Once Upon A Time in Anarene, Texas Peter Bogdonavich and The Last Picture Show

Peter Bogdonavich and The Last Picture Show By Matthew

What I’ve always appreciated about the theater-going experience were always those small, fleeting moments. When the mind-numbing adverts and the trailers end and for a small moment the whole theater is dead silent and the room is pitch black. Bated breaths and anticipation is held in the gut of every warm body in those seats as they wait for light to shoot up on the screen. Obviously, this is probably a shared feeling across a majority of the hardcore moviegoer community, even as we find more difficult day by day with the ongoing pandemic and lackluster releases by studios who care only about tentpole franchises and intellectual properties. For those of us that live in or just outside of metropolitan cities, we are fortunate enough to have the independent theaters that cater to the needs of film fans seeking more of the classic, cult, or subversive works the medium has to offer. However, what if you live in one of those towns a hundred miles removed from all directions from any major city? There’s a lone rundown theater on its last leg and the popcorn machine doesn’t even work. For one Peter Bogdanovich, this was a personal Hell.

The Last Picture Show follows three teens coming-of-age in a nowhere, conservative Texas town that is slowly decaying, both culturally and economically. In this “one street and a traffic light” town of Anarene, boredom reigns supreme. Everyone in Picture Show comes off as exhausted and lethargic in their place in both the town and their lives. We zero in on a trio that would seem to strive easily in the high school atmosphere, two varsity football stars Sonny (Timothy Bottom) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) and the seemingly perfect girl next door, Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Despite the surface level youthful smiles they put on for each other, their peers, their elders, and the whole town itself, each character hides

a deep insecurity in their chests as they reach the end of adolescence.

No matter what the post-war America of the 1950s propaganda tries to tell you, the family unit was not stronger, a popular parenting pattern of ignorance and avoidance built up resentment between the parents and their children. Each one of the trio is striving for a feeling of reassurance and acknowledgement they know they will not get at home. The movie opens the day after the local high school football team has lost, both Sonny and Duane are blamed by the town’s elders, constantly being reminded of the shame and disappointment they are to the community. Meanwhile, Jacy’s entire homelife is basically being told she’ll never amount to anything other than a poor man’s wife by her mother. She is then peer pressured into stripping to be ogled at before skinny dipping into a pool with a bunch of strangers. All three are pushed away from Anarene emotionally. Sonny confides in a romantic affair with his gym teacher’s middle aged wife, Duane attempts to win back the approval of Jacy, Jacy is out seeking the admiration of a boy in a neighboring town instead of the resentment of her own.

The young aren’t the only ones left behind by Anarene, the unfulfilled elders of Ruth (Cloris Leachman), Lois (Ellen Burstyn), and Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) round out the cast that bring into question that this angst is not generational but cyclical in nature. The town’s cruelty weighs on the shoulders of every citizen that walks among them, stuck in a depression that has clung on like a cancer. Ruth’s face shows clear evidence of years of marital neglect, a permanent frown wrinkles on her lips as she always sounds like she’s choking on the verge of tears. A brittle weakness she couldn’t even begin to hide, yet everyone pretends to not see this struggle. Lois having a very obvious and public affair with a domineering oil driller that everyone in town seems to know about, yet everyone turns a blind eye. Sam the Lion acts as the Anarene’s heart and soul, a rancher who used to own a large portion of land where the town now sits on, reminisces to the boys about a short-lived but passionate affair he had with a woman hestill longed for but left long ago, wondering if she still thinks of him. Feeling as though true love passed by his fingertips. Sam’s monologue feels almost like a eulogy for the town itself as he sighs and stares off into the now permanently changed landscape. A sternfaced yet romantically poetic cowboy, the last of his breed. Sam then dies offscreen, unceremoniously.

Ialways found it interesting and slightly ironic Bogdanovich called The Last Picture Show his Ford picture. While it shares the Western vistas and the black and white celluloid that would end up in John Ford’s classic genre films, the film is thematically anti-Ford, anti-Classic Hollywood. A rejection of the celebration of the Good Guys will prevail and ride off into the sunset that major studios wanted pushed during the 1950s. Ultimately, this small Texas town’s innocence isn’t saved or preserved during the movie’s titular final showing of Red River, it’s called into

The Last Picture Show (1971)

question whether such innocence existed in the first place. During the showing we cut back and forth between the screen and Sonny and Duane’s reactions, they almost seem bored and on the verge of zoning out. After the projector darkens and the house lights come back on, the two simply get up and talk about what they’re going to do after. There’s no big emotional revelation or relief when the music swells and the ‘The End’ card fades. Just indifference and the thought of what their responsibilities will be tomorrow. The town will die with or without their sadness, regrets, and nostalgia for it. The final shot panning the empty street with dead fall leaves shooting passed the camera in the breeze until finally holding on the defunct theater feels almost post-apocalyptic. Anarene will die, not fighting to see the next day, but with a whimper in its sleep.