Star Trek

So there we all are, Saturday night, sitting in the theatre nobody goes to because of the shooting that happened five-six years ago. A dozen of us, maybe. Half of us white. Most of us old enough to have watched it on TV for real.

When it's over, we all stay seated. I keep thinking, "This is Bako. Nobody's gonna hang around for the third level of FX tech names, except for me." But they do. We do. We stay there through all of that, through the production logos, through the blue-screened reminder that we've been watching a PG-13 movie. We stay there until they turn on the house lights. Except that one woman who had to pee.

We all stand up in a single movement and walk out, glancing at each other in the aisle, looking for an appropriate opening to say something. All of us wanting to say something, but nobody quite having the gumption to break that old rule about not speaking to strangers, or that other more obscure rule about public art being a private matter.

I stop in the bathroom and see the early-leaving woman washing her hands at the sink. We nod and smile our recognition to each other's reflection in her mirror. I want to say something to her, but I have the overwhelming sense of her early departure having destroyed our ability to appropriately bond. I go on to my stall.

And I sit there thinking, what is it about this film? Is it merely the opportunity it afforded to give shape to these two-dimensional characters that have been a part of my cultural vernacular since I was a kid? Fill them up with personal history and motivation, the way I'd blown air into pool toys for my friend's kids just a few hours earlier? Maybe. Or maybe it's the way it addressed the issue of perceived betrayal, of profound helplessness, of lossed love. Allowed me to sit in the dark while pop art turns (un)surprisingly profound and played the catalyst for my own private weep.

On my way home, I stop by the shaved ice place. I have to talk to someone. "I just saw Star Trek," I tell him, taking back the extra quarter I overpaid him by accident.

"Yeah? Any good?"

"Yeah. I really liked it."

I throw the quarter in his tip jar.