NONFICTION
A Palace for the People
The Town, the Cinema, the Volunteer, and Her Popcorn
Rebecca May Johnson
Issue 5, Winter 2022
In the small, decrepit seaside town where I live there is a cinema where popcorn is not currently permitted because it makes a mess. It is the best-preserved cinema of its vintage in the UK, according to my friend L. The cinema first opened in 1911. It has experienced several periods of decline and almost-ruin in the 110 years since. If you look it up, there are photographs online of the cinema in various states of disrepair and splendor. Since I moved to the town in spring 2019 it has shown no films.
I visited the town with my partner in high summer, when we were still thinking about whether to move, and we walked past the cinema, boarded up for renovation and covered in dust. While admiring its white wedding cake façade with swirls of baby blue and gilded lettering spelling out “ELECTRIC PALACE,” we were invited inside by a white-haired man in a navy cotton tracksuit, also covered with dust. He was a volunteer at the cinema, he said. There were dustsheets and building materials lying around, but I could see burgundy velvet seats and moldings on the ceiling through the netting that had been strung up to prevent plaster from falling onto people below.
“I haven’t missed going to the theater during
these pandemic years, though I do love to visit
a historic movie palace now and again to watch
a film that doesn’t shake. (Old-timey cinema is
best for this, I find. Once they invented lighter
cameras, it all went to hell.)”
Sara Benincasa is ready to join the cinema
preservation club! Read more from her.
The town had clearly seen a lot of action — in the past. The streets were peppered with signs about the role of volunteers in maintaining buildings that the town historical society had designated as being of note: “Another voluntary project by the X Society.” From the historical society website and plentiful signage, it seemed that the town’s prized monuments were held up — just — by a determined group of white-haired volunteers. Other parts of town were less well-resourced; I read about high levels of child poverty and fuel poverty on the website of the local paper.
It was hard to imagine raising hundreds of thousands for a roof. In the part of the town where the cinema is located, businesses are more in the habit of closing than opening.
In fact, the roof renovation was paid for by people from all over the country who play the state lottery games and scratchcards. The UK’s state-franchised lottery was established by John Major’s conservative government in 1993. Money from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, set up in 1994, paid for the renovation of the cinema. The lottery has been criticized as a regressive form of taxation, whereby those who have lower earnings spend a higher percentage of their income than those with higher earnings while not necessarily benefiting. Money from the lottery is the reason that the UK has been able to win more gold medals at the Olympics and bolster national pride; it funds sport. As is typical under capitalism, the lowest earners pay for the grandest things.
I didn’t know L. before she moved to the town to take up a job at the cinema, which was also paid for by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. When they fund the renovation of a cultural institution like a cinema, the Lottery creates fixed-term outreach and education jobs to better embed the institution in the local community — an attempt to benefit lottery players. L. came from a northern city where she worked on film festivals and for another historic cinema.
I could meet people: What would you like? I would say, and then take their payment. Eat, drink, and be merry; there was also the thrill of burgundy velvet, not to be dismissed.
L. visited local primary schools and youth clubs to teach them about the invention of cinema and about how they could be involved in film programming. She dug through archives to learn about the history of the cinema and curated an exhibition in a local arts center. During the winter of 2020, she ran an online film club through which I met more people from the town than I had during eighteen months of living there and watched Battleship Potemkin for the first time, and we discussed the soup filled with maggots that sparked a revolution.
Just as the cinema was finally about to open, damp was found in the floor and more National Lottery Heritage Fund money was allocated to excavate and repair it.
“Theaters were always meant to be commercial but
totally accessible to the public, notwithstanding
exclusionary, discriminatory policies at various
points in history. They are love nests and homeless
shelters and babysitters and more.”
Read more from Marsha Gordon.
Hoovering popcorn from underneath seats is the job L. associates most with her years spent working in cinemas. She does not resent it one bit; she likes popcorn and sees it as part of what it is to go to the cinema. She told me, ever the educator, that in the early twentieth century the cinema was a place to sit comfortably for a while; people would go for the carpets, which they often did not have at home. Cinemas were somewhere to be warm, and to have fun collectively. When women were not always welcome in pubs — in the UK, it was legal to refuse to serve women in pubs until 1982 — cinemas were also spaces where people of all genders could mix and sit in the dark together, perhaps touch, perhaps share food or a kiss.
Films were shown at fairs and town halls, a form of entertainment meant for the working classes from the earliest days of their development in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century there were multiple cinemas in the town. They were spaces to view an art form that was regarded in the early-mid twentieth century (and still by some) as being filled with revolutionary potential:
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.*
“At the movies I got to be like everyone
else because at the movies, I’m not fat
and you’re not mean.”
On the transformative power of popcorn:
Read more from Michelle Weber.
Popping corn is a dynamite-like foodstuff. Popcorn goes off like revolutionary sparks, scattering debris. That which seems small and unlikely suddenly takes up so much space and takes on unforeseen forms. It is also in the eating: popcorn is eaten with hands, is liable to scatter, is indiscreet, noisy, messy — it is a food that gives rise to behavior the disciplinarian middle classes try to distance themselves from. Popcorn is the opposite of the disciplining power of table etiquette. The popcorn-eater is not tortured like Jack in Titanic or Vivian in Pretty Woman, fretting over which cutlery to use; you cannot display your class superiority when eating popcorn in the dark. Popcorn is a playful and unruly food. Popcorn refuses work — it occupies the hands with amusement.
Popcorn is work-shy and loves it. Popcorn is the right food to eat while dreaming of life beyond the drudgery of work.
I love the anarchic quality of popcorn as a material entity, even if it has long been priced to boost multiplex margins. There is a puritanical strain of the middle classes in the UK who love to tut at people noisily enjoying popcorn and think I ate before I came and virtuously saved my money, just as they pretend that paying for television subscription channels is what makes low-income families poor. More leisure time! More popcorn! For all!
“There is a collectivism to the movie theater,
a deep sense of belonging that spans identifiers
and brings a room full of people together in a way
we could only ever do in the most limited of senses.”
s.e. smith longs for the powerful togetherness
of being at the movies — read more.
Of course, many commercial films show you your dream of life beyond work, but simultaneously make it a distant spectacle and conceal the means by which you might give it to yourself. Like TV news segments about the changed lives of lottery winners, films can feed the idea that it will be miraculous luck that will liberate us all. In fact, via the lottery, low-earning populations become the biggest philanthropists in the UK, fixing the roofs of provincial arts institutions across the land. (If only the lottery also funded a movement to end low-income labor and overwork.)
I would like to sell popcorn at the Electric Palace and fill every burgundy velvet seat. L. reports that a Henry Hoover is the best tool for getting popcorn off the floor: “you could suck up a horse with a Henry Hoover, and they are manufactured by unionized workforce,” she says. ‘There’s nothing bad about hoovering up popcorn, even if a child has tipped a whole box on the floor. Ultimately you are there to encourage people to get pleasure at the cinema.”
* From “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Walter Benjamin.
Rebecca May Johnson‘s next book, Small Fires: An Epic In the Kitchen, comes out in summer 2022. Rebecca holds a PhD in Contemporary Literature, and her writing has appeared in Granta, Fantastic Man, The Photographer’s Gallery, The Happy Reader, Luncheon, Tribune, The Plant, Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times, Grub Zine, and others.
