Good Times at the Tropic Cinema
It may be a fool’s errand to champion physical media and brick-and-mortar theater houses without sounding like a romantic in the literary sense. Is a movie theater just another a building, serving its purpose? The act of romanticizing a business has always struck me as kind of a funny practice. But some independently-owned businesses over time become something more - a part of the community, a place of education, an archive or preservational repository, a forum for social action - fulfilling an adaptive function larger than their relationship with customers. An art venue can be all of these things.
In preparing this article about the Tropic Cinema in Key West, Florida, I realize that I've written about this type of place before - the moviehouse-as-temple. I was merely on vacation with my family. But every week or so, if I don't go see a movie, I start to get anxious. I need this form of meditation (or prayer, if you prefer). And I get the appeal of Key West as a place for writers and people who want to use art as a means of reflection and meditation. At the end of the US 1 interstate highway, it’s an isolated locale. It’s literally the end of the line.
The Marilyn Monroe statue in front of the Tropic is a bit tacky but it catches passersby.
The Cinema Tropic rests on Eaton Street just off of Duval Street, which is the island's main thoroughfare that's become its renowned tourist hot spot. What's fascinating about Eaton is that it acts as a kind of cultural Mason-Dixon line between two disparate halves of Duval Street. West of Eaton, one finds Irish pubs with their drinking contests, strip clubs, tourist traps (like Margaritaville) and far too many tacky gift shops (owned by Saudi oil families) where you can buy, say, a t-shirt with the image of Donald Trump made to look like Rambo without a trace of irony. East of Eaton is where you’ll find Duval’s gay bars, drag shows, jazz clubs, art galleries, theater houses, yoga studios and The Tropic, the island’s independent movie house.
A movie theater is (to use a term from a feature in Sight & Sound magazine) a dream palace. Over a century’s worth of celluloid bounty waits to be savored within its walls. The ghosts in the projector get to leave their dark purgatory and live in the light for a few hours, seeing new fellowships with successive audiences on the distant horizon lost in the world of images and sounds and the elements that color their marrow: illuminated dust in the air, the flicker of a 35mm projector, the grainy surface of the image, surround-sound that bats us around like a pinball machine. An intergalactic trip in which we gallivant, the neutrinos of boundless emulsion vibrating all around us.
* * *
The screening I’m attending is a double feature. Both features are low-budget independent short subjects shot in the Keys in the 70's. Stylistically, they reek of the periods in which they were made, adding to their value as historical curios. The first is Tarpon from 1973, the most introspective and pantheistic film made about fishing to date. Inshore and coastal fisherman, angling for their beloved catch, speak about the activity as if it were a form of Zen meditation. They are obsessives, lost hopelessly in what they love, communicating with nature while working their equipment with a large silver critter battling for its life on the other end of the pole.
One of the many tarpon fisherman in Tarpon
Tarpon features numerous montages of the men fishing - a distinctively male activity as it’s depicted here - on the glassy still waters near the inshore mangroves that blend seamlessly with the tropical horizons. The movie is wall-to-wall with slow-motion photography and slow dissolves that were all the rage at the time, overused as they are to the same degree as in Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971), which contains many similar images of crystalline, sunset-brightened water photogenically splashed across the screen and dropping back to the surface like gilded manna.
Interspersed with the fishing scenes, which are scored with original Grateful Dead-y folk rock by Jimmy Buffet, are a few obligatory travelogue sequences showing the tour vehicles known as “Conch Trains,” and other local mainstays. Then there are sequences of the fisherman discussing on their front porches the transcendental dimension of tarpon fishing. Their closed world does seem like only men are permitted the insight to enjoy, but it's a fascinating exposé of a subculture from this period nonetheless.
A conch displayed in shell in Key West Picture Show
The more open and whimsical Key West Picture Show (1977) followed Tarpon and as a harmless city document with a minimal amount of history and a lot of local flavor, it’s cute and paints a fairly detailed picture of the vibrant culture of Key West in its short running time. The lax work ethics, the imaginative interpretation of time, the quotidian casual hedonism, the nature of the community as a safe haven in which to fly one’s freak flag. It’s depicted in all its quirky detail.
Elder locals who’ve descended from the island’s original inhabitants called “Conchs,” bemoan the sliding of their home community into degeneracy. If they could only see the gentrification that’s taken hold of the island now: upscale housing, posh restaurants and high-end shopping outlets that will see to it that the island resembles every other vapid urban area like it, except with palm trees. I’ll take the naked elderly cyclists and jabbering homeless auto-didacts of 1977 Key West any day of the week.
Although the films are both are about people who live in the Keys, they seem aimed at audiences who don’t live daily life there, with a wink at those who do and people like myself who’ve been vacationing there our whole lives and have a good knowledge of the island, saying, “I see you. I see you there in the dark.”
* * *
It’s almost a full screening. Mostly it’s an older crowd. It would hurt to think younger generations are too self-absorbed and insulated to make room for cultural history, so I try not to, telling myself that they don’t know what they’re missing. After all, I was part of a generation that went to the movies growing up, despite that we also had TV, home video, video games, and in my late teens, the internet. It’s an activity that may seem perfunctory if you grew up post-internet. Not only being alone in your house watching films, but in a group of people, reacting as a group to art.
The art deco exterior of the building has a David Lynch feel to it with the neon vintage marquee, but it’s also surprisingly nondescript. The front of house carries through with this aesthetic in terms of lighting, the pastel color scheme, lovely use of neon, the carpet and tile patterns, the angular railings, the ancient projector model on display along with the framed faces of long ago movie gods smiling at patrons. Screening rooms are named for generous donors, signifying an organization built on local support. All in all, it’s an old-fashioned cinema, too welcoming in tone to take any suspicions about its function as simply a den for old people to get their nostalgia fix with any seriousness.
The staff are all volunteers, employed for any length of time they choose. Though most screenings are in the now-standard digital format, the Tropic Cinema managed to find a competent projectionist and programmers in the area for their ongoing revival screenings and new releases, which tended to veer away from multiplex fare. This has changed in recent years as the theater programs some big-budget productions as well. Tourists can put their foam beer koozies down and get out of the heat. The Tropic has no generational or arthouse biases in its programming. It takes all kinds, the manager tells me. And here I was wondering what it took.
The smell of a movie house braces and energizes me. Attending this cinema almost feels like a performative activity, a cherished ritual no matter what day of the week. There’s a reason why I always try to see a movie when I am exploring a new city. Films contain a liminal space that is outside time. You enter them, play around in them a bit as they rock and roll, bouncing and stretching, the act of communal exhibition working its magic on you.
Then there’s a small moment of shock as it ends and I readjust to being in a new and unfamiliar place. The foreignness of being there is renewed in a way that is really important to me. I feel like an outsider in a positive and creative way. I am no longer like a gauche tourist there to drink an aquarium’s worth of watery beer and be obnoxious till dawn, sunburned, margarita-guzzling wife and shit-disturbing kids in tow.
* * *
A return to the theater some days later to chat with the management about running a movie theater in this environment. Their sentiments echo those of many indie movie houses across the country in their wariness of home streaming’s laziness-rewarding monopolization of the audience. They have donors, fundraisers, special events, but like so many of us they seem to exist in a state of perpetual precarity, wondering how long they’ll be able to keep the lights on. Their best attended screenings, like the double feature I saw, work to spread the word about the cause but may only prolong the agony of the ever-encroaching phasing out by apathetic new technologies.
The movie I’m seeing this time is Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, which appropriately ties in with the theme of the precious magic movie theaters offer in a struggle to survive the changing times. These sweeping changes are set against the story of the people working at a seaside movie house in England’s northern coastal province of Kent. Olivia Coleman plays a middle manager suffering from bipolar disorder whose affair with her boss, a mediocre bureaucrat played by Colin Firth in an underwritten part that fails to utilize his full talent, is shaken by an attraction to a younger, newly hired usher, nicely played by Michael Ward.
The script also underwrites Ward’s character as he's either a catalyst for the empowerment and opening up of Coleman’s closed world or a victim of racial violence made saintly after an incident with a skinhead mob (we’re in early 80’s Thatcher Britain). His suffering validates Coleman in her respect and love for him, reducing him to a function of the plot rather than a person. There were sex scenes I found unnecessary to the story (a complaint also made by Coleman following presentation of the final cut of the film), and further development of some of the other characters would have given the story a greater fullness critics like to term “more weight.”
But sitting there in the seats at the Tropic for a screening with substantially less attendance, I cared about none of these flaws. Mendes’s movie intends well, has some wonderful moments, features typically beautiful cinematography by Roger Deakins and is very insightful about living with the condition of bipolar disorder. What struck me, seeing Empire so soon after Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, was an awareness of a type of Hollywood film that feels compelled to argue on behalf of the existence of the medium itself. It’s the pathology of a medium that sees itself as threatened, using it’s own tricks and tactics to evoke nostalgia for its golden age as a justification for its endurance.
Where Empire of Light differs from Babylon is in its argument for the endurance of cinema on the basis of the experience and power of the moviegoing ritual, as opposed to Babylon’s emphasis on the sensations that Hollywood movies themselves contain. Hollywood loves the latter type of movie and in its solipsism, tends to award it with Oscars (The Artist). Of course, major studio product is increasingly showing this fear, in what feels like closing arguments in a trial for its life. I too want to see that magic kept alive, but independent artists - the real craftspeople - don’t always care. Nor do film economies in other countries. They face hardships as well. But they’re used to them. They just go on with their business of producing films. They’ll get distributed and seen one way or another. Making the work is all that matters, so long as just enough money can be raised to make the mare go.
Even despite the bittersweet and visible self-pity of the industry, I was too happy to be there, sitting in the dark cool comfort of the Tropic, supporting the filmgoing community abroad, the sense of prolonged relaxation I was experiencing on a two-week long sunny island trip imbuing everything I did with calm, peaceful introspection. I felt heightened and more receptive, like I could interpret art more perceptively and easily in this state, not thinking for a change about anything I had to get done once I left. The sound is amazing and the projection is great. Whatever is screened there sounds, looks and feels exactly the way a movie is supposed to sound, look and feel.
The Tropic’s largest screening room, with a stage for special guest introductions and interviews
Even if this location and setup were completely different - if it were a big, rickety operation in some ramshackle palace past its prime and ready for its oncoming future as a furniture showroom, or a dinky little specialty movie house sporting little niche rooms with comfy seats, or the inflatable screens they set up in parks, or some podunk village hall so impoverished it can only manage a bed sheet tied to two broomsticks - it would be the same experience, because it’s the staff, the people, the film community, the feeling that accounts for that satisfaction. It wouldn’t matter what was programmed. I’d go.
* * *
I have no clue whether any of the managing staff of the Tropic are aware that the film that I had just seen speaks in some capacity to the rocky mission they have ahead of them. Film will survive, sure. It always has. It’s been dying, dying, dying since the advent of the talkie. Perpetually prophesied to be dying all the time, like the stage. But like the stage, it never dies altogether. It has too consistently proven itself to be elastic, inventive, resilient, buoyant, limber, undauntable and capable of seemingly eternal preternatural evolution.
As a thing not resigned to death at the coming dawn but rebirth on a local scale, community by community - the way we might regain all political control back from our owning classes - this charming and far-flung tropical movie house points the way less in the manner of a lament for what once was and more like a rallying cry for what could be again. The job of an independent movie theater is to nourish the public with an artform, demonstrating that movies are a form of entertainment only incidentally. I’m also informed by the management that this one began life literally as a stretched bedsheet screen in front of seats made from cinder blocks and 2X4’s on a vacant lot, where cinephiles gathered to watch movies under the salty night sky on a three mile by five mile patch of land in the cradle of the Gulf of Mexico. This organization endured till it had a beloved theater space.
It’s a story that was already told long before I wafted in to watch those two documentaries about its home community from half a century ago, eagerly seeing with that audience ourselves and others and recognizing how magnificently and beautifully similar AND different we are. I watch the city around me from another time, whirling and dancing across my vision, the camera passing at one point in the second film right by the space where the theater I’m sitting in now resides. The camera of my eyes and memory is turned on the city I’m both seeing and occupying, and for a few brief moments, I am delighted to find myself in the middle of the film.
Both Tarpon and Key West Picture Show are free to watch on Youtube. You can help keep the Tropic alive by donating here: Donate To Tropic Cinema Key West
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