The bit of steam carries the aroma of fresh morning coffee as I browse through the news on my iPad. My calendar App advises me that, unlike every other morning this week, today is a holiday and I have no appointments.
“Sweetie, how about a date tonight? Do you want to go see a movie?”
Susan takes a sip of her coffee, pauses for a brief moment, then says, “Sure. What’s playing?”
I check the cinema listings and see that the new Billie Eilish movie is being premiered in Munich at Cinemax that night. Perhaps not the first possibility I would have thought of, but she has been in the media a lot recently and I was curious about James Cameron’s determination to produce a 3D concert film with her as a co-director.
“Sure, why not?” was Susan’s smiling response, so off we went that evening.
I discovered that it was playing in their smallest theater and that, when I made our on-line reservations, my presumption that the rows were numbered from front to back was wrong and that our row F seats were in fact those closest to the screen. “Oh well, that’s the way it is and we will survive,” I muttered to myself.
I noticed several older couples near the back of the theater as we made our way down the aisle and that we seemed to be surrounded by younger people as we sat down in the front. Just before the movie started, two of them jumped up and announced that everyone had special permission to come down to the front of the theater whenever they wanted.
Then the film started with the caption “17 hours before the start of the show” and showing enormous cranes and construction equipment creating the stage that covers a significant portion of the football field in Manchester arena.
Then the caption changes to “Five minutes before the start.” The roar of the crowd smacks my ears. Bright, flashing lights pulsate on a vast crowd, many standing, swaying and waving their arms, others holding their phones high above their heads and filling the entire stadium with countless, weaving spots of video lights.
Billie is already suspended in a steel cage with enormous video screens on each side high above the stage. The cameras turn on and she appears to the roars and screams of the crowd, slowly descending on an open platform. A brown baseball cap turned backwards, a short sleeved top with “Hit Me Hard and Soft” lettered across the chest, black shorts, leg reinforcement straps and athletic sneakers inspire screaming fans as she begins running the length of the stage, then jumping up and down to the beat of the music.
Now the camera is in the crowd, viewing the stage through the sea of arms in the air and the fans jumping in synchrony with her. Younger viewers in the theater race down the aisles and join the fans on the screen in a surreal blurring of the boundary between film and reality.
Everyone in the crowd seems to know the words to every song and every so often Billie will say, “You sing it for me” and hold the mic toward the audience with a huge smile. The camera will shift to the audience loudly singing “…and I don’t know what I’m crying for, I don’t think I could love you more…” with tears streaming down their cheeks. The accompanying singing of the theater viewers as they dance and cheer in front of us seems to add yet another dimension to the 3-D of the film.
The film was interspersed with fan interviews outside talking about how Billie had given them new hope for life and a way to look for their own purpose. Several mentioned the Academy award winning Barbie song, “I used to know, but I’m not sure now, What I was made for.”
In another interlude, when Cameron asked her about her standards as a performer, she said simply, “I wanna be an artist that I would be a fan of.” The intense personal, emotional connection with the 50 thousand plus audience members that was evident in the film would suggest that she had met her standard.
Susan and I left the theater mostly in silence. At dinner I commented that I wasn’t sure what I had experienced but it was some new dimension that I couldn’t put into words. She nodded in agreement.
