Peter Thorp discusses how anxiety affected the movie-going experience whilst on a year abroad in Sevilla.
In September 2019, I was going to leave Bristol University to live in Spain for a year. I would be teaching English in a small, rural town an hour outside of Sevilla named La Palma del Condado, as a compulsory third year abroad in my Film and Spanish degree. After a blissfully uneventful summer, August came. My placement was confirmed, the Spanish school was eagerly anticipating my arrival, and I was nearly ready to leave. Aside from the obvious anxieties that come with moving abroad (and, let me tell you, there were plenty of them) only one thing kept me up at night in the weeks preceding my departure. Not the insurmountable language-barriers, not the inevitable culture shock, not even the thought of being away from family and friends for a year. No, the question that kept me awake was ‘how on earth am I going to be able to go the cinema in Spain?’.
Instead of completing any one of the hundred logistical tasks on my ‘year abroad to-do list’, I spent my days and nights tirelessly researching cinemas in Sevilla that showed non-dubbed English language films (to my tiny mind, watching films in Spanish was not even an option - I go to the cinema to relax, not to practice a language)! My searches were showing precious few results, and those cinemas I found that did meet my criteria were difficult to reach and appeared to be, for lack of a better word, shit.
The cinema is where I developed as a person; it was the go-to place for outings for a decade and a half [...] It was a lone constant in a frequently turbulent life.
What was I going to do? Since I was 5 or 6, I had gone to the cinema at least once a month. At this age, I wrote off the cinema as an activity that was simply too boring and/or scary. I slept through the entirety of my first cinema experience(Shrek), I watched most of Finding Nemo from behind the door at the entrance to the auditorium, and I left Spy Kids 3D halfway through - clearly not impressed with being told repeatedly to put on my paper 3D glasses and then take them off again. However, after these initial teething problems, going to the cinema became my favourite pastime; nothing else came close. I loved going to the cinema more than anything.
To go to that dark room and get swept up in a story for two hours is the closest thing I’ve ever had to therapy. The cinema is where I developed as a person; it was the go-to place for outings for a decade and a half. The cinema itself had become a friend to me, one I saw more often than some of my actual friends (god, that’s sad). It was a lone constant in a frequently turbulent life. So, in early September, just as the turbulence of my life was about to increase so much that the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign would flash on, I wondered where, and what, my constant would be. My ever-reliable friend would be gone, leaving me, for the first time, on my own.
September 25th came, and I was driven to the airport. As I left my Mum at security, I turned around and waved goodbye one more time to my loved one: the cinema. I’d have to get through this year alone, wandering through the wilderness without the big screen to guide me.
I arrived in Spain, and in the coming days, set out on an unknown path. To my surprise, for the first month or so I seemed to be making great progress all by myself, without the cinema for help. In the whirlpool of language barriers and logistical challenges, I forgot all about the absence of the cinema from my life. Even after only a couple of weeks, this year-abroad life was providing a therapy of its own. Strict routine and the drudgeries of teaching work distracted me from anxieties that I’d usually relieve with a cinema trip. Maybe I had placed too much emphasis on the importance of the cinema in making me happy. Maybe I could manage by myself. Maybe, just maybe, I could get through this year without needing to go the cinema at all. I was feeling confident and nearly anxiety-free, totally oblivious to the disastrous weeks to come. I didn’t think October would challenge me the way it did, but I had forgotten about what its arrival brought with it: the beginning of Oscar season.
A cinema-lover’s dream, Oscar season makes up roughly the final three months of the calendar year and sees the release of many films that consider themselves good enough to challenge for an Academy Award. During this period, cinema-going becomes a cultural and artistic treat, with every week promising a new film from an array of exciting talents. In my mind, the beginning of Oscar season 2019 was marked by the release of Todd Phillips’ Joker on October 4th. Whatever you thought of the film, you have to agree that the hype around it was gargantuan. Twitter was full to the brim of ‘hot takes’ on the ultra-gritty comic book film. Joaquin Phoenix was receiving praise for his performance that bordered on deification. Even mainstream non-entertainment news outlets were publishing stories about the film’s potential for inciting violence amongst movie-goers, some going so far as to describe it as a sort of propaganda piece, inciting revolution amongst the downtrodden. It was impossible to ignore the presence of this movie. It was maddening for me. I simply had to see it. It was time to welcome back my old friend: the cinema.
However, finding a screening was proving difficult. The only cinemas showing it in VOSE (Versión original subtitulada en Español – Original Version Subtitled in Spanish) were in Sevilla, which meant getting a one-hour train or a 90-minute bus, costing about £30 and £20 respectively. I was hesitant; not only would the trip cost time and (more importantly) money, but I was also still getting used to new surroundings, and my Spanish was still extremely rusty. Going to the cinema would mean venturing deeper into a world I was still unsure of, a world in which I was still an outsider.
Nevertheless, the texts and group chat messages from friends and family back home kept flooding in: “Oh my god Peter, have you seen Joker yet? Joaquin is amazing!”, “Mate, we all went to Joker tonight, incredible, fucking hell *gif*”, “Seriously, Joaquin HAS to win the Oscar”. I couldn’t miss out on this chat. I couldn’t, as the “film guy”, miss the most hyped cinematic event of the year. So, I made the trip at the cost of a whole day and about £50, and yeah … it was alright.
The journey itself was fine. I stumbled through the necessary Spanish interactions and got into the cinema. I took my seat and watched Joker. And I was relatively underwhelmed. It was good, for sure, but not revolutionary. As usual, the hype had worked against the film; it could only possibly be a let-down after all the talk (but this is a conversation for another day). However, being underwhelmed with a much-hyped film was not a new experience to me. So why, after seeing Joker, did I feel so uniquely empty? If the cinema always made me feel better when I felt bad, why didn’t I feel better about my situation after this trip? Why, in fact, did I feel worse? The answer, I think, is this: because I was in Spain.
My friends and all their social events were out of my reach, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing not to go out. [...] So, in my case, FOMO could more aptly stand for the ‘Feeling Of Missing Out’.
On this year abroad, perhaps the most difficult thing to contend with in terms of my mental health has been FOMO, or the ‘Fear Of Missing Out’. It is not a new phenomenon; FOMO is the motivating force behind thousands of people’s decisions daily. It’s such an undesirable feeling that people would rather attend a social event that they won’t enjoy than sit at home and stew over what they are potentially missing out on. The difference with my situation, and the reason FOMO affected me in more serious ways, was that it was not a choice for me. My friends and all their social events were out of my reach, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing not to go out. I only had the feeling of being at home while all your mates enjoyed themselves without you. So, in my case, FOMO could more aptly stand for the ‘Feeling Of Missing Out’.
FOMO was the main form of anxiety that needed treating and I was doing so with routine and work, distracting my mind from the socialising I couldn’t be a part of. A trip to the cinema was my usual remedy but this wasn’t readily available to me, so I’d temporarily found another treatment, and it was working. So you can imagine my surprise when I eventually did go to the cinema, and my former remedy did not further help my mental state, but worsened it. Seemingly, my old friend had betrayed me.
It seems the ‘Feeling Of Missing Out’ had infected my happy place. Looking back this makes sense; my FOMO was activated whenever I heard about or saw the activities of my friends at home in Bristol, and in October the main activity I’d heard about was their trips to see Joker. The messages imploring me to see Joker were from friends and family who had gone to see it together. They’d experienced it at the same time, in the same room, and had had their minds collectively blown. This is the feeling I desperately craved, and the feeling I was chasing when I boarded the train into Sevilla. It wasn’t the film I wanted: it was the experience. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising, then, when I was let down.
After Joker, I began to look back upon all my trips to the cinema, ever since that fateful screening of Shrek, asking myself what I actually remembered of them. I remembered the smell of popcorn, and jalapeños on hotdogs. I remembered the car journeys to the cinema, anticipating the film, and those away from it, discussing what we had seen. I remembered the buzz of chat in the auditorium that rapidly cut out as the lights dimmed, replaced by electric silence as we all waited for the film to begin. I did not remember every film I saw. I did not remember the specifics of dialogue, nor the nuances of the performances. I did not remember just how the films made me feel, but how they made me feel while I was sat in a cinema auditorium.
This was quite a revelation for me. I have always told myself that I love the art form of film, so much so that I’ve gone on to study it at university, perhaps sacrificing my future employment. I always thought the film itself was the reason I went the cinema, not the experience. Because of this, I never used to agree with people like Christopher Nolan who lambasted the ascendancy of streaming services and fought to preserve the ‘cinema experience’. “At the end of the day, a film is a film, whether I’m watching in my bedroom, on a plane or in the cinema”, I thought. Now, however, I’m on Nolan’s side.
The cinema had become symbolic of the very thing that was causing me to be anxious in the first place, representing the shared experiences I was missing out on.
First and foremost, what I love and crave is the experience of the cinema trip. Why else would I go to watch Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a film I predicted (correctly) would be utter nonsense, with a spring in my step? Why else have I still not seen Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane? Because I want the experience of seeing it with others in a vast, dark room - the film alone does not suffice.
Cinema trips only worked as a remedy to my anxiety because they were themselves separate from the sources of my worries. Through the experience of going to the cinema – NOT through the films themselves – I could escape from anxiety. Albeit superficially and temporarily, I could mentally cut off the outside world while inside this wonderful, anxiety-free bubble. But now the cinema had become symbolic of the very thing that was causing me to be anxious in the first place, representing the shared experiences I was missing out on. Walking out of the building after watching Joker, I realised the cinema had become a strange place. I was trapped in the uncanny valley; the walls looked like the walls of a cinema; the posters were advertising films I recognised, and the popcorn smelled as I’d always remembered. But this was not the cinema. Not as I knew it.
Here is an analogy:
Imagine you’re working late on a Friday night, and suddenly you begin to receive texts telling you that there’s a party happening on the other side of town and it’s great, and you need to come. You ignore the messages because you can’t finish work. Eventually though, you finish and head to this party. However, it’s late and everyone has left. The party is exactly the same: the same decorations are up; the same music is playing, and the same drinks are available to you as were available to your friends. But your friends aren’t there. You may try to drink and dance, but alas, with no one around, there’s not much enjoyment to be had from that.
The evening after seeing Joker, I sat on the roof of my house in the small Spanish town that had become my temporary home. I sat watching the sunset with a drink in my hand. I was more than 1000 miles from Bristol and it was 8pm - 7pm for my friends back home. I was sipping my beer and listening to music in my headphones, when the realisation came to me: there I was, sitting, drinking and listening to music, while my friends were probably doing the exact same thing. Yet, the two activities were as far from each other as possible because I was alone, and they were not.
Cinema-going, as I can experience it here in Spain, is an activity I don’t recognise or particularly enjoy. The cinemas here are frauds; they look right and promise the enjoyment I’ve felt so many times before, but they do not deliver it. Like all the other things that surround me here in Spain, all the cinema gives me is a reminder of just how far I am from home. So, with a resigned sigh, I removed any desire to visit the cinema from my head. It would only make me feel worse. It wasn’t the end of the love affair, I was sure we’d rekindle it in the future, but not any time soon. With that, I finished my beer, and made my way downstairs. Behind my back, the sun set, and with it my hopes of continuing my love affair with the cinema disappeared.
by Peter Thorp