A rush of blood to the head
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The lines outside the auditoriums are always surprisingly long, even for movies like "Apocalypto." The passes often come on colored Xerox paper, as if someone couldn't reproduce them en masse and make the one you secured totally irrelevant. And there's always the awkward threats from the apparent higher powers that if you let your friends cut in front of you, you'll go to the end of the line, too!
Even so, though it may not seem so beforehand, the effort to get into an M-Flicks movie - the most popular of which are advanced screenings of major movies not yet in theaters - is fairly minimal. Pick up tickets at the Michigan Union and get to the screening a reasonable time before it's set to start, and you get to see a new movie for free on Central Campus. But that's to say nothing of the experience once you get inside.
Consider last winter's M-Flicks screening of "Children of Men." Alfonso Cuarón's film is touted as a pop masterpiece in many circles, but I dare not watch it again for fear it will evoke the original experience of seeing it.
Scattered tactlessness in a crowded theater is unavoidable, and it's noticeable at even the best theaters. It's not like that with M-Flicks. In "Children," for example, when Michael Caine's hippie jester was tortured and killed, my roommate and I appeared to among the only ones in the Natural Science Auditorium who thought the protracted violence wasn't funny. Later, we were again the only ones not actively vocal in our reaction to the graphic penultimate sequence by clapping or cheering as people were mowed down amid a gory urban battle.
This is not a diatribe against M-Flicks. The group is good-natured and student-driven, designed to bring movies students care about to campus as well as projecting classics into the big-screen format they deserve. When you're open to the public, it's hard to judge you by the company you keep.
This is about that public - that audience composed primarily of University students - that transforms most of the group's screenings into chaos with loud and disturbing reactions to violence on screen. (Incidentally, many of the new movies screened by M-Flicks - be it "300" or "Apocalypto" or "The Reaping" - are among the most violent releases of the year.)
This is no more evident than in the screening of "The Kingdom" I attended a couple weeks ago. The movie follows the investigation of the murders of Americans on Saudi Arabian soil by local terrorists. But again, the movie itself aside, the audience is what left the lasting impression. Loud laughter at tense situations between Saudi officials and an American team investigating murder. Louder clapping after a brutal gunshot ends a terrorist's life. The exalted cheers were as relentless as the violence. It was shocking and disgusting.
Later, characters played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman duke it out with an enormous Saudi. Fierce violence abounds. Garner ends the brawl by stabbing a knife into the behemoth's head. A cheer yet to be paralleled echoed through Natural Science Auditorium A, garnished with applause and one particularly simian grunt of "Yeah!"
The audience's voracity for violence and gore was astonishing, and it brings out the most disturbing in M-Flicks crowds, who continually engage in a participatory celebration of brutality. This not only makes it impossible to watch the movie at hand - even one like "Children of Men," whose violence is in service of powerful allegory - but it hints at an alarming impulse to find release, even thrill in extreme violence.
Why did this devolution occur? "Children of Men" and "The Kingdom" are very different movies, but they share violence as a window into greater social tensions, and it seems the audience is unaware of the emotional ramifications they are intended to carry. This primitiveness of University-centric M-Flicks audiences is especially upsetting. It's not as if we are isolated from this base and vulgar bloodlust. These are our peers who are cheering at the gushing of blood and clapping at death.