This
past week, on my friend Jae's last night in Las Vegas, we decided to
have an all-American experience. We decided to go to a drive-in
movie. Jae had never been to one — I hadn't been to one since my
childhood.
There's a multi-plex drive-in in North Las Vegas. It sits in
between a casino and a small private airport. You can see planes
and helicopters taking off and landing behind the screens during the
show. The projection seems to be accomplished by some sort of
video system seriously inadequate to the “throw” involved — the
distance between the projector and the screen. The resulting
image is very indistinct. The audio is delivered over an FM
station on your car radio and sounds way worse than normal FM reception.
The whole scene has a quality of desolation. The experience is
clearly designed for people who just want to say they've been to a
drive-in movie. I suppose the enterprise could also qualify as
what real estate speculators call “ground cover” — something to bring
in a little income on a property that will be developed more
spectacularly at some future date.
We “saw” Enchanted, which was
fun, even with the fuzzy, washed-out picture and the static-ravaged
sound. We enjoyed the surreal spectacle of it all. This is
what seeing movies in Hell will be like — and that's enough to get you
to try a little bit harder to make it to Heaven, where the movie
theaters will probably be almost as good as those at the Arclight complex in Los Angeles.