I'm a Stranger Here Myself (14 page)

Every year about this time I do a mildly foolish thing. I gather up some of the smaller children and take them to one of the summer movies.

Summer movies are big business in America. This year between Memorial Day and Labor Day Americans will spend $2 billion on movie tickets, plus half as much again on chewy things to stuff into their mouths while staring saucer-eyed at images of extremely costly mayhem.

Summer movies are nearly always bad, of course, but I believe this may be the worst summer ever. I base this entirely, but confidently, on a quotation I saw in the
New York Times
from Jan de Bont, director of
Speed 2: Cruise Control,
who boasted that the movie’s biggest dramatic event—in which an out-of-control cruise ship carrying Sandra Bullock plows into a Caribbean village—came to him in a dream. “The entire screenplay was written backward from that image,” he revealed proudly. There, I think, you have all you need to know about the intellectual quality of the average summer movie.

I always tell myself not to set my expectations too high, that summer movies are the cinematic equivalent of amusement park rides, and no one ever expected a roller coaster to provide a satisfying plot line. But the thing is, summer movies have become so dumb—so very, very dumb—that it is hard to abide them. No matter how much money has been spent on them—and it is worth noting that at least eight of this year’s crop have budgets over $100 million—there is always such a large measure of implausibility as to make you wonder whether the script was concocted over canapés the night before filming began.

This year we went to the new Jurassic Park movie,
Lost World.
Now never mind that it is largely identical to the last Jurassic Park movie—same booming footfalls and trembling puddles whenever T-rex comes into the vicinity, same mortified people backing away from a door against which velociraptors are hurling themselves (only to find another toothy creature looming over their shoulder), same scenes of vehicles dangling precariously from a jungly bluff while the heroes hold on for dear life. No matter. The dinosaurs are terrific and a dozen or so people get squashed or eaten in the first hour. This is what we’ve come for!

And then it all falls apart. In a culminating scene, a Tyrannosaurus escapes, in an improbable manner, from a ship, runs rampant through downtown San Diego, crushing buses and destroying gas stations, and then—suddenly, inexplicably—is in the middle of a heavily slumbering suburban neighborhood, alone and unobserved. Now does it strike you as remotely likely that a prehistoric, twenty-foot-high creature not seen on earth for sixty-five million years could cause mayhem in a business district and then slip off into a residential zone without anyone’s noticing? Does it not seem a trifle nagging and unsatisfactory that while downtown San Diego is full of people doing lively, mid-evening sorts of things—lining up at movie theaters, strolling around hand in hand—out in the residential area the streets are silent and every last soul is fast asleep?

And so it goes on from there. While police cars are dashing around bumping helplessly into each other, the hero and heroine manage to find the T-rex unaided and—undetected by anyone in this curiously unobservant city—lure her some miles back to the boat, so that she can be returned to her tropical island home, thus setting up the happy, inevitable, and commercially gratifying possibility of a Jurassic Park 3.

Lost World
is slack and obvious and, for all its $100 millionplus budget, contains about $2.35 worth of actual thought, and so of course it is on its way to setting all kinds of records at the box office. In its first weekend alone, it took in $92.7 million.

However, my problem is not really with
Lost World
or any of the other summer fare. I’m way past expecting Hollywood to provide me with a cerebral experience during the warmer months. My problem is with the Sony 6 Theaters of West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and the thousands of other suburban cinema complexes like it, which are doing to the American moviegoing experience essentially what Steven Spielberg’s Tyrannosaurus rex did to San Diego.

Anyone who grew up in America in the 1960s or before will remember the days when going to the pictures meant visiting a single-screen institution, usually vast, usually down-town. In my hometown, Des Moines, the main movie theater (imaginatively called “The Des Moines”) was a palatial extravaganza with spooky lighting and a decor that brought to mind an Egyptian crypt. By my era, it was something of a dump—I am sure there was a dead horse in there somewhere, and certainly it hadn’t been cleaned since Theda Bara was in her prime—but just being there, facing a vast screen in a cubic acre of darkness, was an entrancing experience.

Except in a few major cities, nearly all those great down-town cinemas are gone now. (The Des Moines went in about 1965.) Instead what you get nowadays are suburban multiplexes with an abundance of tiny screening rooms. Although
Lost World
was the hottest movie around, we saw it in a chamber of almost laughable minuteness, barely large enough to accommodate nine rows of seats, which were grudgingly padded and crammed so close together that my knees ended up more or less hooked around my ears. The screen had the dimensions of a large beach towel and was so ill-placed that everyone in the first three rows had to look almost straight up, as if in a planetarium. The sound was bad and the picture frequently jerky. Before it started, we had to sit through thirty minutes of commercials. The popcorn, candy, and soft drinks were outrageously expensive, and the salespeople had been programmed to try to sell you things you didn’t want and had not asked for. In short, every feature of this movie complex seemed carefully designed to make a visit a deeply regretted experience.

I’m not cataloging all this to make you feel sorry for me, though sympathy is always welcome, but to point out that this is increasingly the standard experience for moviegoers in America. I can handle a little audiovisual imbecility, but I can’t bear to see the magic taken away.

I was talking about this to one of my older children the other day. She listened attentively, even sympathetically, then said a sad thing. “Dad,” she told me, “you need to understand that people don’t want the smell of a dead horse when they go to the movies.”

She’s right, of course. But if you ask me, they don’t know what they are missing.

I’m going to have to be quick because it’s a Sunday and the weather is glorious and Mrs. Bryson has outlined a big, ambitious program of gardening. Worse, she’s wearing what I nervously call her Nike expression—the one that says, “Just do it.”

Now don’t get me wrong. Mrs. Bryson is a rare and delightful creature and goodness knows my life needs structure and supervision, but when she gets out a pad and pen and writes the words “Things To Do” (vigorously underscored several times) you know it’s going to be a long time till Monday.

I love to garden—there is something about the combination of mindless activity and the constant unearthing of worms that just suits me somehow—but frankly I am not crazy about gardening with my wife. The trouble, you see, is that she is English and thus can intimidate me. She can say things like, “Have you heeled in the nodes on the
Dianthus chinensis
?” and “Did you remember to check the sequestrene levels on the
Phlox subulata
?”

All British people can do this, I find, and it’s awful—terrifying even. Even now I remember the astonishment of listening to the ever-popular BBC radio program “Gardeners’ Question Time” for the first time many years ago and realizing with quiet horror that I was in a nation of people who not only knew and understood things like powdery mildew, peach leaf curl, optimum pH levels, and the difference between
Coreopsis verticillata
and
Coreopsis grandiflora
but cared about them—indeed, found it gratifying to engage in long and lively discussions on such matters.

I come from a background where you are considered to have a green thumb if you can grow a cactus on a windowsill, so my own approach to gardening has always been rather less scientific. My method, which actually works pretty well, is to treat as a weed anything that hasn’t flowered by August and to sprinkle everything else with bone meal, slug pellets, and whatever else I find lying around the potting shed. Once or twice a summer I tip everything with a skull and crossbones on the label into a spray canister and give everything a jolly good dousing. It’s an unorthodox approach and occasionally, I admit, I have to leap out of the way of an abruptly falling tree that has failed to respond to ministrations, but generally it has been a success and I have achieved some interesting and novel mutational effects. I once got a fence post to fruit, for instance.

For years, especially when the children were small and capable of almost any kind of mischief, my wife left me to the garden. Occasionally she would step out to ask what I was doing, and I would have to confess that I was dusting some weedy-looking things with an unknown powdery substance that I had found in the garage and that I was pretty confident was either nitrogen or possibly cement mix. Usually at that moment one of the children would come out to announce that little Jimmy’s hair was on fire, or something else similarly but usefully distracting, and she would fly off, leaving me to get on with my experiments in peace. It was a good arrangement and our marriage prospered.

Then the children grew large enough to attend to their own cranial blazes and we moved to America, and now I find Mrs. B. out there with me. Or rather I am there with her, for I seem to have acquired a subsidiary role that principally involves bringing or taking away the wheelbarrow at a trot. I used to be a keen gardener; now I’m a kind of rickshaw boy.

Anyway, gardening isn’t the same here. People don’t even have gardens in America. They have yards. And they don’t garden in those yards. They do “yardwork.” Takes all the fun out of it somehow.

In Britain, nature is fecund and kindly. The whole country is a kind of garden, really. In America, the instinct of nature is to be a wilderness—glorious in its way, of course, but much harder to subdue. What you get here are triffid-like weeds that come creeping in from every margin and must be continually hacked back with sabers and machetes. I am quite sure that if we left the property for a month we would come back to find that the weeds had captured the house and dragged it off to the woods to be slowly devoured.

American gardens are mostly lawn, and American lawns are mostly big. This means that you spend your life raking. In the autumn the leaves fall together with a single great
whoomp
—a sort of vegetative mass suicide—and you spend about two months dragging them into piles, while the wind does its best to put them all back where you found them. You rake and rake, and cart the leaves off to the woods, then hang up your rake and go inside for the next seven months.

But as soon as you turn your back, the leaves begin creeping back. I don’t know how they do it, but when you come out in spring, there they all are again, spread ankle deep across your lawn, choking thorny shrubs, clogging drains. So you spend weeks and weeks raking them up and carting them back to the woods. Finally, just when you get the lawn pristine, there is a great
whoomp
sound and you realize it’s autumn again. It’s really quite dispiriting.

And now on top of all that my dear spouse has suddenly taken a commanding interest in the whole business of domestic horticulture. It’s my own fault, I have to admit. Last year, I filled the lawn spreader with a mixture of my own devising— essentially fertilizer, moss killer, rabbit food (initially by mistake, but then I thought, “What the heck?” and tossed in the rest) and a dash of something lively called buprimate and triforine. Two days later the front lawn erupted in vivid orange stripes of a sufficiently arresting and persistent nature to attract sightseers from as far away as west-central Massachusetts. So now I find myself on a kind of permanent probation.

Speaking of which, I’ve got to go. I’ve just heard the hard, clinical snap of gardening gloves going on and the ominous sound of metal tools being taken down from their perches. It’s only a matter of time before I hear the cry of “Boy! Bring the barrow—and look sharp!” But you know the part I really hate? It’s having to wear this stupid coolie hat.