WELCOME TO EARTH-4
A Column by J. Torrey McClain
For most of 10 Cloverfield Lane, the story takes place in an underground bunker without a view into the outside world. I dig those types of movies, like Room, where the audience is left to imagine what really is outside the camera’s purview. The movies hint at something horrible outside until it is confirmed through a kidnapper or a woman scarred by some unknown pathogen, microscopic or much larger. But, for a short time, we all have different ideas of what is happening in the world outside the movie. What rarely pokes its head into our thoughts is what is happening outside the theater as we watch the make believe on the screen.
As a former janitor of a movie theater (as I have talked about before in my explorations in the horror genre) I began to see the theater as a closed environment. While in the theater, the movie audience has no clue what is happening in the real world (assuming they turn their phones to silent and keep them in their purses or pockets). From the time the overhead lights dim until they brighten again, the only world the viewer knows is that dark room with a story that envelops them in projected light and sound.
A lot can happen in as little as 90 minutes. The world we know when we walk through the theater door can change dramatically. It can be a local event or a worldwide one. Only if it is big enough to stir the theater itself or to cause our phones to suddenly beep with emergency messages will it enter our awareness. The real world might never cut through the sound of Space Marines exploring an abandoned space colony or the laughs that erupt when watching two idiots clad in neon tuxedos trying to one up each other. It has to be something big for us to turn our attention away from The Terminator as the future hangs in the balance once again.
