Toga

Any day that involves a long soak in a cold waterfall pool and ends in a movie theater screening of National Lampoon's Animal House is a good day! It seems my New England jaunt of classic film continues at the Bellows Falls Opera House (pictured here in it's clock towered glory!), with the hilarious and memorable movie that made togas, binge drinking, and all other scandalous things synonymous with college a cinematic classic of keg stand proportions!

During this screening, I noticed that I sort of love watching movies with an audience who is already familiar with the film being shown as an edgy, anticipatory laughter of knowingness seeps in... just like when the joke from the trailer always gets the biggest laugh during a screening? I wonder if anyone has studied this phenomena? And I wonder if anyone has ever capitalized on it by putting most of a movie in different trailers...? Getting larger laughs from a range of audience members who have pre-experienced the film? And why does this type of familiarity garner such a reaction? Is our memory reacting in some kind of emotional/physical response...?

But hell, I guess that is what all that identification/psychoanalysis film theory stuff is about anyway: us as the the audience in our removed film watching/dream-like state of desires, like babies in a Lacanian mirror, identifying and taking on the things and feelings put before us, being heroes from our velvety seats and feeling even more connected by already being in on the joke. Hmm...if that's the case, regarding Animal House, I would definitely like to identify with John Belushi in this one! Anyway, a lazy summers day from rivers and movie seats high above in the Green Mountain State!