I started reading the Bible late in life. At 38 years old. I started with the Psalms first, then worked my way through the New Testament. Before all of that, I’d been a lovely filthy heathen, involved in tarot, putting people into jars, dabbing essential oils everywhere and keeping the dead carcasses of bugs.
If i’d lived anywhere where there were more small rodentia, I probably would have kept some of those too. At least a few for friends or something. I still have a habit of eating wings and saving the bones. You never know.
I don’t know what preceded the sudden pull towards Christianity, but I have a really hard time with finding peers in my newfound Bible study. They’re either too evangelical or too agnostic. I approach the book with a metaphysical lens, understand that I’m reading and interpreting a metaphysical text which was guarded and kept for the select tonsured few through the ages, and then, like all technology, used for war. Sometimes I use it for war too, but mostly to calm myself down and tune into something more messed up than our current carnal existence. Lots of parallels, but I understand the parallels are there in a different layout.
It isn’t that people have been the same throughout time, it’s because the people written about in the Bible were the way they were, and everyone else who was different was killed later on. To spread the word.
The Cineplex Odeon is where we used to watch most of our movies in the ‘90s. I always remember the Marina Del Rey to have an ethereal calm and magic to it, something woven between the foggy marine layer. There were lots of things open back then, even a Claire’s, where I got my ears pierced at 8. The piercer gave me a little Teddy bear to squeeze. I used to spend hours looking at all the scrunchies, and then looking at myself in the mirrored ceiling, the ones they had to catch all the other girls stealing. I never stole. I always had a crisp $20 bill, my allowance for weekly chores like cleaning my parent’s bedroom, bathroom, the kitchen, organizing their personal library, sweeping, dusting, and sometimes making dinner. Sometimes the allowance went towards clearance jewelry, other times towards a long paperback Garfield book, the rest hoarded until the next payday. The movies always followed. Fear mingled with excitement as we got our tickets.
The concession stands had a bright fluorescent yellow tint that matched the popcorn.
All businesses flanking that theatre have since collapsed or morphed into something else. I’m old, cranky, inflamed, and soupy and dissociative in the brain, so I hardly remember any films I saw there. The pizza place is still there, just around the corner, and it tastes the same as it did 30 years ago.
There’s nothing glowing inside the theatre, and it’s an AMC now, so just a dull redness to everything.
The last two times I was there, it felt like entering a poorly kept amusement park haunted house. If there weren’t a whirling halo of flies circling some corner or threshold, it definitely housed the environment for it. I went once in 2023, after hearing echoing voices of my deceased father to go see Aquaman 2. My hypnotist nodded, saying that there was “something about the water”. A lot came together for me upon viewing, I was high when I saw it, so a lot of things surely made sense. Naturally I’ve forgotten it. As I read the New Testament, now months, even years past seeing my regular hypnotist, where visions of Greece kept peeking through the journeys of the astral, I started to see all accounts of the Messiah come to life in vivid cinematic detail.
They had chocolate covered peanuts at the concession stand, and I believed it was meant to be. Being keto is hard. I try to go to the movies in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day. This keeps me from being reminded of my isolation and persistent loneliness. There’s usually nobody in the theatre, any theatre in the middle of the day, and the few of us who are there, have common sense to not sit too near one another. We eat our popcorn in silence, get up to go to the bathroom and enjoy the legroom. When I book for free on the AMC app, blue means available, red means selected, black means occupied. I choose my little blue seat in a sea of 20-30 other blue seats.
I booked a morning matinee, had a panic attack and never left the house. I tried again the following day, and was able to leave the house without an obsessive compulsive recital of Psalms 23.
It was a rainy day, which helped with my mood. The light usually makes me more anxious, and it felt oddly fitting to watch a scary movie on a rainy day. I don’t normally watch scary movies, but this didn’t count, right? It was technically a Biblical film. I just wanted to see depictions of the people I’d been reading about. I tore open the peanuts in the dark. My seat was close enough to the front, but near enough to the center where I had the perfect view. There were two other people in the theatre, sitting closer to the back. That was it. Peanuts, sparkling water, 25 minutes of coming attractions, Nicole Kidman, and us, with the rain pounding down the Marina.
Everything I was seeing, to a shocking detail, matched most of my visions of Biblical times. It was heavy.
Swirling thoughts of archetypes swishing and mixing time after time, bloodline through bloodline to evolve, like actors, changing behaviors, roles, and later, faces. Nicholas Cage, who could croon Love Me and bash in someone’s faces to red bits in the toilet of Wild At Heart, some 40-odd years ago, to portray the father of Christ. Very heavy. The peanuts were very good.
I started to get the chills when the possessed girl got healing and went to the bathroom to think over whether or not I should continue. What would my very Christian family think? I decided to try again after I got up the gumption. I walked back to a completely empty theatre, everyone else got freaked out too.
Hah. Everyone else, it had just been the three of us.
This old theatre had old floors, not the ones that are dimly lit at the aisles, like it’s neighbor upstairs and across the street at the Marketplace. It had old chairs, not the recliners at the AMC 7 which are great for hot days and lower back pain. These are the older chairs that flip up, narrow at the waist, with pebbled plastic at the cupholders.
I could hear the rain still pounding on the ceiling in the darkness, and after another five minutes of being completely freaked out by Nicholas Cage trying to make the sun appear, I left and ordered a Lyft for Rainbow Acres. There would be more chocolate-covered peanuts and CBD drinks to help with the tightness in my chest.
I watched a few interviews from the writer/director Lofty Nathan. He’d gone on several Christian podcasts to defend his choices, and much to my surprise, the hosts were fairly accepting of his portrayal, if not curious. I didn’t lose any faith, it just scared the crap out of me.
I still haven’t finished the movie, and feel a strong impulse to refrain from finishing, whether or not that impulse is brought on from ancestral guidance, intuitive guidance or the Lord himself, I do not know. Great cinematography though.
