My favorite theater in the world, Sun-Ray Cinema, has closed after their historic building in the Five Points area was bought out by developers.
I’m told that the theater owners are looking for a new location, but my personal instinct after losing a labor of love like the Sun-Ray would be to retreat somewhere to rest up and mourn the loss. Maybe they’ll come back somewhere else, but I wouldn’t blame them if they decided Jacksonville didn’t deserve it.
(I’m projecting here. Every time I’ve talked to the owners myself they’ve been cheerful, positive people.)
The Sun-Ray was the kind of quirky place that played artsy films alongside the first-run ones. I’ve seen most of the A24 oeuvre there, plus a wide range of oddness like the new mediocre Star Wars movies, What We Do in the Shadows, Fury Road, The Witch, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, A Simple Favor, Hail Satan?, Book Smart, JoJo Rabbit, The Hidden Fortress, and about six of their annual showings of Jaws. (Where the audience would crush a can of Narragansett beer when Quint did.)
Even if the movie wasn’t great, you at least could enjoy the food and alcohol they served on pock-marked wooden tables that stretched along the rows. An employee would skulk up from the darkness to leave your pizza or basket of knick-knack sticks, and I’d whisper “Thanks!” as they skittered away.
They had festivals and special showings with people like John Waters. Over the summers, they’d play movies for kids that had an all-you-could-grab sugary cereal bar. They had great pre-movie announcements, including my favorite with weird puppets talking too loud on cell phones.
You had to be a little choosy about what kind of person you’d take to the Sun-Ray. It was dark and sticky and had a lot of layers of chipped paint. They had murals of movie monsters and a precarious balcony that they discouraged people from using. You could hear the movie from the bathrooms on either side of it. Sometimes it smelled weird.
If you had a friend who wouldn’t get the Sun-Ray vibe, who insisted on corporate safety and blandness, that was a good reason to realize they weren’t your kind of person anyway.
It was the kind of theater that you’d run when you were fourteen years old after breaking in.
I’m not much a part of any community (being scared and skeptical of them), so I regret that I wasn’t part of the Sun-Ray’s a lot more. I went to movies there, loved the atmosphere, and then went off afterward in a very aloof Gen-X sort of way. I wish I’d introduced myself and told them how much I liked it, how welcome I felt even alone in the darkness, but I never felt cool enough.
My neighborhood is being taken over by investors with spreadsheets, people who think that enough data can guarantee that every dollar spent is a dollar quadrupled. They believe that everyone wants high ceilings and bright lights and wi-fi and checklist entertainment, a place to take a selfie to show how fun they are.
Maybe those developers are right.
What I loved about the Sun-Ray, though, was that it was a weird space: a place for enjoying the weird and personifying the weird and being surprised by the weird. It was a place for brief displacement and then…maybe wonder. Maybe disappointment. Who knew?
We’ve come to a terrifying moment when we think that the data we’re gathering about the past and present can guarantee the future. We believe we know exactly how many people we can fire without losing any business. We’ve “perfected” the science of entertainment, measuring out the beats of our blockbuster movies in coffee spoons, taking fewer chances, making fewer mistakes.
We’ve refined the process of going straight from investment to profit without any of the accidents that really pay off in between.
I know when I go to the AMC Theatre that a benevolent corporation will protect me from any experience that’s too upsetting or too transcendent. We all have to return to work on Monday, after all, and it wouldn’t do to be amazed too often.
I hope the Sun-Ray finds a new home. When it does, I’ll be there, ready again for a good weirdening.