hollywood was the very pinacle of ‘vertical integration’, where one singular power controlled the creation, distribution, and consumption of their product, giving studios unbridled sway to essentially extort money from the public. Eventually the Supreme Court interceded and handed down a brutal number of penalties against the major players. It’s worth noting that Disney actively engages in ‘block booking’, which is why you can see the latest Marvel film on ten screens in the same theater, but there’s no room for the latest Sarah Polley film. (For more, see: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-day-the-supreme-court-killed-hollywoods-studio-system)
However, as Elijah Wood noted: movies have a history of being an egalitarian entertainment. Before there were movie houses, folks roamed from town-to-town, setting up a hand-cranked projector and a screen outdoors for public entertainment (and a bit of profit). When movies went indoors, the spots were often known as movie palaces — not just for their opulence, but because they were spaces to collectively congregate for the better part of the day, and a nickel would give you a way to beat the heat, learn about current events via newsreels, have a few laughs and maybe shed a few tears. (And yes, that’s where the term ‘Nickelodeon’ comes from.)
Not to be all ‘back in my day’ but back in my day, there were a number of national franchised movie houses, like Loews. Now, AMC owns them all and have a virtual monopoly on movie theaters. Now they’re charging more than what you’d spend to stream a film upon its release. (Those of my age may remember that, ‘back in the day’ you couldn’t buy films on video for less than $100, but that’s a subject for another time.)
Again, this isn’t about me. I’ll pay the minimum price for the handful of films I attend at an AMC for a year and it’s no skin off of my nose. (There’s no way in hell I’m paying a membership fee for the privilege of a discount, though I will note that I do pay a yearly membership fee to my favorite movie theater: Chicago’s own Music Box.) However, it does severely impact families. I can’t speak for everyone, but I vividly remember my early moviegoing experiences with my family, the awe of big screen spectacle, being swept away by intense emotions, sometimes to the point of having to be ushered out of the theater and comforted by my parents. I’m saddened to think that most of the youth of the current generation will not have those experiences — it’ll just be a blur of banal streaming works on a poorly calibrated flat-screen TV because it’s financially impractical as an outing.
(That said, my parents also hewed strictly to ratings and rarely let me watch anything they hadn’t already seen before. Let this post be a lesson to all of you young parents: restricting media to youths only serves to turn them into media-obsessed monsters.)
I wouldn’t be surprised to see AMC either revert this decision, or simply double-down on it. It’s just disheartening and sad to see what should be a simple experience of going to the movies — a literal trope in many movies — become overly complex and expensive when, if matters were better managed, it wouldn’t be a problem.
