34 pages • 1 hour read
Annie BakerThe Flick
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Act Summaries & Analyses
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BetaPreface/Pre-Show-Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface/Pre-Show Summary
The preface describes the play’s setting as summer, 2012, at a theater in Worchester County, Massachusetts. The set, at the play’s opening, is essentially a mirror of the audience: rows of (performative) stage theater seats facing rows of (real) audience theater seats, backgrounded by the projector booth, which radiates a beam “out over our heads” (ii).
The preface also describes the play’s characters: Sam, a thirty-five year-old Caucasian man who wears a beat-up Red Sox cap; Avery, a twenty year-old “African American” man “in love with the movies” (ii), who wears glasses and red, slightly European-looking sneakers; Rose, a twenty-four year-old “sexually magnetic” (iii) woman who sports baggy clothes, no makeup, and dyed, forest-green hair; and The Dreaming Man/Skylar, merely described as “twenty-six” (iii). Sam and Avery wear the “same degrading uniform” (iii). Rose doesn’t wear a uniform, as she’s a projectionist.
The pre-show section describes the opening scene, which contains no dialogue. The onstage theater fills with movie-goers, the house lights dim, and Bernard Herman’s Prelude to The Naked and the Dead plays. The real audience can’t see the film itself; all they see is a beam and some abstracted shooting images. This lasts from the beginning to the end of the song. The house goes black. When the lights rise once again, the onstage theater is empty.
Act I Summary
The first act follows the stilted conversations and slowly-developing camaraderie of low-paid movie theater workers Sam and Avery. Avery has just been hired to help clean the theater after movie screenings. Sam has been working at the theater for years without being promoted.
The two make polite small talk as they sweep the theater. Avery mentions he loves movies. Sam mentions his fascination with the projectionist, Rose, whom he believes to be a lesbian. They bond over their shared disgust for the messes left on the theater floor, and Avery divulges that he is actually an extremely neat person, “shit-phobic” (19) to the extent that the sight of feces makes him vomit. The two workers pass the time playing a game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” In this game, they try to link actors to each other based on the films they’ve appeared in. Through the game, Avery demonstrates his extensive and impressive knowledge of film. Sam remarks that Avery’s love of film is obsessive to the point of being a “disability” (27).
A few days later, Rose descends from her projectionist booth and introduces herself to Avery. She casually remarks that she is hungover from a party the night before and that she has a drinking problem. She and Sam tell Avery about the “Dinner Money” tradition, in which the employees resell a few ticket stubs from each showing to make extra money for themselves. Avery is uncomfortable with this tradition, citing both his straight-laced personality and the fact that their manager didn’t seem enthusiastic about hiring a young black man. Coerced by Rose’s justification that he must go along with this tradition in order to be “fair to everyone” (35), Avery eventually agrees to go along with it. Rose signals that she is attracted to Avery, continually complimenting his red shoes, but this attraction does not appear to be reciprocated.
Sam and Avery debate the artistic merits of old versus new films. While Sam admires films that he perceives as new and innovative, Avery defends his staunch devotion to older films and older film technology. He explains that he chose to work at The Flick because it is one of the few movie theaters that still screens film reels rather than using a digital projector. He shares his abhorrence of digital technology, telling Sam that he’ll want to quit this job if their manager switches to digital. Rose enters with a book on astrology she found in the street. She asks Sam and Avery about their astrological signs and reads out loud from the book about how compatible they are with each other. Sam shows signs of romantic interest in Rose during this conversation, which she pointedly ignores. To get Rose’s attention, Sam asks Avery to perform Samuel L. Jackson’s Ezekiel 25:17 monologue from Pulp Fiction, but Avery refuses, hinting that he feels uncomfortable with this performative stereotype of the tough “black guy.” When Rose retreats, Sam asks if Avery has a crush on her, and Avery confides that Rose makes him uncomfortable. Sam then confides in Avery, revealing some disturbing blotches that have been building up on his skin (60).
When he is alone in the theater, Avery has a phone conversation with his therapist. He discusses his difficulty making friends, hinting at his desire to deepen his friendship with Sam. He also relates a strangely existential dream wherein—after dying—he had to run a scanner over all of the films he has ever seen. The scanner would beep when it reached a film that he truly loved (and thereby represented his life), allowing him to enter heaven. In Avery’s dream, the film that set off the scanner was not one of his prized possessions, but an old VHS he did not cherish or identify with himself. He attributes this dream to his anxiety about living with his dad for rest of his life.
During another day of work, Sam recounts a recent incident to Avery. During a screening, a ceiling tile fell onto the seats below, nearly killing an elderly lady. The usher on duty was able to appease her by giving her a voucher for six free sodas and popcorns that he drew on the back of a receipt. Sam tells Avery that the theater is falling apart because their manager refuses to spend money to fix it up. Taking a timid step toward friendship, Avery remarks that he found some reels of old films in the projection box and invites Sam to watch them with him on Friday night after the theater closes. Sam tells Avery that he will be away that weekend for his brother’s wedding, divulging that his brother is “retarded” (73), suggesting complicated feelings toward his disability. Rose walks in during their conversation and offers to watch the films with Avery in Sam’s place. Sam turns his gaze “beseechingly” (76) to the movie screen, revealing his romantic longing for Rose (or, at least, his idea of Rose).
On Friday night, Rose puts on a hip-hop CD and dances wildly, attempting to start a dance party. Avery commends her dancing, but he is only interested in watching a film. Rose and Avery sit down together in the theater to watch an old movie called The Wild Bunch. While the film is playing, Rose touches Avery and attempts to initiate sexual activity. Avery is not interested and explains that he has tried—and failed—to engage in sex on previous occasions. Rose mentions having an ex-boyfriend, in spite of Sam’s claim that she is gay. Avery and Rose open up to each other about their disappointments in life. Rose admits she can’t stay attracted to anyone for longer than four months and that when she fantasizes, she just thinks about herself. Avery admits that this is the anniversary of the day he tried to commit suicide. They commiserate over how difficult it is to summon the energy to go about their day-to-day lives and continue showing up to their mind-numbing job.
Preface/Pre-Show Summary-Act I Analysis
The Flick opens on a scene of theater seats backgrounded by a projector, creating an uncanny mirror of the play’s real live audience. From the outset, the play resonates with themes of performance and subverted (sometimes inverted) viewer expectations: in a theater, the audience expects to witness art performing life, but The Flick’s performance is more complicated and multi-layered. Over the course of Act I, we watch Sam, Avery, and Rose performing a variety of different roles and types they’ve internalized and projected onto one another: the loser, the man taking charge, the nerd, the “black guy” (35), the “lesbian” (27), and the cool, unattainable dream girl. We are also encouraged to examine the performative symbols of personality each character wears with their workplace uniform (which is itself a kind of costume for a particular role), including Sam’s time-worn Red Sox cap, Avery’s red shoes, and Rose’s green hair.
Act I of The Flick establishes a stifling work environment, illustrating numerous ways the theater has affected not only the lives, but the personalities and perspectives of its workers. Strange, alarming, and otherwise dramatic information is often minimized, as when Sam tells the story of an employee who calmly went about his work, cleaning the theater as usual, while a couple had sex on the seats. Similarly, when Rose first enters the theater, she casually remarks that she is hungover and has a major drinking problem, suggesting that it’s normal not to take the job too seriously, just as it is normal to channel frustration with one’s job into substance abuse.
The Flick also normalizes the precarious situations of its workers and the lack of upward mobility in this workplace. In the first scene, Sam remarks that Avery will never see any of the other theater employees because he’ll “never work Sundays or Mondays” (12), hinting that they will never rise above their current part-time status. In the second scene, Avery comes in late, claiming his dad could not offer the usual ride and he had to take multiple busses (though we later learn—through his Friday night confession to Rose—that this is a lie, that he was actually so depressed by his job he stayed in bed and almost didn’t come to work). Both men live with their parents in a state of uncomfortable arrested development, unable to move out because they aren’t paid enough. As Rose explains, in the midst of justifying the “Dinner Money” scheme, “it is dinner money. Because $8.25 an hour is not enough to live on” (34).
With numerous, extended moments of floor-sweeping, soda-mopping, dustpan-banging, and unsavory discoveries (such as the scattered, sticky lettuce of a Subway sandwich), Act I illustrates that this job involves a lot of degrading work for relatively little pay. In their jobs, Sam and Avery are forced into intimate interactions with the left-behind waste that movie-goers often forget about. They develop a philosophical relationship with this waste—debating the subtle differences between “inside” and “outside” food (39-40)—seemingly half-conscious that these debates concern the wasted days and left-behind fragments of their lives. This (literal and metaphorical) waste interacts with the workers’ phobias and anxieties in many significant ways, as with Avery’s intense “shit phobia” (19) and the mysterious red bumps that appear on Sam’s skin. In conjunction with discussions of Sam’s disabled brother and Avery’s obsessive love of films, which Sam remarks is “almost like a disability” (26), these physical manifestations of illness force the viewer to observe how deeply the job transforms these workers.
Act I leaves the source of these illnesses open to interpretation, however, suggesting Sam’s lesions originate from lovelorn anxiety as much as his contact with contaminated material. Sam is obsessed with Rose to the point of illness, just as Avery is obsessed with films to the point of “disability.” This connection between illness and love carries over to Sam and Avery’s discussions of films and their artistic merit, including Avery’s devotion to film projection and disgust with digital technology. Avery’s obsessive love of film significantly leads him to take this job at The Flick. Likewise, these obsessions of Sam and Avery prevent them from embracing progress in their lives, just as the transition to digital technology may be a necessary step toward progress for the theater. As Rose explains toward the end of Act I, the theater will likely be shut down if their owner fails to make this transition.
In a similar sense, Sam’s love for the projectionist Rose is seemingly inextricable from his anxiety around the projector and his urgency to be trained as a projectionist and thus rise above his current status. While struggling with his internal feelings for Rose, Sam looks “beseechingly” (76) at the movie screen, metaphorically aligning her projections onto the screen with his own projections of who Rose is, and what makes her desirable.
Questions of intimacy, love, friendship, and connection frequently appear in Act I, as the three characters attempt to connect with one another. Despite their obvious desire to make these connections, however, Act I suggests that each character is not only performing a role, but making his or her own projections about others based on their performances.
