Requiem for The Drive-In

"There's basically three ways to get nookie at a drive-in, and two of em are legal."

- Joe Bob Briggs

What do you know about The Drive-In? Have you ever been to one? They're pretty tough to come by nowadays and even if you're my age they were still pretty scattered when we were kids. Whether you've experienced it firsthand or not, we've all been indoctrinated through movies and TV and pop songs that a drive-in is mostly some sort of parking lot bordello in which the occupants of each car are engaged in an act of sexual relations. And I suppose objectively that's a kinda fun and naughty thought, but in my experience it was largely inaccurate - not just for me, and not just for my generation; most of my father's drive-in memories from his own life mirror my own: it was a nuclear family event in which the child or children would sit in the backseat, sometimes with a pillow and blanket or even pajamas, and you'd achieve this campout vibe while you ate snacks and watched a giant movie screen through your front windshield. And you'd look around and that would be a similar setup with all the patrons around you. Even in the handful of times I got to go as a grownup I don't really recall any amorous escapades of my own, but by that time my purest and most vivid kink was simply The Drive-In itself -- particularly Tri-Town Drive-In in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. 

When I was born in 1983 there were three drive-in movie theaters within a 15 mile radius of where I lived, and I frequented them all until one closed and the other mysteriously burned down - which is a solid metaphor for the once and future fate of all drive-ins. As you're aware (or can surmise), by the mid 80s The Drive-In was falling victim to Home Video - not just the convenience and comforts of home viewing, but the content of the features: "Drive-In Movies" like "Grindhouse Movies" were their own unspoken brand of low-budget exploitation films that were produced, marketed, and distributed for cheap, and Video proved to be even cheaper (and more lucrative). So by the time I ever attended a drive-in they were solely showing mainstream Hollywood fare -- in the furthest reaches of my memory I'm pretty sure the first movie I saw at a drive-in was Ghostbusters. I would've been only a year old, but the startling abstract image of the Library Ghost on a giant outdoor TV in the dark that you can see from your car is adequate fuel for a core memory. 

Growing up in a temperate zone, the Drive-In was, of course, a summertime thing, and for the most part a "Second Run" venue; their seasonal lineup would consist mostly of all the film prints that the local movie theaters were no longer showing. So hey, if you missed The Santa Clause the first time, you could catch it in July. But this arrangement allowed me to see stuff like Silence of the Lambs and The Firm before Oscar season (which was very important to me at that age) because the whole thing with Tri-Town Drive-In (as with many drive-ins) is that they'd show Double or sometimes Triple Features, so I'd attend to see one specific movie and then be treated to a typically-unrelated bonus. And while I'd never openly complain about seeing a new movie (especially in the 80s and 90s) I saw a lotta oddities and a few clunkers that I otherwise might've missed; FX2, Three Fugitives, Big Top Pee-wee, While You Were Sleeping, My Best Friend's Wedding, Spider-Man, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Disaster Movie, Taken, Snakes on a Plane, and a Harry Potter sequel were never exactly on my radar but they came my way on the coattails of some other feature I was more interested in - and sometimes it was a delight, and sometimes it was a chore. They'd also often start with the Family Film, which is how I saw a lotta kids' movies: Lion King, Angels in the Outfield, Little Rascals, Man of the House, and Kung Fu Panda are some of the best and worst standouts. 

I saw a lotta movies there, but as I got older it became less about the features and more about the atmosphere. I don't mean the fundamental fun of going to the drive-in - I've covered that. I mean the absolute surreal experience of immersing myself in the time capsule that was Tri-Town Drive-In. Thanks largely to their cheapness, they updated nothing after the 1970s, so if anything the contemporary films on the screen were just a distraction from that journey. Unfortunately that also resulted in a severe deterioration of the general infrastructure, but even with that you were confronting pavement comprised of bottle caps and chewing gum of previous generations, subdivided by rusty speaker poles that no longer had any speakers. 

But the real beacon of bliss was the Snack Bar - a nostalgic paradise of wood paneling and yellow linoleum, and every square foot was entirely authentic; being inside there on a humid summer night, it was 120º and smelled of popcorn and grease, and I could fool myself that I was in the middle of a double bill of Stir Crazy and Cannibal Holocaust. And I was only able to assume that the recipes and methods with which the food was prepared hadn't changed at all, making it the best food I'd ever or will ever have. 

Well into the 21st Century my nostalgia only became more rabid - not for my own memories that I'd accumulated there, but for the exhilaration of time travel. My deep yearning for and fascination with mid 20th Century pop culture (as well as local history) made this crumbling entertainment complex an entirely seductive trip into an era just before my time. The true allure of it may be beyond explanation but if you've ever fantasized about a time machine to the extent that I have then you can appreciate what a turn-on it was. I tried to consume it as much as I could, as with each passing year the threat of its demolition loomed larger and larger. By 2009 there were holes in the screen, the projector would break halfway through a feature, and business hours became increasingly inconsistent. In March of 2010 it was torn down and became a congested block of affordable housing called TriTown Landing.

The assertion that "change is always good" is for the small-minded. I've stood by as most of my past has been dismantled and desecrated in the name of bogus sterilization and/or capital gain. Video and Cable TV weakened The Drive-In, but some false sense of "progress" killed it. There are still a few hanging around this country and many of them thrive on and flaunt a chintzy version of that nostalgia that was so completely genuine at Tri-Town. It was corroded and tarnished by time, but it was a pristine connection to the past - a past that was on the right side of history. And I distinctly remember the night I fully made that connection: it was 1998, I was 15 years old, and I was there with my uncle and my cousin for a triple feature of Dr. Dolittle, Lethal Weapon 4, and Halloween: H20. There was an indirect irony that all of these features were rooted in older movies - movies that probably played there. It was during the intermission reel - the same intermission I'd seen dozens of times before, and the same one they'd most likely been playing since 1979. But for the first time I really watched and experienced it on a visceral level. I drank in its colors and its food porn and disco music and I wholly enjoyed it as a Pop Art masterpiece, but way more than that I felt as though I was peering through a window into the time of its production. It contains a lotta ambient footage of clouds and flowers and oceans, and I didn't just feel like I was at a drive-in in the 1970s, I felt like I actively and currently existed in the 1970s; in a completely cyclical reference, Ray Stantz would describe it as "past-life experience intruding on present time." For the length of that scratchy reel of film, it was no longer 1998, it was Summer in the 1970s. 

- Paul