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

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

Given my highly unorthodox means of deriving personal fulfillment, at least since COVID solidified my perspective in #63—by achieving things and being near things with a small significance to the anonymous wider world, rather than a large significance to my family and friends and people close to me—my choice to live my entire working life in Ottawa has been a very interesting one.

On the one hand, working at a central policy institution in a government town has give me some—emphasis on some—proximity to important domestic (and sometimes global) scale decision-making individuals and processes. On the other hand, outside of my direct work, Ottawa is a mid-sized, sleepy “city that fun forgot” of 9-to-5 white-picket-fence public servants (relatively speaking), with no real significance in the cultural world beyond its immediate city limits.

Since I couldn’t spend all my life at work¹, I had to find some way to feel attached to the grander societal consciousness beyond this city. And the easiest way to do that was to, naturally, inhabit a whole different world—that millions from the most glamorous and important of cities across the continent and planet were inhabiting at the exact same time—without even leaving the street of your workplace.

How does one achieve this seemingly impossible, miraculous state of being? Simple, just go watch a movie. (Specifically, go watch a movie that’s at least moderately famous at a movie theater on opening day.)

To be fair, it’s a very long downtown street, with a forty-minute walk². Though the Cineplex at Lansdowne (#80)³ is a legit one. With its theaters spanning over multiple floors of an integrated building (instead of spread out uninterestingly in a strip mall or open field), with a reliably busy movie-watching crowd (even for non-blockbusters) that is essential for the “millions of others” delusion, and a special VIP theater with large comfy seats and the option to order alcohol and full meals from your seat.

And this day is, definitionally, one of the peak days in modern theatrical history to do that. Barbie. Oppenheimer. Two massive blockbusters, grossing almost $2.5 billion in total, opening on the same night. And between a continuous stream of beer and hard seltzer and nachos and pizza in the dark, I am fully immersed for every minute. There’s not too much else to say about those five consecutive hours that hasn’t already been covered in thousands of movie reviews and opinion pieces and passionate Reddit posts⁴, but safe to say I got the true Barbenheimer experience.

And from that point on, without fail, making that trek from work Happy Hour to the VIP theater becomes an a monthly (approximately, depending on when in movie season it is⁵) Friday experience. Just to capture a small piece of that pure locational, experiential fantasy I did that glorious summer night.

Though, between my early-career blind workaholism (which has become more selective, productive workaholism with age), combined with the multi-hour, after-work, highlight-of-the-week Friday Happy Hour with colleagues being my only regular social activity, I certainly tried.
Or a twenty-minute bus, which is what I usually take—including today, where Happy Hour is so fun that I (1) have drank a lot, and (2) want to maximize every minute of socializing with people I work with.
The complex where Ottawa’s also-irrelevant junior hockey and Canadian football team play.
Only exception is running into close work friend (from another institution) Colin Castleman in the washroom between movies. The last time I saw him after hours back in February, we had a twenty-minute interlude—while working together until midnight litigating “a” vs “the” (among other things) on an important policy note—discussing our top ten favorite movies. I converted him to The Next Three Days and Stillwater, and of course he had three Christopher Nolan films on there.
The most recent run being Project Hail Mary, The Drama, Michael, and The Devil Wears Prada 2 within a seven-week span in early 2026.