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| The Chicago Theatre, a 'movie palace' |
Crying rooms are rooms where you can take your fussy child and finish watching the movie without disturbing anyone else. Only older theaters, aka "movie palaces," have them. Movie palaces, many built during the Great Depression, were super-fancy theaters designed to make average people feel like royalty and allow them to escape their circumstances for a little while.
The movie palaces' fantasy element struck me as quite similar to the escapist overtones of early Greek epic. Early Greek epic was composed during the Dark Ages (quite as grim as the Great Depression) for a sub-elite audience. Hence the poems' grandeur, tragedy and even their mania for visual description. Stories that are too close to your everyday life are useless as a way to "escape", but you need to be able to picture what that alternative, escapist world looks like, whether it's a medieval palace or the treasure room of a Mycenaean king.
I get a kick out of imagining that nebulous group of people, the 'original audience of the Iliad,' as a bunch of downtrodden 1930s office workers going to the movies. But maybe that's just me.
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2 comments:
Interesting take. I wonder, though: How do we know the audience to which the Homeric epics were sung? I had always assumed that the audience was quite elite, or, at least, the audience was gathered in the houses of the elites.
We had a crying room in the church we used to attend. Hmmm.
Thanks for your comment, Magister K. A few sources lead me to think the poems were designed at least in part for a sub-elite audience.
One is Ch. 4 of _In Search of the Trojan War_. Not the most scholarly source, but I like what he says about the poems' nostalgia and their imperfect evocation of the lost world of the Mycenaean palaces. Kind of suggests an audience of ordinary people to me. _As Witnessed by Images: The Trojan War in Greek and Etruscan Art_ also suggests to me that these myths had a broader appeal than they are perhaps given credit for.
Homer was certainly an elite author later on, but during the Dark/Geometric Age I envision epic poetry being performed at festivals, or perhaps at gatherings that were more open to all classes of people than those in later periods. (Perhaps in the homes of the elite but with a wider audience, as you suggested).
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