Audience Participation

This past weekend, I had an experience in a movie theater that connected to a similar experience I had some twenty-three years ago.

I was in a huge, packed theater in Tallahassee with my daughter because I’m a good dad and she wanted me to see “Valentine’s Day” with her. The movie itself is okay—a little obvious with weak writing, but a stellar cast and some real charm. Meleah, my 19 year-old daughter loves it and has seen it three times so far. This makes me love the movie, too. It just doesn’t make the movie any better.

A little background:

Back in 1986, I left the small town of Wewahitchka, Florida, and moved to the big city of Atlanta, Georgia, and going from a place with one traffic light to a place with six-lane interstates was just one of the differences I encountered. Some things were definitely different, true, but not everything. I thought I had left the bigotry and small-mindedness of small Southern towns behind, but I was wrong.

After living in Atlanta for several months, I went with a friend to a theater in the Atlanta suburb of Conyers (this was circa 1987). The movie was, “Fatal Beauty,” and at the end of it, after surviving several acts of violence and a couple of shootouts, Sam Elliott and Whoopi Goldberg kissed. The audience reaction that followed was a horrible, ugly display of racism. After boos and groans and angry expressions, someone shouted, “Just shoot them both right now.”

Twenty-three years later, in a filled-to- capacity theater in Tallahassee, in “Valentine’s Day,” Jamie Fox and Jessica Biel kissed and no one said a word or made a sound—except happy ones.

This made me happy. It’s real progress. (Even if it can be argued that most audiences would find Mr. Foxx and Ms. Biel far more palatable than Mr. Elliott and Ms. Goldberg no matter what they were doing). And it came about because of people like Sam and Whoopi—and so many writers and directors, novelists and painters, and artists (not to mention activists and martyrs; I’m dealing with arts and entertainment and its cultural impact here) who express both how the world is and how it can be.

Don’t get me wrong. I have long since been disabused of my belief in the moral progress of man. Even as a segment of the world’s population is growing and evolving in love and oneness, in wisdom and understanding, another is growing even more militant in its ignorance and fear and hatred.

Still, these two experiences in movie theaters in the South are linked in my mind, and I do see my most recent theater experience as progress of a kind. But the two experiences are linked in another way as well—in a far more discouraging way. Sadly,
both are also linked by expressions of bigotry.

True, no one moaned or groaned when Jamie Fox and Jessica Biel kissed, but they certainly did when the two gay characters did.

When Eric Dane and Bradley Cooper kissed, the bigoted, homophobic reaction was just as bad as the bigoted racist reaction had been at “Fatal Beauty” two decades earlier, and I sat there thinking how sad humans are in the nearly universal tribalism that wants an “us” and a “them.” Why do we need a group to despise, to identify ourselves by, a group for which we say our god loves us but hates them?

The negative reaction was even more poignant because, based on the comments from the women in the audience, the two men were the most attractive on the screen, and long before it was revealed that they were gay, many of the women around me were whispering their approval of and desire for them.

The hopeless optimist in me believes (or badly wants to) that we are evolving, becoming (culturally) our better selves, but another voice inside me says that human history shows not progress so much as a shuffling of bigotry from one group to another. Please, please, please, please, please, please help me prove that voice wrong.