Boulderdash

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Post

I've been thinking a lot about my history with this film ever since learning, a month or so ago, that it was going to have this one-week-only Imax rerelease.

• I'll always know without looking that the film came out when I was in Grafton, W.Va., working for a small-town daily newspaper, because I remember seeing it at the theater in downtown Morgantown, with a schoolteacher named Pam, on one of those awkward is-it-or-is-it-not-a-"date"? things. There was nothing awkward about the cinematic portion of the evening, of course: how could either of us fail to be seduced by the onscreen eros? Really, about the only awkwardness was when we bumped noses in my kitchen the one time (ever) we tried the kissing thing. With more life since than before, I now would guess that Pam was gay (no, the chief cue is not that she clearly had no interest in sex with me)--almost certainly closeted, maybe even to herself, that being the safest place to be in Appalachian coal country at the start of the Reagan era. If I'm right (or even if I'm not), I hope she has had a good life in the almost 3 decades since I've seen her; she was one of the best eggs I knew during my W.Va. exile. But I digress. What surprises me now is seeing that the release date of the film was June 12. Presumably by the summer of '81, secondary markets were getting blockbusters within a week or 2 of the big cities, which would mean I'd been in Grafton a month or less when the film came out, and even in those days, when I wasn't the popcorn junkie I am today, I wouldn't have waited long to see it. Somehow, I would have thought I was more established in the mountains when I met Indy, but the evidence is against me. No wonder I was out with a lesbian and not even realizing it wasn't really a date.
• The second screening involves another woman, Janet. Janet was . . . an important life experience. Why I know that my second screening of Raiders was in February or March 1982 is that the last I saw Janet was when I put her on a plane at the Bridgeport airport shortly after the W.Va. state high school wrestling meet in Wheeling, and February is when that happens. Janet had gone to Wheeling with me, because she didn't want to be taken home to her parents, and she was no condition to be left alone after I'd responded to her Friday night call to me at work to come rescue her from the guy who wanted her out of his house pronto. The call was a surprise because I hadn't heard from her since the holidays, after the last in a series of stormy goodbyes that alternated with steamy reunions over the few months we knew each other. There was, I hasten to add, nothing steamy about this reunion. I had seen Janet in various states of disarray, but I'd never seen her like this: she said it was morphine, and while believing her was never really a percentage play, I had no reason not to on this occasion. If not morphine, it was something soporific; she slept most of the way to Wheeling on Saturday morning, then stayed at the motel all day while I went and did my job. She was awake long enough to answer the phone when it rang: it was my ex-wife in Illinois, with whom reconciliation talks were in progress; nothing ultimately came of those talks, but surprisingly, her calling my room and having a groggy woman answer has little to do with that. By Sunday morning, Janet had enough energy for us to take a long walk around Wheeling--which is, by the way (or was, anyway), a surprisingly nifty little Ohio River town--and on the drive home she made her decision: she'd go to Nebraska, where her brother was in the service, and she'd stay with him, far away from the temptations of home, and get cleaned up once and for all, and get her life turned around. If only she had the money for airfare . . . So I have no idea why Raiders was playing--still? again?--in Bridgeport a few weeks after I put her on the plane; I know only that I took Joey, Janet's 8-year-old myopic, unhappy (go figure) son, whom she'd left behind with her parents, to see it. Seemed like the least I could do to spend some time with the kid, notwithstanding that he wasn't much fun to be around. Janet and I stayed in touch for a while, but I never saw her again. I have often wondered how her life turned out, not to mention Joey's; I wish I were enough of an optimist to believe things went well in the long run.
• I loved the film, so I'd see it from time to time over the years, but after those first two, we were talking indistinguishable home video screenings. Then a few years ago the Criterion opened downtown, and one of their first late-night screenings was of Raiders. It was a print that seemed to have been treated about as roughly as Indy was, and though there was a big, appreciative crowd, something was missing in me. It was like the end of a love affair. Fortunately, a couple of years after that, it was screened one summer night in open air on the downtown Green, which was like starting over. And then a couple more DVD screenings, before I read in the Times that it's getting big. Big. So . . .

Yes, size matters. Though I gotta say the screen struck me as smaller than I remembered Imax, not all that much bigger that a conventional screen at a suburban multiplex these days. Still, this is the biggest and the best I'll ever see (or hear--the sound is amazing, too) this pic, and while there are a handful of long shots with insufficient resolution to produce a big sharp picture, otherwise bigger is better for everything, from the rolling boulder to the herpetic hordes to the Nazi-blitzing Hebraic wraiths to the infinitely cavernous government warehouse. Even Karen Allen's fashion show (was there ever a more ingenious series of plot twists to allow a plucky female lead also show sexy? was there another role in my generation that so combined the boy's fantasy of plucky + sexy?) is surprisingly arresting.

Definitely worth the long bus trip out the Post Road--even through misinformation about showtimes took ParaNorman out of the equation.

Trailers

• Frankenweenie--Is it my imagination, or is there something new from Tim Burton every couple of months?
• Oz: The Great and Powerful--Seriously? I'm a fan of James Franco, but I've never thought of him as wizardly.
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey--Well, sure.