2020 in review: on movies and loneliness

By Jake Skubish

The friends whom I’ve been able to corral to the movie theater over the years will all attest to the same unfortunate truth about me: nothing makes me angrier than people who violate movie theater etiquette. The couple that couldn’t understand the timeline in Little Women and had to talk about it? Remove them from the premises. The woman on her phone throughout Hustlers? Kick her out. The family that brought their infant child to Uncut Gems? I can’t even begin to understand that one.

As frustrating as these incidents can be, though, I somehow find myself missing these people. I haven’t been to a movie theater in 10 months, since I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire in February. It was a divine moviegoing experience—Portrait is a delicately quiet movie, and I’ve rarely been in a theater with such rapt attention. There’s a transcendent energy present in collective movie-watching, fading out the rest of the world to focus wholly on a singular experience. That goes for bad movies, too: I have a more distinct memory of watching The Rhythm Section in theaters in January than I do of any great movie I watched on my laptop this year.

All of these at-home watches blend together into an indistinguishable sea of content consumption. There was the time I watched An American Pickle in my bed ... and I’m Thinking of Ending Things in my bed ... and The Trial of the Chicago 7, in my bed. The blurred feeling mirrors how my time was spent during the pandemic, or perhaps is caused by it. The days were repetitious, and so were the movies. Seeing The Farewell last year was an activity, a part of my life; seeing Mank this year was just a way to fill the time until life starts again. Of course, the world wasn’t entirely on pause: I picnicked in parks, rode my bike, tended to a garden (often unsuccessfully). But I also spent more time alone than I ever have, and nowhere was the contrast to the pre-pandemic era more stark than when watching movies.

The best movies of 2020 reflected this reality, showcasing the damage, or value, of spending time alone. The most joyful movie I saw this year was David Byrne’s American Utopia, a filmed production of the Talking Heads frontman’s Broadway show. The character at the heart of many of Byrne’s songs is a recluse: “Everybody’s coming to my house,” he wails, and as Byrne himself admits, it sounds like he’s not looking forward to it. But the show is a journey toward recognizing of the glory of community, and the next time we hear the song it’s a celebration. American Utopia concludes with a rendition of “Road to Nowhere” that sends Byrne into the audience, reveling in the moment with a crowd of strangers. “Well, we know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been,” Byrne sings. “And the future is certain. Give us time to work it out.”

He might as well have been crooning about Tenet, the misbegotten time travel epic from pop auteur Christopher Nolan. Tenet is as silly and overly complicated as most Nolan movies, but it has a keen eye toward the relationship between past, present, and future. It literalizes the Faulknerian ethos that the past isn’t even past; we are always in dialogue with other generations, and less temporally alone than we might believe. If American Utopia is a celebration of human connection, Tenet is a call to action: we are always connected, and we have an obligation to live as if this is true.

Other times we are truly alone, though, as is the case in a trio of stellar independent films: First Cow, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and Sound of Metal. Each film is set against the backdrop of a world unfit for the needs of its protagonist. in First Cow Cookie (John Magaro) traipses the Pacific Northwest, scrapping to make a life for himself; in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) manages the logistics of getting an abortion across state lines; and in Sound of Metal, Ruben must leave behind his life as a metal drummer when he begins to go deaf. All three characters find their way toward salvation, but only by shedding solitude in favor of uplifting relationships. For Cookie, Autumn, and Ruben, King-Lu, Skylar, and Joe are not just comforting companions—they are necessary for their own survival. Operating alone, it seems, can be a real threat.

In Da 5 Bloods and The Invisible Man, the opposite is true: the threat is a haunting from someone in our protagonists’ pasts, and they’d be better off left alone. This terror is all in the head of Paul (Delroy Lindo), a tragic figure so desperately trying to rectify what took place with his comrade Norman (Chadwick Boseman) that he descends into madness. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) creeps toward a similar path, but perhaps more understandably so: she’s being attacked, invisibly, from beyond the grave by her late, abusive husband. Both characters are trying to escape, not from loneliness but from an unwanted presence. Loneliness can be a dangerous thing, but so can the wrong sort of company.

The characters of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series are acutely aware of this fact, which is why they work so hard to create a space all their own. The unwanted outside company in Mangrove, the series’ first film, are the police, and the nine defendants on trial recognize that the Mangrove is more than a restaurant: it is a gathering place for Black people in Notting Hill that must be protected. The series’ third film, Red, White and Blue, finds John Boyega’s Leroy Logan trying to reform the police from the inside, attempting to change a space that has historically (and personally) abused his community. Lovers Rock, the series’ second film, puts all of this trauma in the background to rejoice in a space that Black Londoners have already created. Collective living is a political response in Small Axe, both personally enriching and necessary for change.

The series is a vital historical recentering. It’s still a dramatized tale, though, and sometimes real-life proceedings can be just as artful and insightful. Such is the case with City Hall, Frederick Wiseman’s four-plus hour documentary about Boston city government. When I say this film is the opposite of dramatized, I mean it: Wiseman’s film digs into the minutiae of local governance, providing long, uncut looks at zoning meetings, mayoral speeches, and sanitation workers on the job. There’s no central storyline at play, either; we bounce around from one meeting to the next, slowly building a picture of public servants at work. City Hall is a portrait of hundreds of people working together to create incremental, lasting change, and told altogether it’s riveting.

While watching City Hall I couldn’t help but think back to David Byrne’s American Utopia. Byrne explains at one point the reason for the visual simplicity of his stage show, saying:

“When I began to think about the show, I realized that what we humans like looking at the most is other humans. More than a bicycle, more than a beautiful sunset, and probably more than a bag of potato chips. So I thought about the show, and I wondered, ‘What if we could eliminate everything from the stage except the stuff we care about the most? What would be left?’ It would be us. Us and you.”

This is precisely what makes a project like City Hall so compelling, and a piece of what has made the year in movie-watching, and in life, such a tragedy. Other people are what make life meaningful, and we had less time with others this year than ever before.

Does that mean, then, that the year’s best movies are evidence of a year wasted? Byrne suggests that people are what we care about the most, and for long stretches I did not get to see other people. Was it a total loss?

I think not, because in a sense the world went even further this year than Byrne’s hypothetical: everything was stripped from the stage, including what we care about most: each other. And through this hellscape we’ve reminded ourselves that Byrne’s proposition is correct. Life didn’t go on pause, because our relationships to each other didn’t stop. The stage is always there, and so are we.

“Everybody’s coming to my house,” Byrne sings. “And I’m never going to be alone. And they’re never going to go back home.” In the film’s first interpretation of the song, sung by Byrne himself, this is a lamentation: it seems he’ll never again be able to get any peace and quiet. In the later rendition, sung by a Detroit high school choir, it sounds like an epiphany, less literal than metaphorical: we are never going to be alone, because we are never really alone at all.

One day, probably far too distant for my liking, we will return to life, to friends, and to movie theaters. (I’ll see you some time, my beloved Dune.) And when I sit in a theater for the first time again I’ll still glare at the lady on her phone, and I’ll still whisper to my friends incredulously about how that family could have possibly thought it was a good idea to bring their child to this movie. But a part of me will be glad they are there. Because I’m glad any of us are.