Black Swan Benji

Jan 31, 2011

After meeting our friends Jason and Erika for brunch, we all decided to see The Black Swan at what has been called the most hated movie theater in all of New York City: The Park Slope Pavilion.

Although the theater is indeed a joke (a dirty one at that), the broken-down seats with their dingy purple upholstery didn't bother us -- the fact that one of the seats had been completely torn out of the floor only made it easier to get in and out of the aisle to use the bathroom. And the fact that it was colder inside the theater than out on the snowy streets could even be seen as a positive, too, since it's been said that bedbugs aren't very hardy against the cold. No, we would've all been quite content to ignore everything and lose ourselves in the movie. If only the two women behind had just shut up.

"Aw hell no," they said between every loud, crunch mouthful of popcorn, while simultaneously kneeing Deborah's seat from behind.

"If either one of them said, 'She's crazy,' one more time, I was going to lose it," said Deborah.

"Yeah, they were pretty annoying," I agreed. "Thankfully, the movie volume was so ear-splitting that I could tune them out most of the time."

In the lobby was a big poster for the original 1974 movie Benji, described on the poster as a "very special motion picture that just plain makes you feel good." I hadn't even noticed the poster on the way in, but since The Black Swan is about as far away from a movie like Benji as you can get without having to go down a dark alley to a special theater, noticing the sappy, syrupy poster when I did was a shock to my system.

Deborah pointed to the poster and told us that until she was nineteen years old, Benji was the only movie she'd ever been allowed to see. It was the only movie to ever come out of the bubbling cesspool of Satan's Hollywood that her parents deemed appropriate, not just for their young daughter, but for themselves as well. Shortly after moving out of her parents’ house, Deborah got a job working at a movie theater, which only goes to show you…

"My parents were crazy," said Deborah, the way she so often does.

"My parents were crazy, too," said Erika, "but on the opposite end of the spectrum. My father thought that his kids should be allowed to see R-rated movies on their own. He took us to see Purple Rain. But the theater attendant told him that he couldn't just buy tickets for his kids, that he would have to go in with us as well."

"I don't want to see Purple Rain," her father grumbled.

"Of course, at the end of the movie, you could tell my dad had been crying," said Erika. "We were so embarrassed."