I was brought up to be a spectator . . . I was raised to be a voyeur.

The World According to Garp, Chapter III, p. 56

Few would argue that the cinema is unnecessary to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show. No film experience involves the audience as much or as well. This interaction makes people want to watch it again and again– in the theater.

The Key Theatre in Georgetown would screen the film every Friday night, and the audience would dress as characters, recite and respond to their lines, bring props (e.g. toast, newspapers, water pistols, etc.), and dance to “Time Warp”, the best-known song from the soundtrack:

It’s just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
Put your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight

But it’s the pelvic thrust
That really drives you insane

“Time Warp”

I am interested in that interactive, in-theater experience in contrast to how most of us watch films today, or as the character Magenta sings in the film:

It’s so dreamy
Oh, fantasy free me
So you can’t see me
No, not at all

In another dimension
With voyeuristic intention
Well-secluded
I see all

“Time Warp”

The writer Esther Kinsky would argue that the cinema is necessary for all films, and that the experience of watching a film at home, alone, on a computer– or worse on a phone– is not the same. Even the collective film-watching on a plane, when everyone is watching a different film on a laptop with headphones, is not the same.

The World According to Garp, the novel by John Irving, became a film in 1982. And I saw it in the theater. The epigraph above includes both “spectator” and “voyeur”, and Irving contrasts the morally acceptable, innocent spectator with the watching of too much when one is too young as a morally corrupt voyeur.

Stripped of its negative connotations, a voyeur is a spectator who sees all.

I just read the novel Seeing Further by Kinsky who posits: “There are two aspects of seeing: what you see and how you see it.” (Kinsky 3). Her book is about the how— how to see.

Kinsky frames her argument in her novel using a cinema set in rural Hungary:

The Hungarian word for cinema is mozi, short for mozgokep: moving images. An enticingly foreign word. (Kinsky 27).

Kinsky is German, but she lived in Budapest, travelling southeast into the Alföld. Her first-hand experiences in the area and with the people and language inform her novel. Her descriptions of the countryside remind me of the descriptions of rural France in The Fruit Thief: Or, One-Way Journey into the Interior by Peter Handke:

It pertains to the place that the viewer takes. It concerns point of view and remove from the things and images, from the action, proximity and distance, vastness. Vastness is more than physical; it is the scope of possibilities you allow. This applies to looking at a landscape, a terrain, at people, at art. (Kinsky 3).

The novel’s narrator applies this point of view to all art, but relevant to the novel, she applies it to the art of film.

She recounts her childhood watching Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (Kinsky 7), watching the filming of a portion of Death in Venice in Northern Italy (Kinsky 10), and visiting cinemas in every town in her travels. These activities in her memory were commonplace:

On my travels in Eastern Europe I looked for the cinema every new place I went. Practically every village had one, after all, had one until the early nineties; the death of the cinema was learned from the West, where film became a private matter, where cinemas wasted away and eventually perished, while the few surviving films were distributed as luxury goods. The cinema as a classless place had died. (Kinsky 14).

Her nostalgia for the cinema leads her to buy a defunct mozi in Hungary. She spends the bulk of the novel restoring it and reflecting on its prior existence. She finds old photographs of actors and a trove of old films in the building, and she obtains, with the help of a friend, the obscure parts to repair the original projectors.

When she opens the doors, the attendance is small, and she has to close and sell the building soon afterward. But that is not the point because to Kinsky the popularity or profitability of a cinema is not important:

In the past century no location was as important for the how of seeing, for contemplating the place that a viewer assigns themself or takes, as the cinema– as a venue, as a space. (Kinsky 3).

She continues:

. . . films are available in other formats; the black box of the auditorium is considered a necessary venue for seeing by only a few, and some even brush off the cinematic experience as an elitist pastime. As if the only thing that mattered any more was the what. And no longer the how. (Kinsky 4).

Kinsky has her own understanding of time. She describes the cinema:

This establishment of a separate space with its own rules is what distinguishes the cinema from other modes of watching films. The distance you have to overcome to reach it is part of this experience of a temporary dissolution of the rules of time and space, and you take this step willingly in order to expose yourself to a different, idiosyncratic space and become part of it. . . . The cinema as a black box represents a wondrous container of time, which defies the course of seconds, minutes and hours during a film, questioning it in silence. A trip to the cinema expands the world and stretches time; the cinema remains a place of wonder. (Kinsky 55-56).

All of this to say that the cinema has its own time warp.

I. Librarian

Works Cited:

Handke, Peter. The Fruit Thief: Or, One-Way Journey into the Interior. Translated by Krishna Winston, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Irving, John. The World According to Garp. E.P. Dutton, 1978.

Kinsky, Esther. Seeing Further. The New York Review of Books, 2023.

O’Brien, Richard. “Time Warp.” The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Original Soundtrack, Ode Records, 1975.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Directed by Jim Sharman, and Barry Bostwick, 20th Century Fox, 1975.

The World According to Garp. Directed by George Roy Hill, performances by Robin Williams, Glenn Close, Mary Beth Hurt, and John Lithgow, Warner Bros., 1982.

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