FIND ME IN THE DARK
Two Decades of Movies with My Wife
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 7.6.23
This may wind up being my first written-to-completion post, so I feel like I’m still introducing myself to you, the hypothetical reader.
Probably one of the first things you should know - or could easily guess - about me is I’m movie people.
In this instance, for the purpose of illumination, I’m Keanu.
This isn’t badge of honor or an attempt to gatekeep - though in the past I’ve certainly used it as both and done a lot of work to, y’know, stop that - but a statement of fact. It just means that the most prominent form of commercial art for the past century is the art form that got its claws into me first, foremost, and which renews its hold on me daily.
In my dating life, if we can count back that far, my being movie people wasn’t a problem exactly, but it didn’t really help - they could like a movie just fine, but then there I was, taking in what should have been an evening’s diversion with deathly serious obsessiveness. Every movie I loved was a bend in the river of my destiny, every movie I disliked (which was most movies) a harbinger of bad things to come in an ever-worsening culture. Forgetting for a moment that a single movie probably isn’t either of these extremes, it made me not a lot of fun to be around.
I suppose it just never dawned on Younger-Me to seek out other movie people. This was probably fueled by something between my need to be The Expert in the relationship and my inability to evaluate whether prospective g.f. and I were a good match when we could be using that time to make out, but I digress.
For sixteen years, I’ve been married to Tanya, the absolute love of my life, and she, too, is movie people. This isn’t only an attribute, but an element that magnetized us early on, even as we spent our first few years knowing each other as friends, before eventually, maybe inevitably, hooking up.
Some background:
My wife and met in New York, working for the same company but at different times; when she left, she recommended as her replacement her friend and roommate, who then became my coworker when I started there weeks later.
Over the next couple of years, we heard a lot of third-person stories about each other through this mutual friend/roomie/coworker, only meeting once at a company Christmas party, long enough to shake hands and make absolutely no impression on each other.
About a year after that, this same friend/roomie/coworker called me last-minute to invite me to this third-person-legend’s birthday drinks and that’s when the clock really started on us.
She had left the company we shared to work as a script reader for a movie & theater producer. She knew, through our mutual friend, that I was a writer, and took an interest in reading my work. (So even though it would be a few more years before anything romantic happened between us, it’s entirely possible that’s the night I began falling in love with her.)
Over the next couple of years, we became moviegoing buddies; for a while I had a g.f. who lived in Boston, so she and I could only see each other every other weekend, which meant that on the alternating weekends, Tanya and I (still with no romantic designs on each other) would go to movies together.
Then, described in greater detail below, all that changed.
NOW: Tanya and I live in Los Angeles, and have for longer than either of us ever lived in New York. Today, we’re trying to make plans for this weekend to catch up on a few things we’ve missed in the last few weeks, while managing childcare for our kid who’s too young for, or too disinterested in, any of the things we want to see.
But since he’ll be sleeping over at his granddad’s, I realized it gives us a rare window of opportunity for our middle-aged parent years: going to three movies in about 20 hours.
Our actual conversation
I was certain she’d either come back with a disinterested “nah,” or a counterproposal for one movie on Friday, and another on Saturday.
When she responded like she did, it sent a twinge - or whatever the good version of a twinge is - through my chest, like we’d tapped into some foundational thing about us. However long you’ve been married, I hope a moment reminding you of a reason you’re with the person you’re with is as nice for you as it is for me.
And while I’m in this particularly sunny moment, here’s an achronological timeline of moviegoing experiences my wife and I have shared - core memories where we were building the relationship - in all its forms - we’ve shared across more than two decades.
1. Amélie (2001), Angelika Film Center, Opening Weekend
Only a few weeks after we met, we arranged a group hang to go see Amélie, then the inescapable toast of hip New York (for whatever reason, Audrey Tautou’s Time Out New York cover from around then is all but un-google-able, but trust me, it was a whole thing).
I liked it, she liked it less, but more critically, it’s the first time we went to a movie together, a comet with a two-decades-and-growing tail.
(BTW, last year for her birthday, I commissioned the below, researched with the help of the NY Times’s TimesMachine, and painted by the shockingly talented David Montgomery)
2. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Film Forum, 2/14/04
I had just recently, agonizingly broken up with my Boston girlfriend, and was spending all of my free time drunk or hungover. It was in the latter state I met Tanya for a Valentine’s Day screening of Jacques Demy’s musical melodrama.
We were running late, and the only seats left were in the front row. So, with at least one of us hungover, we stared up at a gigantic, skewed-perspective 20 yr old Catherine Deneuve, my eye constantly flicking from the subtitles at the bottom of the screen to the action above.
Of note: forget that this was Valentine’s Day, and forget the wonderful, agonizing bittersweetness of Umbrellas, there was no subtext or ulterior motive to seeing this movie on that day. This was a garden-variety outing for Tanya and me, and we were weeks away from our first smooch, which came as a surprise to, again, at least one of us.
3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), United Artists Battery Park, Opening Weekend
I remember hitting pause on a long-distance, day-ruining phone fight with my Boston g.f. to take Tanya to her birthday movie: the Marcus Nispel Chainsaw remake.
To the best of my recollection, we were two of four people in the theater (this was like 11am on a Saturday), but despite that, from the opening minutes the vibe was like an AC/DC concert. We loved it.
(Tanya would later report back to me that she ran into the other two ppl from our showing in the ladies room, where one was trying to console the other who was in hysterical tears over how scary/violent the whole thing was. We agreed that, even if you’re not familiar with the original movie or its sequels, if ever a movie had its contents right there on the label …)
4. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), Cobble Hill Cinemas, opening Weekend
A year before Kill Bill Vol. 1 came out, I read a copy of the leaked script, and was certain that Tarantino - already a few years in post-Jackie Brown absentia - was done. Up to a few months before Vol. 1’s release, I was prognosticating its downfall.
Then the trailer dropped. And well, I started shutting up, in a ramping enthusiasm that peaked the night I took my in-town-for-the-weekend-g.f. (this is a few months pre the breakup referred to above) to a packed house to see Kill Bill Vol. 1, where our seats were horrible, and I adored it and she was horrified by it.
But again, I was bad at calibrating that a night at the movies was meant to be a night out together, and not, y’know, between me and the movie I was seeing, with a cameo by the the girl I brung with me.
Anyway, six months later, that relationship was over, and I was starting a new one, dating my best friend and movie buddy, Tanya (who, btw, had loved Vol. 1), so of course we went to the opening night of Kill Bill Vol. 2.
We went out for drinks afterward … and promptly broke up. It wasn’t a reflection on Kill Bill Vol. 2 - which, while I don’t love it quite as much as Vol. 1, it does have, for my money, the single-best composed scene in QT’s career, but that’s for another post - but because we’d shifted gears in our relationship so suddenly that we actually felt we were getting less from each other by getting involved with each other.
It was an amicable breakup, and we were back to going to the movies together inside of a week.
(BTW, we began hooking up again after seeing a double feature of Spider-Man 2 at UA Battery Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark at a pier on the Hudson, and less than a year after that, it was our collective indifference to seeing Oldboy that led us to day-drink and finally admit our feelings to each other, so I guess a theme emerges…)
5. John Carter (2012), Valley Plaza 6, 4/8/12
Jumping ahead a few years: we got married, spent our honeymoon in Paris (highlights included a showing of Strangers on a Train at an arthouse in the Marais), and moved to LA in 2009.
Not far from our house was a solid $2 theater at a site of some pop cultural virtue - it shares a shopping plaza with the fake Blockbuster where Carol Danvers crashed to Earth in Captain Marvel (there’s no metro station there either), where HAIM shot the insert photos for Something to Tell You, and where PT Anderson faked Victory Blvd. into Magnolia Blvd.
These are all within 50 feet of each other.
(Less pop-culturally, more tragic-historically, it’s half a block from where Larry Phillips, Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu shot a bunch of cops escaping Bank of America in the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout.)
The theater didn’t survive the pandemic, though its façade shows up on TV shows all the time; I clocked it as the casino on Peacock’s unfairly-short-lived Rutherford Falls, for instance.
Anyway, it was an ok theater. I saw some good movies there that I’d missed in their first runs, it was cleanish, and hey it was $2.
This one day in April, we went to see John Carter, which I didn’t care for and don’t recall much about beyond the midriffs of Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, and in general it would have just been another way to pass an afternoon, were it not for the phone call Tanya stepped out to take halfway through the movie; it was her OB, telling her she was pregnant.
From that point on, the movie stayed forgettable, but the moviegoing experience couldn’t be beat.
These are just five out of countless outings - some were just sitting next to each other, watching a movie neither of us remembers a thing about now - but I genuinely had to winnow the list down, considering how often key moments of ours centered around going to the movies. Maybe it’s that we spend so much time going to the movies, life is statistically likelier to occur while we’re there.
I’ll admit this has been a rather one-sided biography - if you want Tanya’s side of these stories, I dunno, I guess tell her to start her own blog? - but thinking back on these, I’m for sure going to have to find out her favorites from our time together, finding each other in the dark.
