I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Look at this photograph I took and tell me something isn’t dying right in front of you. The Stanford Movie Theatre on University Avenue in Palo Alto. The marquee reading Great Expectations on one side, Brief Encounter on the other, like some kind of accidental koan about what happens when you walk into a place expecting transcendence and walk out wrecked. That equation in my title isn’t wrong. It’s prophecy.
And here’s the thing that gets you by the throat: this place is gorgeous and it is already a ghost. You can feel it. The way that light falls on the facade, the way the marquee letters still have that hand-set dignity, that analog stubbornness. This is a building that doesn’t know it’s about to get eaten alive. Because this is Palo Alto. This is Disruption Town. And disruption doesn’t care about your cathedral. Disruption wants the lot.
I worked a jackhammer here in the late ’80s, on a construction crew remodeling the guts of this movie palace. And after it reopened, my friend Dylan worked here. Maybe as an assistant to David Packard, who knows, nobody asked too many questions. He’d sneak us in, hand us free drinks and popcorn like some kind of benevolent usher-saint. The matinees were often empty. Completely, beautifully empty. And it felt like our own personal movie theatre, this absurd palace of velvet and shadow that existed solely for us, two idiots who couldn’t believe their luck. That’s the thing about a great theatre. When it’s empty and it’s yours, it’s not a building anymore. It’s a cocoon. It’s a deal you’ve struck with the dark.
There’s something almost unbearably perfect about the whole arc. Me with a demolition tool in my hands remodeling the place, then sneaking in free to sit in what I’d helped rebuild, then years later photographing it with what I can only call tenderness and filing it under Absolute Solipsism. Which, honestly, is the most Palo Alto thing I’ve ever done.
What Dickens line did I pair with this image? “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” That’s not nostalgia. That’s obsession. That’s the kind of love that knows the object is doomed and keeps showing up anyway, ready for the 7:15 showing.
Every town has a place like this. Had. The place where the dark swallowed you whole and for two hours nothing was expected of you except to feel something. We keep losing them. We keep not deserving them.
The marquee still glows. But barely.