The Flick

In the movie-theater work environment of The Flick, the film projector is the site of power and influence. The role of projectionist is a step above entry-level theater staff in both pay grade and social hierarchy. Operating in a sound-proofed glass-screened booth above the theater, the projectionist is literally and symbolically suspended above the other theater workers.

Sam covets the role of projectionist as a symbol of upward mobility, which he feels he has no access to (after being passed over multiple times for promotions he deserves, having no college education to fall back on, and possessing no financial means to procure an education). Thus, Sam fetishizes Rose as the theater’s projectionist: a worker who possesses a trained skill, the ability to control the images that appear on the screen.

The projector, the movie screen, and the projected images also become metaphors for Sam’s feelings of unrequited love and longing. He fantasizes about being with Rose romantically and confessing these romantic feelings to her. When he confesses his feelings in reality, however, Rose questions the integrity of these feelings, remarking that they have little to do with her as a person, and seem, rather, to be absorbed in Sam’s projected fantasies (that is, who she is in his imagination). She also aptly points out that Sam may not want anything to change about these fantasies, and that in part, his obsession with her stems from her very unattainability: his belief that she is a lesbian, living and operating in a glass room high above him.

When she confides in Avery during their Friday night screening of The Wild Bunch, Rose admits that she thinks of herself as a projection. Her sexual fantasies revolve around an image of herself looking amazing, gazed upon by others like an actress in a film.

The projector is also a source of symbolic love and loss for Avery, who originally chooses to apply for a job at The Flick because it is one of the few remaining area theaters that still uses a film projector. When the original owner sells the theater to new management, the projector is switched to digital. This change seems to trigger a series of other changes in the play that adversely affect the workers, including new rules, new uniforms (that limit expressions of individuality), and a discovery that results in Avery losing his job. Though the digital projection is associated with progress, and The Flick could very well go out of business without it, the play leads viewers to question the human cost of such “progress.”

Because The Flick’s workers, and especially Avery, cultivate personal relationships with movies, screened films often serve as a commentary on the emotional states and conditions of the play’s characters. They also provide a great deal of dramatic foreshadowing, serving as a thematic container for the events of the play.

The play begins with the Prelude to The Naked and The Dead, a war film that is filled with flashbacks, suggesting a longing for a time past (and the sensation that time is passing these characters by). The music is grandiose, filled with loud drums and generating the feeling of an intense build-up to an ultimately underwhelming experience (just as the great expectations of The Flick’s characters lead them to underemployment in dead-end, minimum wage jobs).

During the pivotal Friday-night encounter between Rose and Avery, they screen The Wild Bunch, a Sam Peckinpah western. The film follows a gang of aging outlaws on the border of Mexico and the U.S., as they try to adapt to the changing and modernizing world of 1913. This theme of an out-of-place group trying to adapt to changing times mirrors Avery’s inability to adapt to modern digital technology and modern relationships (to the point where he’d rather watch a movie than make a connection with another person.

The most resonant film themes are derived from François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, which follows the (tragically) evolving ménage à trois between two male friends and a mysterious woman (effectively mirroring the dynamics of Sam, Avery, and Rose). The bittersweet melody of “Le Tourbillon”—sung by Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim—plays twice in the play: once in the form of Avery’s casual whistling (at the beginning of the fourth scene of Act I), and, next, as an entr’acte that demarcates the transition to Act II. This song aptly speaks to the reoccurring transitional feeling of an on-again, off-again love affair, filled with yearning, disappointment, and underwhelmed self-minimization. The refrain of the song suggests that hope, love, and happiness are ever-fleeting.

The play’s use of the light-hearted theme ofJules et Jim, “Vacances,” is somewhat more ambiguous. The theme plays at the very end of The Flick in reference to Avery’s earlier reflection to Sam: “Do you remember the end of the movie Manhattan? […] [Mariel Hemmingway says] ‘You gotta have a little faith in people’ and the music swells up? […] This is like the opposite of that ending” (174). When Sam turns off the lights in the theater, the light-hearted music of “Vacances” swells, inspiring the viewer to question whether or not this truly is “that ending” Avery has described. 

Both Sam and Avery describe their particular sensitivities and heightened sensory awareness, including Avery’s “shit phobia” (19) and Sam’s aversion to strong smells. These sensitivities speak to the extremity of labor involved in this job that requires them to frequently interact with bodily fluids, strong-smelling garbage, and other questionable and possibly-contaminated substances.

When Sam develops strange lesions on his skin—possibly as the dual result of his contaminated-food contact and his anxiety-inducing obsession with Rose—the audience is compelled to examine how the body processes this work environment. This visible illness deepens the play’s examination of “disability,” troubling the boundaries between Sam’s internal and external experiences.