Why You Should Go to the Movies on Your Next Trip
Celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer reflects on how stepping into the dark of the movie theater is an illuminating way to travel.
Words by Pico Iyer
Illustrations by Ryan Johnson
I stepped into a cinema in Osaka last February—it happened to be my birthday — and was startled to see an elderly couple in the reserved seats next to me. On the other side, too. In front of me, as well. As the late-morning showing drew closer, more and more of these generally small, hushed, orderly guests kept filing in, till soon the place was almost entirely full. I knew there’d be large crowds for the screening of Paddington 2 I’d just missed — how could Japanese kids possibly pass up that joyous celebration of multiculti London? — but I couldn’t fathom why so many had arrived, before noon, for a showing of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, a harrowing investigation of race riots in 1967.
As the screen erupted into flames, the elders around me sat as silent as ever. They looked rapt, never once heading out to the restroom or rustling any popcorn. At the end of 143 minutes of punishing brutality and anarchy, they remained as noiseless and still in their chairs as at the end of a ceremonial (and snail-paced) Noh drama. I’d been disappointed by the movie, but I’d been deeply instructed by the experience; expecting to see Detroit, I’d come away with a rich taste of Osaka.
It’s always been one of the founding principles of travel for me: Follow your passion in a foreign place, and you’ll see both that passion and the place in a radically new light. Some people achieve this by going to the opera in Hanoi, or to a soccer game in Rio. Others find it at a production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing or Waiting for Godot in Tehran. But for me, movies have become a high- focus lens through which to see corners of faraway worlds that might otherwise be out of view. I’ll never forget the time in Beirut when I watched Nicole Kidman disrobe before a bemused Anthony Hopkins in the 2003 movie of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Instantly the crowd around me began guffawing, then exploding into hoots of what sounded like derision. No one had cracked a smile when I’d watched the same scene in Santa Barbara a few months earlier, but I’d come to see the film a second time precisely because I knew it would become a different movie in this foreign setting. The laughter all around reminded me that I was in the company of droll ironists so worldly and close to violence that they knew how to seize their amusement where they could.
“For me, movies have become a high-focus lens through which to see corners of faraway worlds that might otherwise be out of view.”
Yes, I know that taking three hours out of a long-planned holiday to bask in a movie you could catch at home may sound like a waste of precious time. But travel, very often, has dead spaces, and a movie may be a much more diverting option than killing time in a coffee shop. Having taken my aging mother to celebrate the new millennium on Easter Island, I found myself stranded with her in the rowdy, not-so-benign streets of Papeete, killing time before a 2 a.m. check-in. Where better to enjoy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me?
In somewhere unfamiliar, quite wonderfully, the quality of a film is largely beside the point. During the winter of 1988, I spent three weeks alone in silent Bhutan. In time the days began to seem very long indeed. A country without tourists proved to be a country without tourist attractions, and very soon I’d exhausted all the worthwhile offerings in the local library. But at a Stallone blockbuster in a peeling cinema down the street, I witnessed peaceful Buddhists exploding in delight as the Land of the Thunder Dragon finally lived up to its name.
And it hardly mattered what movie I was seeing when a North Korean director projected for a small group of us foreigners a zany comedy of his own in a plush screening room in the country’s capital of Pyongyang, surrounded by a ghost town of false fronts that was a film studio spread across roughly 10 million square feet. At film’s end, the maestro asked us what in his picture we’d disliked, and all 14 of us had the sense to hold our tongues about the ringing celebrations of the fatherland and the antic pratfalls. In that case, the worst of films produced one of the choicest of memories.
Travel always involves an exchange of values, and at a movie abroad even incomprehension becomes a kind of knowledge. I couldn’t understand a word of the film I saw while visiting Burma 33 years ago, but as a portal to local innocence, good nature, and fun, it was at least as memorable as any temple. In the Bolivian city of La Paz, I used to go to Italian comedies just to see who else among the ruddy-cheeked, bowler-hatted populace would be taking them in. And in the half-light of the cinema, it may be the past that’s illuminated: Letters from Iwo Jima proved rending the minute I realized that most of the others in the audience in Japan were old men who probably knew firsthand the action being depicted.
When I think back on places that I love, their cinemas become all but indistinguishable from the fragrance and texture of the places themselves. A midnight showing on the boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris: one of the least transporting movies I’ve ever endured — I won’t name it here. And yet the excitement of my jet-lagged arrival in late evening, the long kiss in the seats in front of me as at last the closing credits began to roll, the footfalls through the rue Saint-André-des-Arts on my walk back to my tiny hotel: sublime. Or Falling in Love in Havana in 1989, when the whole fading cinema around me seemed to creak and groan with murmurs and whispered endearments. There weren’t many places to go courting in surveillance-filled Cuba, and there wasn’t much to do on sultry evenings. Not all the stifled sobs around me had to do with the unexpectedly poignant alliance of De Niro and Streep.
So why were all those old folks in Osaka so eager to watch violence in the streets of Detroit 52 years ago? Why did this old guy choose to devote his birthday to an exercise in pain? And why on earth was the film being screened at all when it had barely been visible in the U.S., and when so few American movies ever make it to Japan these days? I really couldn’t say. But I do know that I’d never have found the atmosphere, the breath-held silence, the wacky cartoons before the main attraction, and the sociological intensity — in those around me, watching the film, and in me, watching them — in Michigan itself.
So if you’re awaiting a late plane in Casablanca and Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 is showing at midnight, my advice is: Head straight into the dark.
About the author: Pico Iyer is the author of a dozen books. His new ones, Autumn Light and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, come out later this year.
