Genderless in the Megaplex

This ain't no review.
This ain't no rating.
This is just musin' around.
Alright, I went to see the film The Lives of Others not long ago--in original German, Das Leben der Anderen, of interest for "anderen," or "others," and I couldn't help thinking of Cruise's Anderton character in Minority Report, Anderton translating on German screens as "Otherton," and referring to his future "other" committing a crime that isn't allowed to happen; hey, Spielberg's got German blood, but I don't know about Phil Dick--and the film does an excellent job of recreating the look and feel of Communist bloc East Germany; the country is given an empty warehouse aesthetic. Bland exteriors and bland interiors prevail, floor-to-ceiling absence of decor, wall-to-wall lack of design. Difficult, I thought, to imagine a happy place like the former GDR looking any other way.
And what does this to do with anything gender-related, you ask?
Screen-bleed. I could see the film's warehouse aesthetic bleeding into the darkened auditorium where I sat. Cinemas aren't the once-heralded movie-palaces of yore--that stopped long ago. Cinemas these days aren't far from the warehouse aesthetic of yesterday's East Germany. Yeah, plush carpeting and stadium seating up the luxury ante a little, but, as a whole, a current movie theatre is a warehouse with lights playing tricks against one wall.
And the gender thing?
Such modern cinemas are genderless. I've seen black-and-white photos of movie-palaces long gone, back when MGM and Paramount had strings of theatres and could dump hefty industry revenues into the look, into the architectural and interior design of the venues flickering their circulated spectacles--Roman columns and heavy tasselled drapes, elaborate balconies and flying buttresses, hell, maybe even a stone gargoyle or two. And such interiors were gendered.
Amped imaginations, minds geared for impending spectacle and the hyperstimulus the moving image can foment, tend to see charged images in things. Interiors can be eroticized.
Imagine a vintage poster ad campaign for eroticized cinema interiors:
SEE THE TOWERING PHALLUS OF DORIC COLUMNS LOOMING HIGH!
SEE THE SHAPELY LEGS OF THE BALUSTRADE ENCIRCLING THE BALCONY!!
SEE THE SHIFTING SCARLET DRAPES LIKE THE FOLDS OF A WOMAN"S DRESS!!!
And these days, warehouses.
A de-eroticizing of interior cinema-space design. A "de-genderizing." Maybe it's got something to do--accch! a LOT to do--with what Laura Mulvey writes about the cinema's scopophilic tendencies, the "pleasure in looking" the cinema engenders with its "playing on [our] voyeuristic fantasy" (170). Can't have super-charged, super-eroticized patrons filing out of the darkness, can we? Products of voyeurism coupled with erotic interiors? Far-fetched, I know. Probably just the laziness in building standards. Ya never know, though.
I don't know. Every film I've ever seen I saw in a warehouse. In fact, the warehouse I saw The Lives of Others in is the same warehouse chain I saw Fight Club in years ago.
And so a word about Fight Club.
In the film, we hear Tyler's "As I See the World" speech. This is better elaborated in the book, wherein Tyler wants to "blast the world free of history," a world where "You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle [and] paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis" (124) and "you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower" (125).
Ah, Project Mayhem. To my mind, it seems like Project Mayhem has a specifically gendered agenda--to return the world to a state of fertility. Fertility, traditionally a female aspect, here commandeered by a man who, in the film, says "we're a generation of men raised by women" and "perhaps another woman isn't the answer."
Mass gender re-orientation?
Fertile not in the body, so fertile in the mind.
And a fertile mind it is--so fertile it whipped up another personality.
Just a thought.