Trains and cinemas have much in common. As Tom Sutcliffe wrote in his book Watching, we experience anxiety when we miss the start of a film for we fear that “pleasure will leave without us”. As Anthony Lane observed in his review of Wes Anderson’s partly train-bound movie The Darjeeling Limited, a similarity exists between the state of the train passenger and that of the cinemagoer, both of whom “are required to sit with their fellow-men, and to start their journey at a particular time, not of their own choosing. Both are left alone, yet their privacy—tinged with dreaminess—is of a very public kind.”
Of course, disembarking a train is a bit trickier than walking out on a movie. Should your journey be unsatisfactory, flinging yourself from the carriage between stations would be a rather extreme version of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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