Hilton Als’s White Girls begins with a man sitting “on the promontory in our village, deep in movie love. He’s running the same old flick in his head again. In it, the stars kiss breathlessly, in true love.” A page or so later, now in a darkened cinema, Als says of the same man, “Watching him watch a movie, I noticed how his eyes would open and close slowly, like the folds in an accordion. The movies filled his eyes up.”
In Annie Baker’s The Flick, now on at the National Theatre, we watch people watching movies. The play begins in darkness, a point of light radiating out over the audience, the whirring of a projector the only sound. When it stops, and the lights are raised, we see rows of empty cinema seats staring blankly back at us.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Content from our partners
