#164. Barbenheimer (Friday, July 21, 2023)

What was your best day of…immersing yourself in a monumental cultural event?

One consequence of the perspective I solidified after COVID (#66) was that I increasingly valued being near things that mattered to the wider world. That made choosing to spend my entire working life in Ottawa an interesting problem.

Working at a central policy institution in a government town gave me some proximity to important domestic—and occasionally global—decisions. Outside work, though, Ottawa was still a sleepy mid-sized “city that fun forgot,” with almost no cultural significance beyond its own borders.

Since I couldn’t spend my entire life at work,¹ movies became an easy way to tap into something larger. Go see a sufficiently famous movie on opening night, and for two hours you’re doing exactly what millions of people in New York, Los Angeles, London, and around the world are doing at the same time.

And somehow I could get that without even leaving the street where I worked.

To be fair, it’s a very long street. The Cineplex at Lansdowne (#94) was forty minutes from my office on foot,² but it was a good place for the illusion: multi-level, reliably busy, and equipped with a VIP theater where I could order alcohol and full meals from my seat.

And this was one of the peak days in modern theatrical history for doing exactly that. Barbie. Oppenheimer. Two enormous movies opening on the same day, eventually grossing nearly $2.5 billion combined. Between a continuous stream of beer, hard seltzer, nachos, and pizza in the dark, I was fully immersed for all five consecutive hours.

There isn’t much useful I can add about the movies themselves that hasn’t already been said in thousands of reviews, essays, and Reddit posts.³ I got the full Barbenheimer experience.

After that, the trek from Friday Happy Hour to the VIP theater became a roughly monthly ritual, depending on the movie season. Not because every release was Barbenheimer, but because I wanted to recapture a little of that same feeling: being in Ottawa while briefly feeling plugged into something much larger.

Though between my early-career workaholism and the multi-hour Friday Happy Hour with colleagues—my only regular social activity—I certainly tried.
Or a twenty-minute bus, which I usually took—including today, because Happy Hour was fun enough that I wanted to maximize every minute there, and I’d already had plenty to drink.
The one notable interruption was running into work friend Colin Castleman in the washroom between movies. Months earlier, while working together until midnight on a policy note, we’d somehow spent twenty minutes comparing our top-ten movies; I converted him to The Next Three Days and Stillwater, while he had three Christopher Nolan films on his list.