In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Varsity Theatre on Franklin Street is set to reopen. Sometime in late November the reels will be running again under new management, playing mainstream and classic films rather than the more unmarketable independent fare it used to offer.
Some of it sounds great, in theory. Super-low $3 movie tickets will leave plenty of cash for patrons to buy junk food at the updated concession stand. Sweet, right? And best of all, this happily-ever-after narrative runs, we get to keep the Varsity. Our beloved Varsity.
It’s a flight of fancy that the DTH editorial board, bless their hearts, fell for hard Oct. 28, when it said that “with the theater’s reopening, students will have another chance to take in the experience that is the Varsity.” Allow me to respectfully disagree.
The true experience of the Varsity is, or was, many things. It could be slightly sleazy, as anyone who sat on the sherbert-colored couches in the pastel lounge can attest. It was often a bit cramped, and always inconvenient in its demand that tickets be purchased with cash.
Its movie selections were enigmatic and inconsistent in the best possible way. No where else could one see “Synecdoche, New York” one week and “Quantum of Solace” the next. The experience was defined by a symbiotic relationship between frustration and artistic rapture. There were no easy answers to be found in most of its movies, but when you found them, you knew you had something worth keeping.
But we failed to hold on to the Varsity itself, and so we lost that experience. Maybe we just didn’t deserve it. But to take any theater filling the space as a resurrection of the Varsity, as the editorial board did last week, is missing the big picture.
Namely, that the Varsity was the Varsity because of the movies it played. A two-screen theater in downtown Chapel Hill showing current mainstream films and old John Wayne flicks is not really the Varsity. It might be a satellite of Southpoint or Timberlyne, but it isn’t the old institution that some of us loved, most of us ignored and all of us knew.
It’s something different, and it might need a different name.
I’m not saying that change is necessarily bad. There’s nothing wrong with having a theater on Franklin Street that runs the latest Spielberg movie. In fact, it’s a blessing for Franklin Street that the new owners, Paul and Susan Shareshian, got a hold of the property. Apparently they were the only potential buyers who planned on keeping the space as a movie theater. If it weren’t for them, that historic venue would probably be making room for a KFC, or, God forbid, another T-shirt shop. So I thank my lucky stars that there will still be a silver screen or two close to campus.
