Even as they fade from our landscape, there is something quintessentially American about drive-in theaters. They seem, somehow, to contain all the great stages of our lives in one place; in one car, the reckless romance of youth; in another — probably a station wagon — the steady pulse of family life. For a long time, I thought the pull was because of our strong national love affair with the car, and that the drive-in was simply a relic of a booming auto industry. But when I think back on the great drive-in experiences of my youth (more on that in a bit), I realize that the real draw of the drive-in was not in the driving in, it was in the feeling that came from rolling down your windows and opening your doors and sharing a movie with friends. Under the stars, it’s always a party.
The drive-ins aren’t gone — the Northfield Drive-In, on the New Hampshire border in Hinsdale, opened for the 2015 season a couple of weekends ago and remains a great way to spend a summer night — but even if they’re fading, the impulse that brought people together to watch movies outside is still going strong. It’s that impulse (minus the cars) that brings us Cinema Northampton, a welcome addition to the Valley’s film scene that will bring free monthly movie screenings to outdoor locations around Northampton for the rest of the summer.
A collaborative effort of the Northampton Arts Council, Northampton Community Television, Forbes Library, and the Parks and Recreation Department, the series will feature (mostly) family-friendly movies on the last Wednesday of each month, with the bulk of the outdoor screenings set for the Forbes Library lawn (shows move indoors to the Academy of Music beginning in October and continue through the rest of the year; for details, visit cinemanorthampton.org). Moviegoers are encouraged to bring blankets, chairs, and flashlights.
Up this week (8:30 p.m. Wednesday on the Forbes lawn) is the 1981 Steven Spielberg smash Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, the archeologist who made the profession (and bullwhips) cool to a generation of kids. Built on the bones of older serial adventure stories, Spielberg’s love letter to the genre — complete with Nazis, romance, derring-do — is a great fit for a night out not just on the town, but with the town.
But back to drive-ins for a moment. My own memories of the drive-in are tied fast to a single film: Tobe Hooper’s (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) 1982 supernatural chiller Poltergeist. It’s the story of a family who moves into a new home only to find that it is occupied by paranormal entities, and it came out when I was nine years old. As it happened, it opened at nearly the same time as Annie, a much more genteel film about a little red-haired orphan girl. It was that movie that my parents took me to see at our local two-screen drive-in, but a savvy cousin clued me in to the fact that we could tune into the other screen’s audio feed on our hand-held radios. And so it was that the two of us sat backwards in my parents’ station wagon, sharing headphones and watching Poltergeist on a screen a hundred yards away.
This week, a new generation of youngsters gets the chance to be scared when the remake of Poltergeist (directed by City of Ember’s Gil Kenan) hits area screens. By most accounts a less intense version of the story, the remake stars Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie Dewitt as the couple trying to deal with an unwanted influx of supernatural entities. But if it’s anything like the original, you can count on your youngsters begging to see Annie instead.
And finally this week: The Family Films series continues at Amherst Cinema with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, screening at 10 a.m. on Saturday May 23rd. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, Miyazaki’s animated film, about a young girl who enters the spirit world to save her parents, is a tour de force of storytelling, and not just in the visual sense. Eerie and reassuring all at once, Miyazaki is an excellent guide through our own thoughts — especially the ones that we didn’t realize we had.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
